We worry because we are built to anticipate the future. Nothing can stop us from worrying, but science can teach us how to worry better, and when to stop worrying.
Take a deep breath; Dec 21, 2012 is behind us. The Mayan calendar end-of-world debacle is over: zip, zilch, gone! The silliness, anxiety, and paranoia leading up to the predicted end of times was so bad that on Dec. 21st — the appointed doomsday — a worried citizen left a message on my office phone…
The total mass of life on Earth may be one-third less than thought, altering how active we think life on our planet is, researchers say. Past estimates of how much life there is on Earth suggested living organisms store about 1 trillion tons of carbon, of which about 30% dwells in single-celled microbes in the…
Are there dark doings near the center of the Milky Way? That may be so when it comes to the collision of dark matter particles. Although such particles are invisible, we could still theoretically see the mess they make when they collide. It’s this idea that leads physicists to scour the galaxy for some glimmer…
The world’s largest particle accelerator is roaring along at an unprecedented pace, delivering torrents of data to its physicist handlers. But the hundreds of millions of collisions happening inside the machine every second are now growing into a thick fog that, paradoxically, threatens to obscure a fabled quarry: the Higgs boson. The problem is known…
At last, a member of the celebrated sirtuin family of proteins has been shown to extend lifespan in mammals — although it’s not the one that has received the most attention and financial investment. Sirtuin genes and the proteins they encode have intrigued many researchers who study aging ever since they were first linked to…
The newly discovered Phoenix cluster may be one of the most extreme objects ever observed, being among the most massive, luminous, and productive clusters in the universe. Located about 5.7 billion light-years from Earth in the constellation Phoenix, it has a mass roughly 2,500 trillion times that of the sun. Distributed between the galaxies in…