If there was a ‘Just So’ story for how the zebra got its stripes, Rudyard Kipling certainly would have come up with an amusing and entertaining camouflage explanation. But would he have come up with the explanation that zebra’s stripes stave off blood-sucking insects? According to a study, published in The Journal of Experimental Biology,…
The Fermi Paradox asks the simple question “where are they?” Our Milky Way galaxy is so big and so old — and we are estimated to be accompanied by at least 100 billion planets — that aliens should have visited us by now. Instead, when we peruse the heavens, we are faced with the Great…
A group of forward-thinking military scientists want to plug soldiers’ weapons directly into their brains, and this time DARPA is nowhere to be found. The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of scientific thought, issued a report on the applications of neuroscience in the military and law enforcement contexts. Discussed therein: new performance-enhancing designer drugs,…
A swathe of seagrass in the Mediterranean could be the oldest known living thing on Earth. Carlos Duarte of the University of Western Australia in Perth sequenced the DNA of Posidonia oceanica at 40 sites spanning 3500 kilometres of seafloor, from Spain to Cyprus. One patch off the island of Formentera was identical over 15…
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1992 brought an influx of Soviet mathematicians to U.S. institutions, and those scholars’ differing areas of specialization have changed the way math is studied and taught in this country, according to new research by University of Notre Dame Economist Kirk Doran and George Borjas from Harvard University. Results…
Politicians change their minds like everyone else. And accusations of flip-flopping are often thought to be a boon for opposing candidates during heated debates. Depending on certain factors, changing stances can actually help a candidate. But it also depends on what political party both voter and politician belong to.
It used to be sex ed that got science teachers into challenging situations once in awhile. Evolution, too, of course. Increasingly, the “C” word, climate, is creating challenges for educators trying to explore the heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide and the implications for climate as concentrations of CO2 and other greenhouse gases rise. Teachers are…
Tweeting or checking emails may be harder to resist than cigarettes and alcohol, according to researchers who tried to measure how well people could resist their desires. They even claim that while sleep and sex may be stronger urges, people are more likely to give in to longings or cravings to use social and other…
Is the fact you are reading this story a decision you arrived at it by your own free choice, or was your interest programmed into the universe from the moment of the big bang? What makes free will such a fun topic is not only that it dives deep into physics, neuroscience, and philosophy, but…
Scientists have been exploring the idea that we are all governed by two disparate existential systems, each with its own distinct method of processing the idea of death. Both existential minds have the power to meaningfully change our attitudes and actions, but they work in very different—almost opposite—ways. One of our systems of existential thinking…