The Sequoia National Park forest contains the biggest and among the oldest living things on earth – the giant Sequoia redwoods. But it also boasts the worst air pollution of any national park in the country. Already this year, the level of ozone in Sequoia park has exceeded federal health standards, even though it’s early in the summer ozone season.
Cosmic impacts that once bombed Mars might have sent temperatures skyrocketing on the Red Planet in ancient times, enough to set warming of the surface on a runaway course, researchers say. According to scientists, these findings could potentially help explain how this cold, dry world might have once sustained liquid water and conditions potentially friendly…
In 1981 physicist Nick Herbert leveraged strange features of quantum mechanics to design a superluminal communication system. The quest to uncover its subtle flaw led to a profound new understanding of the quantum world. This discovery became known as the “no-cloning theorem”: a powerful statement about the ultimate foundations of quantum theory. An arbitrary or…
As galaxies go, our Milky Way is pretty quiet. Active galaxies have cores that glow brightly, powered by supermassive black holes swallowing material, and often spit twin jets in opposite directions. In contrast, the Milky Way’s center shows little activity. But it wasn’t always so peaceful. New evidence of ghostly gamma-ray beams suggests that the…
The mysterious fall of the largest of the world’s earliest urban civilizations nearly 4,000 years ago in what is now India, Pakistan, Nepal and Bangladesh now appears to have a key culprit — ancient climate change, researchers say. Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia may be the best known of the first great urban cultures, but the…
Despite what the movies tell us, any aliens that visit Earth probably won’t want to enslave or vaporize us, veteran E.T. hunter Jill Tarter says. Hostile aliens abound at the multiplex these days, terrorizing our planet in films such as “Battleship” and “Men in Black 3.” But science fiction is probably far from reality in…
A study of more than 300 Neolithic skeletons suggests evidence of “hereditary inequality” among farmers 7,000 years ago, researchers claim. Archaeologists from Cardiff University led a team who studied the skeletons from across Europe. They say evidence suggests farmers buried with tools had access to better land than those buried without. Dr. Penny Bickle, of…
From an evolutionary standpoint, the key players in the mating game were males with poor fighting skills and females faithful to them.
Noted paleoanthropologist Richard Leakey says scientific discoveries may soon make the debate over evolution a part of history. The Kenyan-born scientist serves as a professor at Stony Brook University on New York’s Long Island and recently spent a month in New York raising funds for his Turkana Basin Institute. Leakey says the institute welcomes scientists,…
Global warming skeptics are not less educated about science but rather use their knowledge to affirm their predetermined beliefs. The new research says that deniers hold their skeptical views due to “opposing sets of cultural values” that help them make a decision on the hot-button environmental issue. “The aim of the study was to test…