From afar it may seem entirely disconnected from the real world, but the Higgs boson is much more integral to life, the universe and, well, everything than you may think.
In a study just released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, economists Nathan Nunn and Nancy Qian find that our well-meaning helping hand has often had the unintended consequence of aggravating conflict. Focusing on U.S. food aid windfalls that were triggered by bumper crops in the Midwest, they find that unexpected increases in wheat…
The Amazon rainforest is in flux, thanks to agricultural expansion and climate change. In other words, humans have “become important agents of disturbance in the Amazon Basin,” as an international consortium of scientists wrote in a review of the state of the science on the world’s largest rainforest published in the journal Nature. The dry…
Much of the internet is buzzing over upcoming “big news” from NASA’s Curiosity rover, but the space agency’s scientists are keeping quiet about the details. The report comes by way of the rover’s principal investigator, geologist John Grotzinger of Caltech, who said that Curiosity has uncovered exciting new results from a sample of Martian soil…
Scientists say they have new evidence that our ancestors were using fire as early as a million years ago. the evidence takes the form of ash and bone fragments recovered from Wonderwerk Cave in South Africa. The research team told the journal PNAS that the sediments suggest frequent, controlled fires were lit on the site….
Researchers at the University of Washington have determined that “some” microbial life migrated from the Earth’s oceans to land some 2.75 billion years ago. However, a number of scientists continue to hypothesize that such land-based life was limited – at least initially – because the ozone layer that shields against ultraviolet radiation didn’t form until…
From the editors at SciAm: Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, died on July 23 of pancreatic cancer. She was 61. Outside her trail-blazing career as an astronaut, Ride was also a major champion of STEM education. In 2010, she helped found an initiative called Change the Equation [a CEO-driven initiative to increase…