The First Direct Image of a Baby Planet Being Born! (Maybe!) (But Probably!)
Astronomers may have, for the first time, directly imaged a planet still in the process of formation, gathering material from a debris disk surrounding its parent star.
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Ancestor of All Living Things More Sophisticated Than Thought
The mysterious common ancestor of all life on Earth may have been more complex than before thought—a sophisticated organism with an intricate structure, scientists now suggest.
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History That’s Written in Beads as Well as in Words
A small cadre of diverse collaborators in anthropology, archaeology, primatology, genetics, and linguistics have spent the last two and half years working on a forthcoming book, Deep History: The Architecture of Past and Present (University of California Press) that serves as a kind of manifesto for their cause. As the authors explain, deep history emphasizes…
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Opinion: An Electrifying Ancestor
We know we got here from somewhere, but who would have suspected it was by way of a fish that used electrical currents to hunt and communicate and locate itself?
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The Hazy History of Air on Saturn’s Moon Titan
“Titan provides an extraordinary environment to better understand some of the chemical processes that led to the appearance of life on Earth,” said Josep M. Trigo-Rodriguez, of the Institute of Space Sciences in Barcelona, Spain. “Titan’s atmosphere is a natural laboratory that, in many aspects, seems to have a strong similitude with our current picture…
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Ancient Mud Volcanoes Perfect for Early Life
To learn more about life’s origins, scientists investigated some of the oldest remnants of crust on Earth—rocks 3.7 billion to 3.8 billion years old from Isua on the southwestern coast of Greenland.
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An Epoch Debate
An influential group of geologists, ecologists, and biologists argue that humans have so changed the planet that it is entering another phase of geological time, called the Anthropocene, “the Age of Man.”
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Was the Universe Born Whirling?
If the idea stands up, it is a bombshell. The universe is not the same wherever you look; it has special directions in which certain things occur and others do not. Parity is violated; the cosmological principle seems weakened.
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E.O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything
At 82, the famed biologist E.O. Wilson arrived in Mozambique last summer with a modest agenda—save a ravaged park; identify its many undiscovered species; create a virtual textbook that will revolutionize the teaching of biology. Wilson’s newest theory is more ambitious still. It could transform our understanding of human nature—and provide hope for our stewardship…
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What Will Happen to Us?
Serious futurologists are not a large group yet. “It’s a fairly new area of inquiry,” says Nick Bostrom, an Oxford University philosophy professor who heads the school’s Future of Humanity Institute. But they are trying to give a first draft of a map of the future, using the kinds of rigor that theologians and uneducated…