The world population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year, according to a guesstimate from the United Nations. So, should you be scared?
The Philippine tarsier is a tiny primate with a seriously high voice. The saucer-eyed mammal can let out (and listen to) squeaks and squeals at such a high frequency that it effectively gives the mammal a private communication channel. A team of researchers found that the tiny tarsier can hear and emit sounds in the…
Researchers developing extra-contagious strains of H5N1 avian influenza have agreed to pause their work for 60 days. The moratorium is a response to public fear and alarm in the scientific community, which has split over whether the research could inadvertently lead to release of a nightmare disease. Depending on perspective, the moratorium is either a…
When discussing magnetic fields, images of the sun’s coronal loops or simulations of Earth’s magnetosphere may come to mind. But now, astronomers have observed the effects of a supersized magnetic field extending tens of thousands of light-years inside the two huge gamma-ray ‘bubbles’ that were discovered projecting from the top and bottom of the Milky…
Quantum physicists have discovered that quantum mechanics enlarges our capacity to reason in unexpected ways. The notorious Prisoner’s Dilemma, in which the rational choice is the wrong choice, can be eliminated by quantum entanglement. A more recent (and still unproved) claim is that a quantum system of voting could avoid the inconsistencies of ordinary voting….
This is not good news. A new international study—done by 47 experts using data from multiple satellites and aircraft—shows that the Earth is losing ice at an ever-increasing rate from both poles. We’ve known for years that the Arctic has been suffering massive ice loss, with the record low broken more than once in recent…
After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists looking for fossilized human bones have established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe. Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown…