The Evolution of Personality
Examining four animal groups with high relative brain size, and finding that they have a variety of qualities in common even though they have very different evolutionary histories and live in different environments.
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What Happened Before the Big Bang?
What existed before the big bang? What is the nature of time? Is our universe one of many? On the big questions science cannot (yet?) answer, a new crop of philosophers are trying to provide answers. Stephen Hawking may have famously declared that “Philosophy is dead.” but philosopher of physics Tim Maudlin disagrees. Maudlin, whose…
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Mysterious Galaxy Possibly Made of Dark Matter
A team of astronomers has identified a new galaxy that may be made completely of dark matter, the second of its kind. In a discovery announced in January, an international team of researchers has found a dark dwarf galaxy about 10 billion light years from Earth. In the current issue of Nature, the team of…
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Say Cheese: Astronomers Aim To Take First Picture of Black Hole
Taking a picture of a black hole, an object so gravitationally bound that not even photons of light can escape, sounds like an oxymoron, but astronomers are attempting to do just that. What they’re hoping to glimpse is something called the “event horizon” — the swirl of matter and energy that are visible around the…
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Education, Religion … Evolution?
The evidence is clear, as in a February 2009 Gallup Poll, taken on the eve of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birthday, that reported only 39 percent of Americans say they “believe in the theory of evolution,” while a quarter say they do not believe in the theory, and another 36 percent don’t have…
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Do Thrifty Brains Make Better Minds?
Might the miserly use of neural resources be one of the essential keys to understanding how brains make sense of the world? Some recent work in computational and cognitive neuroscience suggests that it is indeed the frugal use of our native neural capacity (the inventive use of restricted “neural bandwidth,” if you will) that explains…
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Evolution Defenders to Fight Climate Skeptics
A national organization best known for its defense of teaching evolution has added climate change to its agenda in a move that highlights a brewing controversy inside the classroom. Across the country, teachers and schools boards are being pressured to teach that the science of climate change is controversial when, in fact, it is not,…
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Moroccan Rock Came from Mars
A hail of Martian meteorites crashed to Earth last July, and collectors and scientists around the world are snapping up the ultra-rare rocks for display and study. The meteorites fell in the Moroccan desert in July and were recovered a few months later. Scientists confirmed that the rocks are Martian, presumably blasted off the Red…
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Multicellular Life Evolves in Laboratory
An evolutionary transition that took several billion years to occur in nature has happened in a laboratory, and it needed just 60 days. Under artificial pressure to become larger, single-celled yeast became multicellular creatures. That crucial step is responsible for life’s progression beyond algae and bacteria, and while the latest work doesn’t duplicate prehistoric transitions,…
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Scientists Nominate Their Favorite Deep, Elegant, Beautiful Explanations
Scientists’ greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant”. Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms…