If you could escape the human time scale for a moment, and regard evolution from the perspective of deep time, in which the last 10,000 years are a short chapter in a long saga, you’d say: Things are pretty wild right now. In the most massive study of genetic variation yet, published in Nature, researchers…
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…
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.
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…
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…
The question of how life began on a molecular level has been a longstanding problem in science. However, recent mathematical research sheds light on a possible mechanism by which life may have gotten a foothold in the chemical soup that existed on the early Earth. Researchers have proposed several competing theories for how life on…
Beneath the icy surface of a buried Antarctic lake, in super-salty water devoid of light and oxygen that is also cold enough to freeze seawater, researchers have now discovered that a diverse community of bacteria has survived for millennia. The findings, detailed online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shed light…
Researchers from NASA and the Department of Energy have demonstrated a nuclear reactor that could power spaceflight. It’s nowhere near as powerful as NASA’s conceptual antimatter engine–the Demonstration Using Flattop Fissions (DUFF) experiment produces just 24 watts of electricity. The researchers used a heat pipe to cool a small nuclear reactor and power a Stirling…
The race is on to blame everything related to ecological change on human footprints – even the past can be re-framed as anthropocenic climate change and University of Massachusetts Amherst geoscientists have shown how to do just that, by using a biomarker from human feces in a completely new way to establish the first human…