It’s true that the successful may indeed be more likely to commit adultery, but not for the reasons usually cited, such as their supposed sense of entitlement. It also conflates social monogamy with sexual monogamy, assuming that these complicated sets of behaviors are one and the same. The difference between social and sexual monogamy is…
As all the people and computers on our planet get more and more closely connected, it’s becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain. It’s important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with…
The universe is neither a computer nor a brain, but there are surprisingly similar laws to rule them all.
A hunt for supermassive black holes reveals a monstrous one at the heart of galaxy NGC 1277, which may force theorists to rethink their understanding of black holes.
Quashing the ‘doomsday’ rumors, top NASA scientists have assured that the world won’t end on December 21, 2012. “The world will not end in 2012. Our planet has been getting along just fine for more than 4 billion years, and credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012,” NASA said on its website….
According to Aristotelian philosophy, earth was eternal, a world without history and with no end. Only with the advent of religions based on the promise of a final salvation – supposedly after the end of time – it became of great interest for philosophers and scholars to calculate the age and understand the possible lifespan…
A consortium of scientists announced they had made major progress in deciphering the genome of bread wheat, a vital crop whose DNA is notoriously complex. Publishing in the journal Nature, they said they had analysed between 94,000 and 96,000 genes in bread wheat (Triticum aestivum). The plant’s genome is nearly five times as big as…
A culture change is needed if the benefits of development, such as new jobs and hospitals, are not to be destroyed in future natural disasters. A new report, ‘Reducing Risks of Future Disasters: Priorities for Decision Makers’, published by the UK government, calls on all development stakeholders — including aid and development funders, governments and…
Collisions between particles inside the Large Hadron Collider atom smasher have created what looks like a new form of matter. The new kind of matter is called color-glass condensate, and is a liquidlike wave of gluons, which are elementary particles related to the strong force that sticks quarks together inside protons and neutrons. Scientists didn’t…
Astronomers have seen a distant galaxy that blasts away material with two trillion times the energy the sun emits — the biggest such eruption ever seen. That ejection of matter could answer an important question about the universe: why are the black holes in the centers of galaxies so light? Computer models of the early…