Energy: DOE Secretary Steven Chu Talks Up the “Sputnik Moment” for Energy...
Readers of this blog will know that one of my pet issues is energy research and innovation. The U.S. invests an obscenely low amount of federal money on basic energy research—perhaps $5 billion a year,...
View ArticlePolitics: Celebrating the Passage of a Science Bill
For all the complaints about government gridlock, the 111th Congress proved to be incredibly productive, passing health care legislation, an unprecedented stimulus, major tax cuts, allowing gays in the...
View ArticleHow Whale Songs Rocket to Number One
There’s no accounting for musical taste — particularly when the kind of music you’re talking about doesn’t even originate in your own species. Bird songs may be lovely, but whale songs? Say what you...
View ArticleMore Warming, More Rain, More Plague
Most of us learned about “the plague” or “the Black Death” a long time ago – reading Boccaccio and Petrarch, sitting in high school history class, and even from that debate about the nursery rhyme...
View ArticleIs High-Speed Evolution an Answer to Climate Change?
Maybe, like Al Gore, you believe we are our own worst enemies in battling climate change. You too might think politicians manufacture denial-rhetoric to appease special interest groups, that industries...
View ArticleSticker Shock: What Extreme Weather Costs the U.S.
It’s not hard to imagine the damage weird weather inflicts on our planet. Hurricane Katrina, for example, obliterated coastal communities, wiped out businesses and left hundreds of dead bodies in its...
View ArticleScientists: We Want More Children
We Ecocentric writers have the privilege of constant exposure to the most cutting-edge science research around – we’ve written about sexy birds, Arctic oil, paper solar panels, and countless other...
View ArticleDrill, Baby, Drill: Russian Scientists Reach a Massive Underground Lake
If life were a Michael Bay movie, the moment this week when Russian scientists finally drilled into the subglacial Lake Vostok in Antarctica would immediately be followed by the sudden and frightening...
View ArticleNew Element 115 Takes a Seat at the Periodic Table
It isn’t carbon, it isn’t nickel, it sure as heck ain’t gold — it doesn’t even have a formal name. But never mind that. The newly created superheavy element, announced today in a paper published in the...
View ArticleNobel Medicine Prize Winners Announced
The Nobel Assembly has announced the winners of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. James Rothman, a chemist from Yale University, Randy Schenkman, a professor of molecular and cell biology...
View ArticleThe Woman With No Memory
Lonni Sue Johnson, 63, is an artist suffering profound amnesia after a nearly fatal battle with encephalitis in 2007. The disease destroyed her hippocampus, wiping out most of her old memories, as...
View ArticleScientific Panel: Global Warming Threatens Society, Warning System Needed
A scientific panel has called for the creation of an early ecological warning system after finding that global warming threatens a polar sea ice collapse, vast dead zones in the ocean and mass plant...
View ArticleSecond Code Uncovered Inside the DNA
Scientists have marveled at the ingenuity of the DNA code since it was first deciphered in the early sixties, but now it appears that there is much more to it than previously known. A research team at...
View ArticleThe Most Important Brain in the History of Neuroscience
This post is in partnership with Publisher’s Lunch. To get a free copy of their new collection Buzz Book 2014, click here. In 1559, the two surgeons Ambroise Paré and Andreas Vesalius discussed...
View ArticleThese 1,500-Year-Old Teeth Prove the Bubonic Plague Isn’t Dead Yet
Researchers studying the teeth of two 1,500-year-old German victims of the Justinian plague have uncovered tiny bits of DNA that link the ancient disease to the deadly plague of just a few centuries...
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