How easy is it to create life? It happened here at least once. Does that give scientists studying the creation of life from non-life (abiogenesis) much to work with?
The relationship between science and religion has always been vexed. Most scientists I know are nonbelievers, convinced that there is no deity, or at least that there is no convincing evidence of one. Even those who are believers, like Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, see their religion and their science as…
We could wring our hands about our unreconstructed nature but sex is at the center of human thought, and always has been. Some of the earliest cave art has erotic themes. We didn’t get where we are without genetic programming that makes us value eating, drinking and having sex. Add to that our inbuilt compulsion…
Caltech physicist Sean Carroll makes the search for the Higgs boson a scientific detective story. At heart is the mystery of the universe.
Alien planets born in widely separated two-star systems face a grave danger of being booted into interstellar space, a new study suggests. Exoplanets circling a star with a far-flung stellar companion — worlds that are part of “wide binary” systems — are susceptible to violent and dramatic orbital disruptions, including outright ejection, the study found….
Shalosh B. Ekhad, the co-author of several papers in respected mathematics journals, has been known to prove with a single, succinct utterance theorems and identities that previously required pages of mathematical reasoning. Last year, when asked to evaluate a formula for the number of integer triangles with a given perimeter, Ekhad performed 37 calculations in…
A swollen star near the end if its life has been caught devouring one of its own planets — a scenario that could one day be replayed on Earth when our own sun dies in billions of years, scientists say. Astronomers discovered the cosmic crime scene while studying an ancient star that has expanded in…