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Goodbye Holocene, Hello Anthropocene
A movement to declare the 10,000-year-old Holocene Epoch as finished is gaining steam amongst scientists. Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen suggested in 2000 that human activity was altering the planet sufficiently to rate a new epoch, and a couple of recent papers are giving the idea momentum. Among the major changes heralding this two-century-old man-made…
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Nanohazard Warning Sign Competition
The ETC Group is “dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights.” They’re currently holding a competition to design an international warning sign for nanotechnology hazards. Great. Something else to worry about. Link (via BoingBoing)
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Source of Mystery Antimatter Found
There’s a large cloud of antimatter lurking out in space, and researchers have long wondered where it came from. An international team examining four years’ worth of data from the European Space Agency’s INTEGRAL satellite has identified the positrons as originating from stars being eaten by black holes and neutron stars. Is it just me,…
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Six World-Changing Ideas
Esquire has an interesting article about six new technologies that have the potential to be vastly influential. Some sound like they’re right out of a Gibson novel. But those without prostheses will benefit from Lacour’s innovation as well. She envisions T-shirts embedded with electronics that can detect if a baby has stopped breathing and a…
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It’s a Cat! It’s a Flashlight!
In the “headlines that sound like a joke” department: South Koreans Clone Cats That Glow in the Dark I think the first paragraph in this article is incorrect, since it says that the researchers “have cloned cats by manipulating a fluorescent protein gene;” I expect what the reporter meant is that they’ve cloned cats which…
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Evolution May be Speeding Up
You’d think that the ease of world travel would have an homogenizing effect on the human species, but new research suggests that the residents of various continents are becoming increasingly different from each other. If evolution had been proceeding steadily at the current rate since humans and chimps separated 6 million years ago there should…
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Climate Skepticism Rebuttals
The BBC has put together a list of the most common arguments that “climate skeptics” use to refute the idea of global warming, along with a rebuttal for each. Sceptic Earth history shows climate has regularly responded to cyclical changes in the Sun’s energy output. Any warming we see can be attributed mainly to variations…
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Possible Alternate Universe Found
Back in August, astronomers reported the discovery of a huge hole, a billion light-years across, in the constellation Eridanus. Now, theoretical physicist and cosmologist Laura Mersini-Houghton and her colleagues are claiming that the hole is an “unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own.” No word on whether Spock has a beard…
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Invisible Tanks
The British Ministry of Defence and Funny Spelling has just unveiled new technology that can make tanks invisible. It uses a bank of cameras and projectors to beam images of the surrounding landscape onto the tank. The result is that someone looking at the tank will see only the landscape behind it. Even cooler, the…
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Vote for Real Science
A pseudoscience blog called “Climate Audit” is currently in the lead to win a Best Science Blog award because influential conservative sites are asking their readers to vote for it whether they read it or not. It’s a denialist blog that argues humans have no responsibility for global warming and promotes political ideas as “science.”…