The highly influential environment activist Bill McKibben is proposing a fossil energy divestment campaign, on the model of the international anti-apartheid dis-investment campaign that successfully brought pressure on South Africa’s white-only regime. McKibben was among the organizers who brought the planned Keystone pipeline to a standstill last year, and he has been the leading figure…
John Wiley has reached an agreement with TED, the nonprofit specializing in spreading discussions on technology, entertainment, design and other subjects, to produce instructional material for TED Studies, 21 collections of curated discussions aimed at the school market and organized under academic subject categories. The Wiley/TED instructional content will be offered for free along with…
With the growth of online science networks, geography and economics no longer dictate how research is undertaken or published. Just as matchmaking sites connect romance-seekers based on their relationship compatibility, new academic social networks are connecting scientists based on their professional research interests. These sites obviously lack the general appeal of Facebook, which topped one…
Astronomers have discovered what they believe to be a rogue planet floating through space without a star. The super-Jupiter, called CFBDSIR2149, has a mass four to seven times that of our own gas giant, and is probably a scorching 800 or so degrees Fahrenheit. It appears to sit in a moving group of stars that,…
A new study has found that participating in an 8-week meditation training program can have measurable effects on how the brain functions even when someone is not actively meditating. Researchers also found differences in those effects based on the specific type of meditation practiced. “The two different types of meditation training our study participants completed…
Why do we get older? When do we die and why? Is there a life without ageing? For centuries, science has been fascinated by these questions. Now researchers from Kiel (Germany) have examined why the polyp Hydra is immortal – and unexpectedly discovered a link to ageing in humans. “Surprisingly, our search for the gene…
A group of researchers led by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona has discovered the first scientific evidence of genetic blending between Europeans and Asians in the remains of ancient Scythian warriors living over 2,000 years ago in the Altai region of Mongolia. Contrary to what was believed until now, the results published in PLoS ONE…
The search for the Higgs boson using the Large Hadron Collider at Cern has taken years of research and cost billions. It is a prime example of big money being spent on fundamental research into scientific principles, that critics say provides no answers to the problems the world faces today. In these austere times and…
Hearing is a vastly underrated sense. We tend to think of the world as a place that we see, interacting with things and people based on how they look. Studies have shown that conscious thought takes place at about the same rate as visual recognition, requiring a significant fraction of a second per event. But…
For the past five billion years, the expansion of the Universe has been speeding up, powered by the mysterious repulsive force known as “dark energy.” But thanks to a new technique for measuring the three-dimensional structure of the distant Universe, astronomers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have made the first measurement of the cosmic…