The MIT Museum has opened the new Kurtz Gallery for Photography with an inaugural exhibition featuring over seventy images by Berenice Abbott taken while working at MIT. Renowned for her early to mid-century photography in Paris and New York, Abbott also spent time at MIT during the late 1950’s when she was hired to create…
Researchers said a new computerized model of part of a rat’s cortex predicts connections between neurons, which could help explain how the brains of mammals — including humans — work. “This is a major breakthrough because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain,” said…
The highest-resolution camera ever built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey’s 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years. The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorized to be…
A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light….
What knowledge of science, culture and civilization would you most want to pass on to the surviving humans as they faced the prospect of adapting to a new environment and rebuilding their lives over many generations?
Archaeologists have discovered eight extremely well-preserved spears that are an astonishing 300,000 years old, making them the oldest known weapons ever found. They probably belonged to members of the species homo heidelbergensis, although no human remains have yet been found at the site. Homo heidelbergensis lived throughout the Old World between 600,000 and 300,000 years…
The drought-induced run-up in corn prices is a reminder that we’re nowhere near solving the problem of feeding the world. The price surge, the third major international food price spike in the last five years, casts more doubt on the assumption that widespread economic development leads to corresponding gains in agriculture. The green revolution has…
Researchers have made a startling discovery: the summer Arctic could be an open sea within a decade
There is no clear correlation between tax cuts for high earners and economic growth, according to a new study by the Congressional Research Service. The findings are pertinent to a central debate in the presidential election, wherein President Obama is pushing to end the Bush-era tax cuts on high incomes, while his Republican challenger Mitt…
The chance to save the world’s coral reefs from damage caused by climate change is dwindling as man-made greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, scientists said in a study released on Sunday. Around 70% of corals are expected to suffer from long-term degradation by 2030, even if strict emission cuts are enforced, according to the…