Culture
Is Rural Americans’ Identity Anti-Science?
Even before this pandemic, America had a long history of resistance to public health measures and new vaccines, but now that resistance is increasingly polarized by geography and party.
Matthew Clapp
Motion
Wormholes could solve a fundamental paradox
A seemingly intractable black hole paradox first proposed by physicist Stephen Hawking could finally be resolved — by wormholes through space-time.
Mind
Does consciousness come from the brain’s electromagnetic field?
Some 2,700 years ago in the ancient city of Sam’al, in what is now modern Turkey, an elderly servant of the king sits in a corner of his house and contemplates the nature of his soul. His name is Katumuwa.
Motion
See The Jaw-Dropping New 83 Megapixel Photo Of The Sun
If you only look at one “space photo” this year then this one has to be it. Here it is to download—the Sun, our life-giver, in stunning 83-megapixel glory. You can zoom-in like never before to see close-up its filaments and flares.
Motion
Aliens Created Our Universe in a Lab, Scientist Suggests
Could our universe have been created in a petri dish? Avi Loeb seems to think so. The Harvard astronomer posits that a higher “class” of civilization may have conjured up our universe in a laboratory far, far away.
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Life
How Does a Caterpillar Turn into a Butterfly?
To become a butterfly, a caterpillar first digests itself. But certain groups of cells survive, turning the soup into eyes, wings, antennae and other adult structures.
Mind
Open-Minded People Have a Different Visual Perception of Reality
Psychologists have only begun to unravel the concept of “personality,” that all-important but nebulous feature of individual identity.
Life
'Impossible' chemistry may reveal origins of life on Earth
Experiments suggest that metabolism could have begun spontaneously on our primordial planet—and that scientists may need to rethink how we define life.
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Mind
The Doomed Mouse Utopia That Inspired the ‘Rats of NIMH’
Dr. John Bumpass Calhoun spent the ’60s and ’70s playing god to thousands of rodents.
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Motion
Why Is M-Theory the Leading Candidate for Theory of Everything?
The mother of all string theories passes a litmus test that, so far, no other candidate theory of quantum gravity has been able to match.
Motion
The Large Hadron Collider Is Back and Ready to Hunt for Dark Matter
We spoke to the head of operations at CERN to find out what it takes to fire the collider back up after a brief hiatus for upgrades and maintenance.
Myth
Relation Between Religion and Conspiracy Theories
A large study published in the journal Political Psychology suggests that the link between conspiracy belief and religiosity is rooted in cognitive similarities between the two beliefs.