Frank Sinatra would have been happy to learn that a U.K. company called Excalibur Almaz wants to literally fly folks to the Moon and back again. The catch—it’ll cost a cool $150 million per ticket for a trip around Earth’s satellite and you’ll be flying in refurbished Soviet-era spacecraft built back in the 1970s. The…
Physicists in Europe will present evidence of an entirely new particle on July 4, Nature has learned. But more data will be needed to officially confirm whether it is indeed the long-awaited Higgs boson — the particle thought to be behind the mass of all the others. Even as rumours fly in the popular media,…
A team of scientists from Arizona State University and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences found out that by returning to the nest some aging bees could learn new things.
A few strands of DNA could help solve the mystery of dark matter. A newly proposed detector aims to use DNA to resolve the conflicting claims from current dark matter detectors. Dark matter is thought to make up about 85% of the matter in the universe. The prime suspects are so-called weakly interacting massive particles,…
The panel on “Quantum Biology and the Hidden Nature of Nature” at the World Science Festival last month was particularly memorable. Skip to 5:30 to hear John Hockenberry give an informative and humorous introduction to these strange bedfellows—biology and quantum mechanics. Paul Davies, Seth Lloyd, and Thorsten Ritz then join Hockenberry for a fascinating conversation….
Hints of the Higgs boson detected last year by a US “atom smasher” have become even stronger, scientists have said. The news comes amid fevered speculation just two days before an announcement by researchers at the Large Hadron Collider. Finding the particle would fill a glaring hole in the widely accepted theory of how the…
A new study indicates that mass extinctions affect the pace of evolution, not just in the immediate aftermath of catastrophe, but for millions of years to follow. The study’s authors, University of Chicago’s Andrew Z. Krug and David Jablonski, will publish their findings in the August issue of the journal Geology. Scientists expected to see…
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care reform law has an impact in the form of key provisions that will impact US science funding in the years to come.
Until about 8500 years ago, Europe was populated by nomadic hunter-gatherers who hunted, fished, and ate wild plants. Then, the farming way of life swept into the continent from its origins in the Near East, including modern-day Turkey. Within 3000 years most of the hunter-gatherers had disappeared. Little is known about these early Europeans. But…
Chimpanzees have made headlines in recent years for several unprovoked attacks against humans, the latest just recently at the Jane Goodall Institute Chimpanzee Eden in South Africa. The severely injured victim, University of Texas graduate student Andrew Oberle was mauled by chimpanzees as he gave a lecture to about a dozen tourists. Oberle remains in…