No doubt you never thought about this question. But suddenly it is hot science news. The answer that we get is: Yes. And it has interesting implications. The story starts with the odd properties of carbon. (It’s our story too because they are the basis for life, not to mention much of our industry.) Carbon […]
Another stunning discovery hits the astronomic news: Seems there are big black holes in galaxies all over. This opens a new chapter in the quest to understand the role of black holes in our universe. But its significance may run even deeper: a step toward unraveling the mystery of dark matter. Last year I reviewed […]
Sex may be mostly private, but sometimes clues can tell you that a couple has got something going on. That’s not unusual. But here’s a story of ancient history coming to life that is unusual. It’s about an interspecies coupling of a Homo sapiens and a Homo neanderthalis forty thousand years ago, and of how […]
How about a multi-billion-dollar good-news story? Science may have found a way to grow more food. It’s a source of nitrogen: bacteria that live in leaves. It may be worth a mint in new ecosystem services, which is a name for what Earth does for us by being there. Here’s the scene you need to […]
Danish political scientist Bjorn Lomborg makes a high-profile case against spending on Ebola. It may be good politics, but is it good science? Why should we care? One reason is that scientific thinking on Ebola could save lots of lives and staggering amounts of money. Science is a driver of our economy. Science is why […]
Finding new drugs these days is largely done with quantum mechanics. Fifty years ago it was more like what the Brits (and the indie rock band Arctic Monkeys) call suck-it-and-see. So thousands of Americans don’t know that they have arms and legs and normal lives thanks to the courage of a Canadian—and American—physician. She says […]
Here is a story that can save you money. It might even save your life. If we could see all of the organisms that surround us, we would see microbes, billions of them, many kinds of viruses, bacteria, fungi and archaea. Most of them do nothing to us. Some could help us. Others, if they […]
Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Frank Herbert Can we set a limit on how bad climate change can get? A new paper by ten European geoscientists seems to say so. […]
A new study has revealed how infection with measles exposes children to many other causes of death. This is something caring parents need to know about. Measles (aka rubeola) shows up as a rash. It is very infectious. Because it mostly just goes away we tend to think of it as a nuisance that keeps […]