If the U.S. wants to keep its prominence as a world power and technological innovator in the 21st century, we need to work fast.
Given the dramatic difference in the size and sequence of the human X and Y chromosomes, it’s hard to imagine that they were once a perfect matching pair. But in fact all sex chromosomes start out that way. New research published in Science examines the early phase of sex chromosome evolution in a strain of…
A new species of small nocturnal primate has been discovered by scientists in Borneo. The primate is a type of slow loris, a small cute-looking animal that is more closely related to bushbabies and lemurs than to monkeys or apes. Uniquely among primates, they have a toxic bite, belying their appearance. Two previously known subspecies of slow…
“I have a dream,” declared Martin Luther King, in a speech that has lost none of its power to inspire. And some of that dream has come true. When King spoke in the summer of 1963, America was a nation that denied basic rights to millions of its citizens, simply because their skin was the…
New astonishing pictures by the European Space Agency have revealed a 1,500km long and 7km wide river that once ran across Mars. The agency’s Mars Express imaged the striking upper part of the remnants of Reull Vallis river on Mars with its high-resolution stereo camera, ESA said. Reull Vallis, is believed to have formed when…
We see with our ideas. That idea can open our eyes to key questions about modeling human nature. Varying blues and illusions illuminate a weird sampling error at the heart of a heartless economic worldview. And suggest a fix.
To see how deeply ideas influence what we see, consider that: Russians have blues, but no blue. They have no single word for our color blue. Their language makes “an obligatory distinction between” lighter blues (goluboy) and darker blues (siniy). Their idea that these are separate colors means Russians distinguish them faster than English speakers can.
A group of forward-thinking military scientists want to plug soldiers’ weapons directly into their brains, and this time DARPA is nowhere to be found. The Royal Society, the UK’s national academy of scientific thought, issued a report on the applications of neuroscience in the military and law enforcement contexts. Discussed therein: new performance-enhancing designer drugs,…