Mention creationism, and many scientists think of the United States, where efforts to limit the teaching of evolution have made headway in a couple of states. But the successes are modest compared with those in South Korea, where the anti-evolution sentiment seems to be winning its battle with mainstream science. A petition to remove references…
Roughly 100,000 years ago, human evolution reached a mysterious bottleneck: Our ancestors had been reduced to perhaps five to ten thousand individuals living in Africa. In time, “behaviorally modern” humans would emerge from this population, expanding dramatically in both number and range, and replacing all other co-existing evolutionary cousins, such as the Neanderthals. The cause…
The Chandra X-Ray Observatory announced that’s it has observed something unprcedented: a supermassive black hole being ejected from its own galaxy at speeds of millions of miles per hour. The evidence suggests that the ejection was caused, 4 billion years ago, when the black hole collided with the supermassive black hole of another galaxy, producing…
Researchers are calling it the “Goldilocks Effect”: Turns out that babies’ brains are wired to focus on “just right” experiences and information to help them learn. In a fascinating new study from the University of Rochester, 7- and 8-month-olds quickly lost interest in video animations of balls, pacifiers and colorful boxes that were too ho-hum…
Millions of years ago, oversized insects like griffinflies boasting wingspans comparable to today’s hawks scuttled across (and fluttered above) the planet. But why these jumbo jets of the insect world shrunk to modern size has remained a mystery, until now. Turns out, as dinosaurs evolved flight and eventually took to the skies as birds, they…
Results of a recent experiment demonstrated that students who read material in difficult, unfamiliar fonts learned it more deeply than students who read the same material in conventional, familiar fonts. Strange as that may seem, the finding stems from a well-established principle in learning theory called cognitive disfluency, which has fascinating implications for teachers. As the…
A new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute suggests that the replication process for DNA—the genetic instructions for living organisms that is composed of four bases (C, G, A and T)—is more open to unnatural letters than had previously been thought. An expanded “DNA alphabet” could carry more information than natural DNA,…
Despite the fact that today’s kids have less time to play than previous generations, children’s creative play has increased, recent research finds. The study seems to oppose earlier findings that children’s creativity has dropped since the 1990s. However, it’s possible that increased creativity in play isn’t translating to creativity in other activities, Case Western University…
Quantum computers are still years away, but a trio of theorists has already figured out at least one talent they may have. According to the theorists, including one from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), physicists might one day use quantum computers to study the inner workings of the universe in ways that…
A University of Delaware-led research team reports an advance in the journal Science that may help astrophysicists more accurately analyze the vast molecular clouds of gas and dust where stars are born. Krzysztof Szalewicz, professor of physics and astronomy, was the principal investigator on the National Science Foundation funded research project, which solved equations of…