Nearly every coral reef could be dying by 2100 if current carbon dioxide emission trends continue, according to a new review of major climate models from around the world. The only way to maintain the current chemical environment in which reefs now live, the study suggests, would be to deeply cut emissions as soon as…
Anthea Butler and others have quite appropriately drawn attention to and criticized conservative Christians who blame the Newtown tragedy on God’s absence from our schools. The problem with this approach, however, is that those who make such statements fully expect that they will be criticized and take smug pride in it.
University of Toronto Faculty of Medicine researchers have uncovered a genetic basis for fundamental differences between humans and other vertebrates that could also help explain why humans are susceptible to diseases not found in other species. Scientists have wondered why vertebrate species, which look and behave very differently from one another, nevertheless share very similar…
Winter solstice is the longest night and shortest day of the year. A time of ending and new beginnings as now the days will slowly begin to lengthen again. For Pagans, Solstice is symbolically the night when the Sun Child is reborn out of the womb of Mother Night. For the Mayans, this year marks…
Coal took another serious hit Wednesday — in the heart of coal country. American Electric Power, or A.E.P., the nation’s biggest consumer of coal, announced that it would shut its coal-burning boilers at the Big Sandy electric power plant near Louisa, Ky., a 1,100-megawatt facility that since the early 1960s has been burning coal that…
A $45 million pot to fund innovative projects that aim to increase government transparency and accountability using web and mobile technology has been unveiled by the U.K., U.S. and Swedish governments. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) launched the Making All Voices Count (MAVC) initiative in early December to support Internet-based technologies that increase…
A new map that divides the world’s vertebrates into 11 biogeographic realms is the biggest update to a 19th century version, and one of the most important maps for our understanding of global biodiversity. The map was published online in the journal Science. The original map was created by naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace in 1876. He divided the…
Fighting may have shaped the evolution of the human hand, according to a new study by a team of University of Utah researchers. The scientists used instruments to measure the forces and acceleration when martial artists hit a punch bag and found that the structure of the fist provides support that increases the ability of…
In a discovery that may prove important for cognitive science, our understanding of nature and applications for robot vision, researchers at the University of Adelaide have found evidence that the dragonfly is capable of higher-level thought processes when hunting its prey. The discovery, published online in the journal Current Biology, is the first evidence that…
Forget beef or even milk. If you’re looking for a sustainable and substantial source of protein, mealworms may be the way to go. Compared to a kilogram of edible protein in meat from cows, chickens or pigs, production of the same amount of mealworm protein emits fewer greenhouse gases and requires much less land to…