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There is a lot of evidence suggesting life exists on Mars, says astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch. “It’s actually more scientifically outrageous to think that Mars is and always has been sterile.”
Plant breeders are offering hybrid heirloom tomatoes this year that they claim “have the distinct flavors and funky looks of heirlooms but are more disease-resistant and abundantly productive.”
“The ‘birther’ myth is the political equivalent of a horror-movie villain: Not only does it refuse to die, but every time someone tries to kill it, it only comes back stronger,” writes Christopher Beam.
“We may not know why we sleep, dream or wake up, but these states are never static,” writes author Siri Hustvedt. There is a continuum of perception from unconsciousness to full self-consciousness.
“What if the Eyjafjallajokull ash cloud is “not just a minor volcanic hiccup, but the beginning of an event that causes in time a mass extinction of some form of earthbound life?” asks Simon Winchester.
“Combining as it does great energy expenditure and risk with apparent pointlessness, [play] is a central paradox of evolutionary biology,” writes anthropologist and neuroscientist Melvin Konner.
Women remain much choosier than men when it comes to dating. Is this difference a vestige of our early ancestry? Or could it be the result of something more modern and mundane?
The cover of this month’s issue of Fast Company has an excellent article by Anya Kamenetz on how smart phones are leading the charge in revolutionizing traditional methods of teaching and learning. […]
Mark Twain was a great American novelist, but Nathanial Rich notes that in his own lifetime—which ended exactly a hundred years ago today—he was read more widely as a travel writer.
Researchers have found that bees see the world nearly five times as quickly as humans do, helping them to navigate through bushes and find food.
University authorities—seeing the distraction that the Internet and social media can cause—are trying a varied of methods to get students to turn off their computers in class.
“No poet has ever been so influential, so controversial, and so little read” as Ezra Pound, writes Jamie James. After him, “anyone aspiring to be a poetic messiah would be shunned as a charlatan.”
Several studies have concluded that obesity accelerates the process of dementia. People who are overweight in their 40s are more likely to show a rapid, pronounced decline in brain function in their 70s.
Nearly fifty years after the invention of the birth control pill, we now have a wide variety of options for contraception. Yet nearly half of pregnancies in the U.S. are still unintended.
Scientists have used DNA to trace the evolutionary split between head and body lice to 190,000 years ago. They say this may indicate how long humans have been wearing clothing.