“The letters reveal that the discovery of the double helix could have turned out differently if the characters involved had a little more information.”
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As I wrote in my past blog entry, “The 1000 Genomes Project Will Help Us Understand Genetic Variations,” it initially cost $3 billion to fully sequence all of the 25,000 […]
Six months ago, in late April, Research teams at the NASA Infrared Telescope facility in Hawaii made an astonishing discovery. They found that both water ice and organic compounds exist […]
When you smell a perfume you may be smelling hundreds of molecules at once, but the best nose in the world cannot smell more than five distinct scents.
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There’s no such thing as a verbatim, facsimile memory, says USC neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. When we reconstruct events in our minds, we are pulling together set sequences of specific details stored in different parts of the brain.
“Many vital crops capture the sun’s energy in a surprisingly inefficient way. A borrowed trick or two could make them far more productive.” The New Scientist on improving photosynthesis.
When you smell a ripe strawberry or your morning coffee, what you’re really smelling are hundreds of molecules, says fine fragrance perfumer Chistophe Laudamiel. But that doesn’t mean the brain […]
When fine fragrance perfumer Christophe Laudamiel, a recent Big Think guest, saw our video interview with filmmaker John Waters—in which Waters divulged his affection for a deadly work of contemporary […]
One of the most wonderful things about the emerging global superbrain is that information is overflowing on a scale beyond what we can wrap our heads around.
If you are a Star Trek fan, you may long have been fascinated by the idea of a “replicator”; a device where you simply ask for something and the device […]
The theory behind the substance graphene was first explored by theoretical physicist Philip Wallace in 1947 as kind of a starting point when he was doing research trying to understand […]
We physicists used to laugh whenever we talked about some of the topics that I mention in my book, “Physics of the Impossible”—some of these include such ideas as invisibility […]
Why exactly do fights break out when people are drinking? You might think it’s simple biochemistry—alcohol molecules wreaking changes on brain cells, leading to behavior change, leading to a broken […]
Because of their biochemical makeup, women are better than men are at managing risk. As a result, female equity managers yield higher returns for their clients and are better at navigating downturns.
My new television show “Sci-Fi Science” on The Science Channel is inspired by my book “Physics of the Impossible.” The first season of the show takes viewers through the wildest […]
Released just yesterday, Physics of the Future is my most ambitious book to date. Based on interviews with over three hundred of the world’s top scientists, who are already inventing the […]
A 1940 map of a fictional continent slightly resembling South America, symbolising different aspects of the new and exciting world of plastics
Scientists have figured out how independent, programmable nano-scale robots can be made out of individual molecules—with the robots’ actions programmed into their environment.
Using lasers to manipulate the weather sounds like science fiction, but researchers at the University of Geneva have done just that. In May, Dr. Jerome Kasparian unveiled the results of […]
Like atoms in a molecule, we’re all linked together. Studying the complex matrix that results can illuminate everything from bucket brigades to Bernie Madoff.
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Organic chemistry’s an intricate subject. Media chatter about wellness, though, is an action movie, where “good” molecules (like Omega-3 fatty acids) battle “bad” ones (like LDL cholesterol). If they could, […]
As part of their conversation series with scientists, the NY Times this week runs an interview with Harvard’s Eric Mazur featuring the headline “Using the ‘Beauties of Physics’ to Conquer […]
Molecules cooled to less than a millionth degree Kelvin above absolute zero can still react chemically with one another despite the temperature causing near-negligible collision motion.
There now seems “little doubt” that Saturn’s moon Enceladus holds a “large body of liquid water” beneath its icy surface after a probe returned yet more evidence.
Few things have become as underappreciated in recent years as sleep. Yet for anybody who sees this activity as more of a luxury than a necessity in our ever-plugged-in world, […]
One of the primary processes behind aging is oxidation, which occurs when “free radical,” bachelor, molecules break away from their natural pairings and begin to “hit on” healthy cells. There […]
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Seeking the hidden causes of behavior, some scientists work on the scale of brain regions and neurons, searching inside people’s heads. Others work on the scale of crowds, neighborhoods and […]
Protestors who are skeptical about the efficacy of homeopathic medicines are staging a “mass overdose” in a bid to prove that such treatments are bogus.
A cure may have been found for a defective alcohol metabolism enzyme that affects and estimated 1 billion people worldwide, according to research by the NIAAA.
New research suggests that drinking two glasses of champagne per day can improve heart function and circulation flow.