Half the atoms inside and around us came from outside the Milky Way
The Guardian reports: Nearly half of the atoms that make up our bodies may have formed beyond the Milky Way and travelled to the solar system on intergalactic winds driven by giant exploding stars,...
View ArticleFirst support for a physics theory of life
Natalie Wolchover writes: The biophysicist Jeremy England made waves in 2013 with a new theory that cast the origin of life as an inevitable outcome of thermodynamics. His equations suggested that...
View ArticleAliens in our midst
Douglas Fox writes: Leonid Moroz has spent two decades trying to wrap his head around a mind-boggling idea: even as scientists start to look for alien life in other planets, there might already be...
View ArticleMoon had a magnetic field for at least a billion years longer than thought
Science News reports: The moon had a magnetic field for at least 2 billion years, or maybe longer. Analysis of a relatively young rock collected by Apollo astronauts reveals the moon had a weak...
View ArticleIs the living world more a result of happenstance or repeatable processes?
Zachary D Blount writes: Amazon’s television series The Man in the High Castle, based on the classic novel by Philip K. Dick, presents a nightmarish alternative 1962 in which the triumphant Nazi and...
View ArticleThe Anna Karenina hypothesis says that every unbalanced microbiome is...
Ed Yong writes: In 2012, Rebecca Vega Thurber looked at the results of the large underwater experiment she had been running for three years—and was disappointed. Since 2009, her team had been traveling...
View ArticleBacteria use brainlike bursts of electricity to communicate
Gabriel Popkin writes: Bacteria have an unfortunate — and inaccurate — public image as isolated cells twiddling about on microscope slides. The more that scientists learn about bacteria, however, the...
View ArticleThis is how our world could end
Peter Brannen writes: Many of us share some dim apprehension that the world is flying out of control, that the centre cannot hold. Raging wildfires, once-in-1,000-years storms and lethal heatwaves have...
View ArticleThe stunning underwater picture this photographer wishes ‘didn’t exist’
Lindsey Bever writes: The powerful and poignant image shows a tiny sea horse holding tightly onto a pink, plastic cotton swab in blue-green waters around Indonesia. California nature photographer...
View ArticleMicrobes that eat electricity
Emily Singer writes: [In 2015], biophysicist Moh El-Naggar and his graduate student Yamini Jangir plunged beneath South Dakota’s Black Hills into an old gold mine that is now more famous as a home to a...
View ArticleIn his journal, Thoreau discovered how to balance poetic wonder and...
Andrea Wulf writes: In late 1849, two years after Henry David Thoreau left Walden Pond—where he had lived for two years, two months, and two days in a cabin that he had built himself—he began the...
View ArticleHow toxic PCBs came to permeate life on Earth
Rebecca Altman writes: Deep in the Mariana Trench, at depths lower than the Rockies are high, rests a tin of reduced-sodium Spam. NOAA scientists caught sight of it last year near the mouth of the...
View ArticleWarning of ‘ecological Armageddon’ after dramatic plunge in insect numbers
The Guardian reports: The abundance of flying insects has plunged by three-quarters over the past 25 years, according to a new study that has shocked scientists. Insects are an integral part of life on...
View ArticleInsectageddon: Farming is more catastrophic than climate breakdown
George Monbiot writes: Which of these would you name as the world’s most pressing environmental issue? Climate breakdown, air pollution, water loss, plastic waste or urban expansion? My answer is none...
View ArticleA giant insect ecosystem is collapsing due to humans. It’s a catastrophe
Michael McCarthy writes: Thirty-five years ago an American biologist Terry Erwin conducted an experiment to count insect species. Using an insecticide “fog”, he managed to extract all the small living...
View ArticleThe physics of life
Jeremy England writes: Living things are so impressive that they’ve earned their own branch of the natural sciences, called biology. From the perspective of a physicist, though, life isn’t different...
View ArticleInspired by ISIS: Trump administration will reward hunters who collect...
If there’s any remaining doubt that the U.S. government is now led by a cabal of twisted misfits, read this: Wayne Pacelle, President and CEO of The Humane Society of the United States, writes: With...
View ArticleThe depletion of the human microbiome and how it can be restored
Tobias Rees and Nils Gilman write: It is a crisis some scientists believe has similar proportions to climate change, but it gets much less coverage: Microbes are disappearing from our bodies. You may...
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