The hiding spots for the particles making up dark matter are narrowing, and the answer to this cosmic mystery could come within the next three or four years, scientists say. Dark matter is an elusive substance that is invisible and almost never detected, except by its gravitational pull. Yet astronomers say it likely makes up…
American denial of climate change hit bottom this month. Hurricane Sandy was the most powerful instance yet of mundane weather trumping abstract science to make people face the truth. “It’s Global Warming, Stupid!” screeched the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek, above a photo of a flooded street. Rising sea levels just moved from future threat to…
Governments, businesses and civil society have much to gain from a spirit of determination within the international community
Critics claim that evolutionary biology is, at best, guesswork. The reality is otherwise. Evolutionists have nailed down how an enormous number of previously unexplained phenomena—in anatomy, physiology, embryology, behavior—have evolved. There are still mysteries, however, and one of the most prominent is the origins of homosexuality. The mystery is simple enough. Its solution, however, has…
Evidence is mounting that modern birds descended from gliding, feathered non-avian dinosaurs. Two dinosaurs could be candidates for the bottom of the bird family tree, and each helps to reveal how feathers first evolved. “The oldest known feathered dinosaurs would be Anchiornis (155 million years ago) and Epidexipteryx (between 152 million and 168 million years…
Within supersized alien versions of Earth, a common transparent ceramic may become a flowing liquid metal, perhaps granting those distant worlds magnetic fields to shield life from harmful radiation, researchers say. Among the hundreds of extrasolar planets, or exoplanets, that astronomers have discovered in recent years are so-called “super-Earths,” which are rocky planets like Earth…
Much of the internet is buzzing over upcoming “big news” from NASA’s Curiosity rover, but the space agency’s scientists are keeping quiet about the details. The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil…
A smattering of white spots found among the ink in medieval books aren’t just printing errors — they’re actually an amazingly detailed “fossil” record of European beetles, new research finds. The dots represent spots, or wormholes, where hatching beetles chewed their way out of the woodblocks used to print art and illustrations between the 1400s…
A study using a unique new instrument on the world’s largest optical telescope has revealed the likely origins of especially bright supernovae that astronomers use as easy-to-spot “mile markers” to measure the expansion and acceleration of the universe. In a paper to appear in the Astrophysical Journal, researchers describe observations of recent supernova 2011fe that…
For the first time, ESA’s Planck space telescope has detected a bridge of hot gas connecting a pair of galaxy clusters 10 million light-years apart. Abell 399 and Abell 401, each containing hundreds of galaxies, are billions of light years away. The presence of hot gas linking them had already been hinted at in X-ray…