When thinking about the economic recession, women exhibit less interest in alpha males in favor of guys who call themselves “natural followers,” a new study suggests. The results are surprising because they fly in the face of what evolutionary psychologists expect from women’s mate choices. According to evolutionary theory, women will seek men who provide…
The earliest cells were unstable chemical systems that survived by combining a handful of shaky carbon-based assemblies together, researchers say. All life on Earth is based on carbon. To create living matter from carbon, organisms carry out chemical reactions such as photosynthesis to generate organic compounds from the carbon dioxide in the environment. These mechanisms,…
Researchers have succeeded in mimicking the chemistry of life in synthetic versions of DNA and RNA molecules. The work shows that DNA and its chemical cousin RNA are not unique in their ability to encode information and to pass it on through heredity. The work, reported in Science, is promising for future “synthetic biology” and…
Think of all the data humans have collected over the long history of astronomy, from the cuneiform tablets of ancient Babylon to images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. If we could express all of that data as a number of bits, our fundamental unit of information, that number would be, well, astronomical. But that’s…
When the sun really acts up, spewing out heaps of charged particles in a burst called a coronal mass ejection, space weather can get menacing—and future storms could be even worse than the ones we’ve experienced. Solar storms can damage power grids, fry communications satellites and disrupt aircraft electronics. A few oft-cited historical examples: a…
Planets form more commonly in star systems with relatively high concentrations of elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, a new study suggests. Such heavier elements are necessary to form the dust grains and planetesimals that build planetary cores, according to the study, which was carried out by researchers Jarrett Johnson and Hui Li of Los…
Polar bears have been chilling on the ice far longer than is generally thought, new research suggests, and they probably interbred with brown bears at one point after the two species separated. The new German study contradicts data from a study published last July in the journal Current Biology that suggested polar bears separated from…
In a feat of technical mastery, condensed-matter physicists have managed to detect the elusive third constituent of an electron — its ‘orbiton’. The achievement could help to resolve a long-standing mystery about the origin of high-temperature superconductivity, and aid in the construction of quantum computers. Isolated electrons cannot be split into smaller components, earning them…
The mystery of the origin of the strongest cosmic rays has deepened as new clues into key suspects, the most powerful explosions in the universe, suggest they are likely not potential culprits, researchers say. Cosmic rays are charged subatomic particles that streak to Earth from deep in outer space. A few rare cosmic rays are…
Brain activity shows how one voice pattern stands out from the crowd