Sean Carroll: The multiverse might be impossible to test directly. Even if such a theory were true, the worry goes, how would we ever know? Is it scientific to even talk about it?
Senior US government officials are to be briefed at the White House this week on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. The meeting is bringing together Nasa’s acting chief scientist, Gale Allen, the director of the US National Science Foundation, Cora Marett, as well as representatives from the US…
On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly…
Georgia Tech researchers say they’ve resurrected a 500-million-year-old gene from bacteria and inserted it into modern-day Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The resurrected bacterium has been growing for more than 1,000 generations, providing scientists a chance to observe evolution in action, the university announced. “This is as close as we can get to rewinding and…
In recent years, diseases have ravaged through bat, honeybee and amphibian populations, and now animal experts suspect that shared factors may link the deaths, which are putting many species at risk for extinction. The latest setback affects bats, given this week’s announcement that the deadly fungal disease known as white-nose syndrome has been confirmed in…
What if factors other than climate, like the food available nearby or the viruses, bacteria, and parasites native to the area, had an effect on various human populations’ genetic toolkits? It’s a fascinating question, but, given that we have to reconstruct all this supposed evolution from the current state of modern genomes, finding an answer…
The leap second may live on for at least another three years. Once or twice a year, the leap second can be tacked on to synchronize atomic clocks — the world’s scientific timekeepers — with the Earth’s rotational cycle, which does not run quite like clockwork. Without the leap second, atomic clocks would diverge about…