Adapted from The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, by Fred Guterl (Bloomsbury USA, 2012) NASA climate scientist James Hanson has warned of a “Venus effect,” in which runaway warming turns Earth into an uninhabitable desert, with a surface temperature high enough to melt…
Researchers have trapped a rainbow – slowing light to a near-stop – in an array of 25,000 “invisibility cloaks”, each smaller than a hair’s breadth. A report in the New Journal of Physics shows how the quest for an invisibility cloak is leading to cleverer ways to use and manipulate light. The trick could aid…
When three American astronomers won the Nobel Prize in Physics last year, for discovering that the expansion of the universe was speeding up in defiance of cosmic gravity, it reaffirmed dark energy, and it underscored the case, long urged by American astronomers, for a NASA mission to measure dark energy — to determine, for example,…
A new dolphin speaker device could one day help us talk with these remarkably intelligent life forms, scientists say. Dolphins live in a world of sound far beyond our own. They can distinguish very small differences in the frequency or pitch of sound waves, and can hear and generate low-frequency sounds below 20 kilohertz that…
‘Tractor beams’ of light that pull objects towards them are no longer science fiction. Haifeng Wang at the A*STAR Data Storage Institute and co-workers have now demonstrated how a tractor beam can in fact be realized on a small scale. Tractor beams are a well-known concept in science fiction. These rays of light are often…
Crop diseases could be detected earlier and more easily if a new method that stamps a leaf with a colour-changing biosensor is successful. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation awarded $100,000 to Hideaki Tsutsui of the University of California, Riverside, to develop the early warning system for crop diseases. Tsutsui’s idea is to print biosensors…
Less than six months after the world agreed to craft a new climate pact by 2015, negotiations stumbled at a crucial preparatory phase as rich and poor countries butted heads. The concluding session of an already troubled 11-day haggle in Bonn ran into delays as countries clashed over who will chair the long negotiations, which…
Four decades ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology computer model called World3 warned of a possible catastrophic course for human civilization in the 21st century – a collapse of socioeconomic order and massive drop in human population. In Limits to Growth, a bitterly disputed 1972 book that explicated these findings, researchers argued that the global…
Species don’t hang around forever. Homo sapiens has already notched up a mind-boggling 200,000 years on Earth. Is the end nigh? The geological statistics suggest not – the average mammal species celebrates its millionth birthday long before it begins to slip towards oblivion. But we are no average species, and there has long been a…
Archaeologists digging at a Jerusalem site have found the oldest artifact that bears the inscription of Bethlehem — a 2,700 years old seal with the name of Jesus’ traditional birthplace. The tiny clay seal’s existence and age show Bethlehem was a bustling place of trade linked to the nearby city of Jerusalem, not merely a fabled biblical town.