Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, but uncovering the past can be just as tricky. Now researchers have developed a method that looks backward and may reveal where a widespread phenomenon originated, be it the outbreak of a disease or a new technology. The new method relies on distance, but is not constrained by geography….
Loneliness can send a person down a path toward bad health, and even more intense loneliness, studies have shown. But while some have assumed the culprit was a dearth of others to remind a person to take care of himself or herself, new research suggests there’s a direct biological link between being lonely and ill…
The SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute is asking the public to join in its hunt for signals from intelligent civilizations out there in the universe. Anyone can register on the new website, SETI Live, to help analyze data from SETI’s radio telescope devoted to scanning the heavens for signals from E.T. The public will…
Could sad music be perpetuating our sullen views and upbeat tunes optimizing our optimistic outlook?
For female Bonobos, climbing the social ladder means having sex with the alpha female
Analysis of books identifies lexical victims of shifting social, technological influences
Britain’s Nuffield Council on Bioethics, which examines ethical issues raised by new developments in biology and medicine, recently launched a consultation on the ethics of new technologies and devices that intervene in the human brain. The three main areas of the group’s focus are brain-computer interfaces, neurostimulation and neural stem cell therapy.
Physicists have taken a step forward in their efforts to understand why the Universe is dominated by matter, and not its shadowy opposite antimatter. Physicists think the intense heat of the Big Bang should have forged equal amounts of matter and its “mirror image” antimatter. Yet today we live in a Universe composed overwhelmingly of…
Charles Darwin regarded the problem of altruism—the act of helping someone else, even if it comes at a steep personal cost—as a potentially fatal challenge to his theory of natural selection. After all, if life was such a cruel “struggle for existence,” then how could a selfless individual ever live long enough to reproduce? Why…
It was a slender bird, with long wings and a spear-like bill to catch swift ocean prey. And scientists say the first glimpse of the extinct giant penguin species was worth the 26 million-year wait. Experts from New Zealand and the United States reconstructed a fossil skeleton of one of the giant sea birds to…