Quantcast
Channel: War in Context
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 185 View Live

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 Article



First 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 Article

Aliens 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 Article

Moon 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 Article

Is 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 Article


The 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 Article

Bacteria 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 Article

This 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 Article


The 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 Article


Microbes 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 Article

In 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 Article

How 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 Article

Warning 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 Article


Insectageddon: 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 Article

A 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 Article


The 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 Article

Inspired 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 Article


The 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...

View Article
Browsing latest articles
Browse All 185 View Live




Latest Images