Since NASA has made missions to the moon, Mars, and Pluto they are now getting ready to mission to the sun. This spacecraft will come within four million miles from the sun’s surface to explore its atmosphere and observe how this star works. The probe called Solar Probe Plus will have a shield on it so that it can survive […]
Read more
Stephen Hawking: ‘There are no black holes‘ – Renowned physicist Stephen Hawking has declared that black holes do not exist – at least not in the way we normally think about them. In a new paper, he tackles a scientific paradox regarding a black hole’s event horizon. This is the threshold past which nothing can escape it’s gravitational pull. Under […]
Read more
Why do people complain? Not to torture others with their negativity, surely. When most of us indulge in a bit of a moan, the idea is to “vent.” By getting our emotions out, we reason, we’ll feel better. But science suggests there are a few serious flaws in that reasoning. One, not only does expressing negativity tend not to make us […]
Read more
A desparate farmer killed himself in public, and India’s politicians do little more than point their fingers. Gajendra Singh, 43, climbed a tree and hanged himself during a rally against the government’s new land acquisition bill. A suicide note said his crop had failed and he could not support his three children. Singh joins “a long list of farmers who […]
Read more
Of the world’s billion Internet users, one in three logs on in English. That’s no surprise. The technology got its start in the U.S., most Web pages are English, and more than 60 percent of the U.S., Canadian, U.K., and Australian populations are online. But China is catching up. The number of Chinese speakers using the Internet is five times […]
Read more
Astronomers have spotted the most enormous black holes ever detected, inspiring new theories about how such pockets of extreme gravity form. Together, the two objects, which are roughly 300 million light-years away, have more mass than 30 billion suns, University of California at Berkeley astrophysicist Chung-Pei Ma tells the Associated Press. “They are monstrous,” she says. The smaller of the […]
Read more
The “stoner” stereotype isn’t just a myth. Heavy use of marijuana in the teenage years dulls intelligence—and the loss of IQ points may last for life, according to a new study. Researchers tested the IQs of more than 1,000 New Zealand schoolchildren at age 13, before most had tried marijuana, and again at age 38. In between, they regularly surveyed […]
Read more
The emirate isn’t just the world’s richest country, it’s also one of the fattest. Half of adults and a third of children are obese, and almost 17 percent of the native population suffers from diabetes. By comparison, about a third of Americans are obese, and 8 percent diabetic. The problem is that Qataris are so rich that they don’t need […]
Read more
Since the late 1990s, when they began decoding the human genome, scientists have believed that 98 percent of DNA is “junk,” with no function. But new research shows that most of this genetic material serves as switches that turn genes on or off, which could explain why some people predisposed to certain diseases get them, while others don’t. Our genome […]
Read more
Bright Lights in a World of Darkness More than 30 years ago the Supreme Court in the United States ruled that if individuals are mentally ill but not criminally insane they cannot be confined to asylums. They must be allowed to live in the general population. The results of that decision over the years have met with mixed success in different areas of the […]
Read more