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A Breakthrough in Measuring the Building Blocks of Nature
An artistic rendering of the quarks and gluons that make up a proton.Illustration by D. Dominguez / CERN In a recent experiment done at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, in Germany, physicist Alexey Grinin and his colleagues came a step closer to resolving one of the more significant puzzles to have arisen in […]
Humans Have Rights and So Should Nature
An “Earth lawyer” argues for cultural transformation in environmental law.
We Didn’t Evolve for This
A lesson from the animal kingdom on why COVID-19 is so deadly to humans.
Why Humans Wage War
War is purposeful and calculating. The more organized we are, the better we get at fighting.
We’re the Cosmic 1 Percent But Our Solar System Isn’t a Complete Weirdo
About half of all stars seem to have “super-Earth” planets on orbits closer to their stars than Mercury is to the Sun, but we don’t.Illustration by Vadim Sadovski / Shutterstock Is Earth unique? Once a grand philosophical question, it has, over the past two decades, become, with the discovery of thousands of planets around other […]
How to Talk Like a Physicist
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who probably is the smartest person on her block, has fun in her latest video skewering the scientific braggart.Photograph by Francisco De Legarreta C. / Unsplash The other night I was out on our street with the neighbors for a socially distanced hang. My two-year-old daughter, mistaking the only street light […]
The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming
Will the world now wake up to the global threat of zoonotic diseases?
Vaccines Are the Safest Medical Procedure We Have. Make Your Wager Wisely
All drugs and treatments have side effects, but vaccines in general have the fewest.Illustration by eamesBot / Shutterstock In the late 1650’s, the French polymath and renowned scientist Blaise Pascal, having undergone a religious experience that transformed him into something of a zealot, suggested the following logical strategy regarding belief in God: If there is […]
Reading, That Strange and Uniquely Human Thing
How we evolved to read is a story of one creative species.
The Sight of Jupiter and Saturn Together Is a Beautiful Thing
A conjunction is a good time to reflect on our cosmic heritage, and on the long shadows cast by the gas giants.Illustration by SN VFX / Shutterstock Today, December 21, Jupiter and Saturn will appear extremely close to each other in the sky, less than a tenth of a degree apart, about one fifth the […]
