General Electric has brushed aside the doubts leading Republican presidential contenders have raised about climate science. The U.S. industrial and financial conglomerate said it had long seen climate change as a valid concern after an internal evaluation of the scientific case in 2005. “We found enough data there to have a company like GE respond…
Consumer products such as shampoos and sunscreens, even ones touted as safer, may contain potentially harmful chemicals not listed on their labels, according to a recent study that tested dozens of them. Chemicals that disrupt hormones or affect asthma were found in all 42 of conventional products sampled, as well as in most — 32…
Fearing that climate change could wipe out their entire Pacific archipelago, the leaders of Kiribati are considering an unusual backup plan: moving the populace to Fiji.
Nationwide, gardeners have been experimenting with their newly assigned plant hardiness zones, a guide provided by the USDA that maps how well a plant will survive winter temperatures in a certain region. The map divides regions into different growing zones based on the average lowest temperature. Since the 1960s, growers have used it as a…
Do you believe in God? Or do you put your faith in science? Some argue that it has to be one or the other–that either you accept scientific dogma or give yourself over to dogma of the religious sort. Others see no contradiction between reason and faith, and are just as comfortable with the Big…
Participants in a recent study who were instructed to try to visualize angels during states of lucid dreaming had, in some cases, succeeded in having experiences which seemed to parallel the encounters of Elijah and other Hebrew prophets with angelic messengers, as recorded in the Bible. The intensity of experience in lucid dreams is one…
Google is stepping up wind-power purchases to reduce emissions, even as it devotes most of its renewable energy investments to sun-related projects, a trade-off aimed at reining in costs as the company seeks higher returns. Google drew 30 percent of the energy it consumed last year from renewable sources, virtually all of it from wind,…
In Silicon Valley, the line between computing and biology has begun to blur in a way that could have enormous consequences for human longevity. The promise is that low-cost gene sequencing will lead to a new era of personalized medicine, yielding new approaches for treating cancers and other serious diseases. The arrival of such cures…
In a recent book — Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion and Naturalism — the philosopher Alvin Plantinga argues that the conflict between science and religion is superficial. Natural science doesn’t entail the nonexistence of “a person such as God” or even rule out the possibility of miracles. Given quantum indeterminacy, at least according…
More scientists are getting closer in the search for the “God particle” of physics that would help explain the fundamentals of the universe, but they haven’t found it yet. In the hunt for the Higgs boson, which is key to understanding why matter has mass, two teams of physicists using results from a now-closed American…