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.
Like all of us, economist Tyler Cowen loves a good story. But in this intriguing talk from TEDxMidAtlantic, he asks us to step away from thinking of our lives—and our messy, complicated irrational world—in terms of a simple narrative.
The Earth’s oceans may be acidifying faster than at any point during the last 300 million years due to industrial emissions, endangering marine life from oysters and reefs to sea-going salmon, researchers said. Scientists found surging levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere forced down the pH of the ocean by 0.1 unit in the…
In his new book, The Infinity Puzzle: Quantum Field Theory and the Hunt for an Orderly Universe, Oxford physicist Frank Close reviews decades’ worth of brain-teasing theories and looks ahead to puzzles yet to be solved. Author Metanexus Editors
Carbon buried in soil rises again as carbon emissions, a clue to understanding past and future global climate change, U.S. and European scientists say. Researchers say that while earlier studies have found erosion can bury carbon in the soil, acting as a carbon sink or storage, part of that sink is only temporary. They estimated…
Well, it’s taken 80 years, but the post–New Deal, post-military-industrial-complex mega-state has finally come up with a single good idea: the construction and deployment of a mobile, moon-sized, planet-killing death ray in outer space. Here is the language of the official petition to build a Death Star–style “space-superiority platform,” submitted to the White House under…
Astronomers have spotted a new component of the Milky Way galaxy’s skeleton — a “bone” of dust and gas that contains about as much material as 100,000 suns. The newfound Milky Way bone is more than 300 light-years long but just 1 or 2 light-years wide, giving it the appearance of a slender cosmic snake,…