What is it about the Earth that has allowed life to continue for such long periods of time? The most important factor is plate tectonics.
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If you really look at the history of life on this planet, you see a lot of biologically-produced catastrophes. Where do they come from? From life itself.
Peter Ward: Not going extinct doesn’t mean you’re not going to be miserable, and by misery I mean, wholesale, enormous human mortality.
We now think the big mass extinctions were caused by hydrogen sulfide bacteria. Two hundred hydrogen sulfide molecules among a million air molecules is enough to kill a human.
Peter Ward: We will get hit again. It is only a matter of time until we get hit by an asteroid the same size of what killed off the dinosaurs, should humanity last long enough, that is.
A large asteroid hit us in the Yucatan Peninsula causing the mass extinction. Was the impact just the coup de grace coming on an already affected world?
We are now at levels that the world has not seen for the last 40 million years and we will soon be at carbon dioxide levels that existed 100 million years ago when we had a true hot house world.
The problem with speculative fiction is what might be called “the tour of the garbage disposal plant,” in which somone says to the visiting character, “Well in your day, you did this terribly inefficient thing, but now we have this wonderful garbage disposal plant.”
“Love, Actually” exemplifies a remarkable transformation from a society that understood female empowerment as a systemic concern to one that interprets all feminist concerns about empowerment through the ideological lens of market-based morality.
“He never is alone that is accompanied with noble thoughts.”- John Fletcher (born on this date in 1579)
Vivian Maier took about 150,000 pictures during her lifetime, but never showed a single one to another living soul. When she died in April 2009, Vivian was remembered as a […]
A few weeks ago I found myself engaged in an all-too-familiar debate. She was frustrated that I was not subscribing to her idea that ‘everything happens for a reason,’ and […]
If people cooked 50 percent of their meals, as opposed to what’s probably 20 percent of their meals, it would have a huge impact on both their health and on the environment, and it would be almost entirely positive.
A horrendous disease called Sleeping Sickness was close to being eradicated but war in Sudan gave it a new lease on life.
Other primates don’t seem to share their own desires and intentions with others, which leads to a lack of cooperation in a lot of domains.
The mechanism for changing your mindset through messaging is the same as for changing a physical behavior: a targeted and limited resolution practiced relentlessly until it becomes automatic.
A Republican congressman from Georgia, Jack Kingston, thinks the national school lunch program sends a terrible message to our youngsters. “We need to get the myth out of their head,” […]
A million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab.
“Worse than not realizing the dreams of your youth, would be to have been young and never dreamed at all.” – Jean Genet
I want to think about garbage today. Driving home from the store, I made an informal census of the garbage by the side of the road and in the green […]
Lee Smolin: As long as people of faith respect the facts and the deductions of science we should be respectful of their faith and their search for a faith.
Vikas Pota: I care a lot about education because I’m the product of education.
Chinese state television released this video of the Chang’e-3 space probe landing on the Moon, the first soft-landing in three decades.
The idea of uploading your brain to the Internet has been proposed by the likes of Stephen Hawking and Ray Kurzweil. According to Michael Graziano, the question is not if, but when, and what then?
“A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take from you.”- Ramsey Clark (born on this date in 1927)
The future of sex is here, or at least it could be, technically speaking.
Fewer than 14% of American silent films still exist today in complete form according to “The Survival of American Silent Feature Films: 1912-1929,” a recent Library of Congress report by […]
Do you know the science of global warming? Fortunately, Michael Ranney at the University of California, Berkeley, put together a video that explains the science in less than one minute.
Ray Jayawardhana: Being a scientist has given me a chance to see the world.
The astrophotographer Juan Carlos Casado has estimated there are 50 meteors visible in this composite image of the Geminids meteor shower.