A study of rocks in Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Syria provides powerful support for the theory that a major impact helped wipe out mammoths and other megafauna, and destroyed a major prehistoric culture. They’ve discovered melt-glass material dating back nearly 13,000 years, and formed at temperatures of 1,700 to 2,200 degrees Celsius. The new data…
Better lithium ion batteries have led to an explosion in availability of plug-in passenger cars. And now, thanks to relatively cheap electricity and the simplicity of the electric drivetrain, electric vehicles have even more potential for use in the extremely cost-sensitive public transportation arena—a concept that is only just taking root. In particular, two projects…
Smooth wrinkles and sharply crumpled regions are familiar motifs in biological and synthetic sheets, such as plant leaves and crushed foils, say physicists Benny Davidovitch, Narayanan Menon and colleagues at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, but how a featureless sheet develops a complex shape has long remained elusive. Now, in a cover story of the…
“Prometheus,” the new movie from the director Ridley Scott, is a scientific and spiritual quest. The scientists in the movie think somebody or something else created us. Creationism? Yes, in a way, but creationism for geeks, of the sort that science fiction writers and scientists have long indulged in. It does not run counter to…
Researchers who were looking for organisms that eke out a living in some of the most inhospitable soils on Earth have found a hardy few. A new DNA analysis of rocky soils in the martian-like landscape on some volcanoes in South America has revealed a handful of bacteria, fungi, and other rudimentary organisms, called archaea,…
A climate time machine has been erected in Australia. The contraption, comprised of several nine-story-tall frames with pipes that pump carbon dioxide into the air surrounding a forest, is part of an experiment to measure the effect of carbon dioxide on real woodlands — and get a glimpse of the future. The four-acre project, called…
Neutrinos are most definitely not faster than light after all, says CERN. The laws of physics got the good news at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, in a talk titled “The neutrino velocity measurement by OPERA experiment.” Slides accompanying the talk say the faster-than-light results generated in 2011 were…
There’s ample evidence that a more entrepreneurial approach to postsecondary education is overdue. While some pioneering ventures are under way, numerous barriers continue to slow innovation and thwart experimentation, both in traditional institutions and in startup ventures that aspire to disrupt the existing marketplace. Against this backdrop, the Kauffman Foundation convened a diverse group of…
There is an understandable tendency to put problems of the ‘global commons’— climate change or biodiversity loss, for instance — in the hands of intergovernmental institutions. However, thus far these bodies have failed miserably. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), born at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 20 years…
With simple arguments, researchers show that nature is complicated! Researchers from the Niels Bohr Institute have made a simple experiment that demonstrates that nature violates common sense — the world is different than most people believe. The experiment illustrates that light does not behave according to the principles of classical physics, but that light has…