The world population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year, according to a guesstimate from the United Nations. So, should you be scared?
A previously little-considered heating effect could shrink estimates of the habitable zone of the Milky Way’s most numerous class of stars — ‘M’ or red dwarfs — by up to one half, says Rory Barnes, an astrobiologist at the University of Washington in Seattle. That factor — gravitational heating via tides — suggests a menagerie…
Spinach power has just gotten a big boost. An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Vanderbilt University have developed a way to combine the photosynthetic protein that converts light into electrochemical energy in spinach with silicon, the material used in solar cells, in a fashion that produces substantially more electrical current than has been reported by…
A boost for quantum reality: Theorists claim they can prove that wavefunctions are real states.
What if instead of dust and rocks, our planetary neighbor Mars were a bit more lush? What if it had oceans, an Earth-like atmosphere, and green life coating its land? These are the questions Kevin Gill, a software engineer living in New Hampshire, sought to answer with his project, A Living Mars. Author Metanexus Editors
As virtuous as you might feel when you choose organic foods sweetened with brown rice syrup instead of high-fructose corn syrup, you might actually be making a potentially toxic decision. Infant formulas, cereal bars and other foods made with organic brown rice syrup are loaded with arsenic, found a new study. And while an occasional…
A nine-year study conducted in the Plum Island estuary indicates that sewage and fertilizers may be seriously damaging salt marshes. The study, published in the journal Nature, indicates salt marshes may be crumbling from the inside out, due to polluted waterways and runoff from people’s lawns. It’s a concern because the marshes are critical to…