The History of English in 10 Minutes
A hilarious and informative cartoon history of the English language in just over 10 minutes from the Anglo-Saxons to the Internet!
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Ultimate Guide to the Multiverse
Whether we are searching the cosmos or probing the subatomic realm, our most successful theories lead to the inescapable conclusion that our universe is just a speck in a vast sea of universes.
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Life Began With a Planetary Mega-Organism
Once upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet’s oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today. This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin…
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Why the Higgs Boson Matters
From afar it may seem entirely disconnected from the real world, but the Higgs boson is much more integral to life, the universe and, well, everything than you may think.
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The Noble Gases Get to Work
Helium, neon, argon, krypton, xenon and radioactive radon are odourless, tasteless, practically non-reactive wisps of unconnected atoms. In this material universe, they amount to just about nothing at all. And yet … it would be hard to make a case that any other group of elements has had a greater impact on our understanding of the universe.
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Lynn Margulis: 1938-2011
Lynn Margulis is justly celebrated for her determined claim that the eukaryotic cell (the more complex cell with a nucleus and other parts, organelles) is not something that evolved on its own. It is rather the result of a simpler (prokaryotic) cell incorporating other such cells, which latter (rather than being absorbed) continued their existence within the whole, developing their own contributory functions.
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Oxygen a Bit Player in Earth’s Outer Core
Oxygen makes up a smaller percentage of the core than scientists had thought, suggests a study in Nature. Knowing the core’s contents helps researchers better understand how Earth clumped together 4.5 billion years ago, says co-author Yingwei Fei, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C.
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Are We the Teachable Species?
It’s certainly true that teaching comes naturally to us humans. There’s no culture on Earth without teachers. But just because something’s easy doesn’t mean it’s not special. And in the animal kingdom, teaching is exceedingly rare. In fact, it’s not clear whether any other animal can teach.
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Separating You and Me? 4.74 Degrees
The world is even smaller than you thought. Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
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Is Civilization a Bad Idea?
We don’t want to ask the question: Is civilization good for you (or me)? Instead we want to ask: Is civilization good—in the long term—for planets and their capacity to support life (or at least technologically adept civilizations)? In other words, we want to frame the question of sustainability in an astrobiological setting.