After having launched the space rover Curiosity to Mars, researchers at NASA are now planning to send people to the red planet. Work has begun at Michoud Assembly Facility to find ways by which Mars could be made a reachable planet. It has been reported that the Boeing engineers have been given the responsibility to…
How is the absence of discussion about global warming going to affect our ability to do something about it? Climate change and the federal government’s role in addressing it are conspicuously missing from the presidential campaign trail and the halls of Congress. A broad range of environmental groups and other experts have called on the…
Katrina Lantos Swett contributes a post for On Faith’s Guest Voices: Across the globe, religion and belief continue to matter deeply in the lives of people and their cultures. From worship to prayer, births to funerals, weddings to holy days, almsgiving to thanksgiving, religion is a central source of identity, meaning, and purpose for billions…
Primates’ brains see the world through triangular grids, according to a new study published online in the journal Nature. Scientists at Yerkes National Primate Research Center, Emory University, have identified grid cells, neurons that fire in repeating triangular patterns as the eyes explore visual scenes, in the brains of rhesus monkeys. The finding has implications…
An epic battle between paintballs and a giant asteroid could one day save the Earth from an apocalyptic space rock impact. The novel asteroid-deflecting scheme proposes that a cloud of paintballs shot into space could knock a dangerous asteroid off a collision course with Earth. Sung Wook Paek, an MIT graduate student, says a spacecraft…
Scientists from the University of Oxford and the University of Southampton have created a technique called reflectance transformation imaging that may help crack an ancient undeciphered writing system. The aim is to decipher manuscripts written in the so-called proto-Elamite writing system used in ancient Iran from 3,200 to 3,000 B.C. British researchers say new technology…
Herb Silverman for On Faith’s Guest Voices, reflecting on the life and contributions of Paul Kurtz, who died October 20 at the age of 86: Paul Kurtz was a founder and a leader, more so than anyone else I have ever known. Before there were the new atheists and their best-selling books, there was Paul…
Evolution, often perceived as a series of random changes, might in fact be driven by a simple and repeated genetic solution to an environmental pressure that a broad range of species happen to share, according to new research. Princeton University research published in the journal Science suggests that knowledge of a species’ genes—and how certain…
Adversity during childhood can help someone build persistence and self-control a new study suggests, with implications for nature vs. nurture arguments. Researchers at the University of Toronto found that an interaction between biology and life experience work to alter human development. They published the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. “Biologists…
There’s a notorious problem with defining information within physics, namely that on the one hand information is purely abstract, and the original theory of computation as developed by Alan Turing and others regarded computers and the information they manipulate purely abstractly as mathematical objects. Many mathematicians to this day don’t realize that information is physical…