The case of the missing quasar gas clouds has been solved by a worldwide research team led by Penn State astronomers. The discovery was announced in a paper published in The Astrophysical Journal, which describes 19 distant quasars whose giant clouds of gas seem to have disappeared in just a few years. Quasars are powered…
President Obama and his challenger, Mitt Romney, each responded at length to a question posed by ScienceDebate 2012 about the nation’s goals in space. But while both emphasized the importance of space exploration, with Mr. Obama briefly mentioning the need for monitoring the Earth, neither candidate, and neither party, has addressed the scientific question of…
One of the most deeply rooted concepts in science and in our everyday life is causality; the idea that events in the present are caused by events in the past and, in turn, act as causes for what happens in the future. If an event A is a cause of an effect B, then B…
Samples from eight cedar trees in Bolivia have helped shed light on the seasonal rainfall in the Amazon basin over the past century, say researchers. A study led by UK-based scientists said the data from the trees provided a key tool to assess the natural variation in the region’s climate system. It suggested that tree-rings…
Should we build a supercomputer on the moon? It would be a mammoth technical undertaking, but a University of Southern California graduate student thinks there’s a very good reason for doing this: It would help alleviate a coming deep-space network traffic jam that’s had NASA scientists worried for several years now. Ouliang Chang floated his…
A new study finds that most of the specific genes long thought to be linked to intelligence probably have no bearing on one’s IQ. Furthermore, researchers say that it may be some time before researchers can identify intelligence’s specific genetic roots. In the study, Christopher Chabris of Union College and David Laibson, a Harvard economist,…
Surrounding our planet are rings of plasma, part of Earth’s magnetosphere, which are pulsing with radio waves. Those waves are not audible to the human ear alone, but radio antennae can pick them up, and that’s just what an instrument — the Electric and Magnetic Field Instrument Suite and Integrated Science (EMFISIS) — on NASA’s…
Researchers on 70,000-mile voyage to investigate climate change say effect of humans is now ‘truly planetary’
Researcher Jonathan Haidt delves into the psychology of red-state, blue-state, and offers hope for reconciliation
Falsified data is the main reason biomedical and life science research articles are retracted, a problem that has increased 10-fold in the past three decades, a review of studies found. About 43% of the articles were rescinded because of made-up or manipulated data, 14% were retracted because the study appeared in more than one publication…