The world population will hit 7 billion on Halloween this year, according to a guesstimate from the United Nations. So, should you be scared?
Lack of rain has left many rivers at low levels unseen for decades, and while this creates problems for river commerce, it also offers an occasional treasure trove of history. For example, a rock containing what is believed to be an ancient map has emerged in the Mississippi River in southeast Missouri, with etchings that may be 1,200 years old.
Some NASA supporters are mourning what they see as the decline of U.S. leadership in space. But they should really be celebrating the dawn of a new era. After all, we’ve been stuck in low Earth orbit for several decades now, at considerable cost. Visionary plans for genuine space exploration have gathered dust at NASA,…
Countries are working towards a new global agreement on climate change that would, unlike the Kyoto protocol, require cuts in greenhouse gas emissions from both developed and developing countries, to be signed in 2015 and come into force from 2020. At Doha, they cleared away some of the obstacles to the proposed new treaty, including…
A bird listening to birdsong may experience some of the same emotions as a human listening to music, suggests a new study on white-throated sparrows, published in Frontiers of Evolutionary Neuroscience. “We found that the same neural reward system is activated in female birds in the breeding state that are listening to male birdsong, and…
A simple brain trace can identify autism in children as young as two years old, scientists believe. A U.S. team at Boston Children’s Hospital say EEG traces, which record electrical brain activity using scalp electrodes, could offer a diagnostic test for this complex condition. EEG clearly distinguished children with autism from other peers in a…
When the Large Hadron Collider went online in 2009, most scientists saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to conduct experiments involving the building blocks of the physical world. But to Stanislav Shalunov, a networking engineer, it looked like a whole a new kind of Big Data problem. A few years before the LHC went live,…