From David Barash’s post, The Hare, the Tortoise, and the Aurora Madman, in reaction to the tragedy in Colorado, from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog: Far more than any other critter, we Homo saps are stuck between two worlds, biological evolution and cultural evolution. The former is a Darwinian, genetic process, necessarily slow…
Ever since Darwin first published The Origin of the Species, scientists have been striving to identify a last universal common ancestor of all living species. Paleontological, biochemical, and genomic studies have produced conflicting versions of the evolutionary tree. Now a team of researchers has developed a novel method to search the vast archives of known…
Summer storms may create new holes in our protective ozone layer as Earth heats up—bringing increased solar ultraviolet radiation to densely populated areas, a new study says. What’s more, if more sunlight reaches Earth, skin cancer could become the new marquee risk of global warming. As the planet warms, some studies have suggested summer storms…
Innovation researcher Maria Clara Couto Soares calls for a new debate on expanding the reach of grassroots social innovations.
A rift in the Antarctic rock as deep as the Grand Canyon is increasing ice melt from the continent, researchers say. A U.K. team found the Ferrigno rift using ice-penetrating radar, and showed it to be about 1 mile deep. Antarctica is home to a geological rift system where new crust is being formed, meaning…
A new study has provided the first evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness in older adults. The researchers, led by Carnegie Mellon University’s J. David Creswell, also found that mindfulness meditation — a 2,500-year-old practice dating back to Buddha that focuses on creating an attentive awareness of the present moment — lowered inflammation levels, which…
Deforestation of protected areas and illegal hunting of endangered species that live there has a greater impact on biodiversity than climate change, overfishing and the degradation of coral reefs, according to a researcher. The “rapid disruption” of protected tropical forests is the greatest threat to wildlife, Bill Laurance, a professor at James Cook University in…
From the editors at SciAm: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died on July 23 of pancreatic cancer. She was 61. Outside her trail-blazing career as an astronaut, Ride was also a major champion of STEM education. In 2010, she helped found an initiative called Change the Equation [a CEO-driven initiative to increase…
As farmers in the United States slog through the country’s largest drought in 50 years, a lot of people are asking about the connection between global warming and the arid landscape in the Midwest. Is climate change causing this drought? Didn’t the United States suffer worse droughts in the past? And what will happen if…
The famous biologist Stephen J. Gould once asked: If we rerun the tape of life, would the outcome of evolution be the same? For years, scientists have questioned whether evolution is predictable, or whether chance events make such predictability unlikely. A study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that…