The color of a candidate’s skin failed to sway voters to depress the lever for either Obama or McCain in the 2008 election, immediate analyses of that contest seemed to suggest. Some pundits hailed it as the first postracial election. But a closer look after the election has revealed a much more nuanced picture of…
Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy. That’s the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in a commentary in the journal Nature that the economic pain of a…
Charles Darwin recognized that natural selection can make eyes sharper, muscles stronger, and fur thicker. But evolution does more than just improve what’s already there. It also gives rise to entirely new things—like eyes and muscles and fur. To study how new things evolve, biologists usually have to rely on ancient clues left behind for…
Kay Steiger and Scott Zeger talk about ways college professors could make introductory science classes less off-putting and encourage more people to major in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). Matthew Yglesias suggests we take a deeper step back and ask whether STEM faculties actually want more people to major in their fields.
George Soros believes it’s time to stave off disaster. As he sees it, the world faces one of the most dangerous periods of modern history—a period of “evil.” Europe is confronting a descent into chaos and conflict. In America he predicts riots on the streets that will lead to a brutal clampdown that will dramatically…
Tiny substances called nanomaterials have moved into the marketplace over the last decade, in products as varied as cosmetics, clothing and paint. But not enough is known about their potential health and environmental risks, which should be studied further, an expert panel of the National Academy of Sciences said. Nanoscale forms of substances like silver,…
After five years of steady progress, scientists are now edging closer and closer to mastering real-world invisibility. While researchers have already made marked strides toward making objects unseeable, much of the work was more like mimicry: Meta-materials that bent light around an object to conceal it, but only worked in two dimensions. Or a device…
President Obama pledged in the State of the Union address to use government power to balance the scale between America’s rich and the rest of the public, trying to present an election-year choice between continued leadership toward an economy “built to last” and what he called irresponsible policies of the past that caused an economic…
The upsurge in droughts is one of the main consequences of climate change, and affects crops in particular. However, Anabel Robredo, a biologist at the University of the Basque Country, has confirmed that in the case of barley at least, climate change itself is providing it with self-defense mechanisms to tackle a lack of water….
Lord Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi of the Commonwealth, says science and religion can mix, and he has set out to move the argument forward by considering the nexus of science and faith in a century he believes will be more religious than the last. ”Science takes things apart to see how they work. Religion…