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Why Earth’s Cracked Crust May Be Essential for Life
Life needs more than water alone. Recent discoveries suggest that plate tectonics has played a critical role in nourishing life on Earth. The findings carry major consequences for the search for life elsewhere in the universe.
Overtaxed Working Memory Knocks the Brain Out of Sync
Researchers find that when working memory gets overburdened, dialogue between three brain regions breaks down. The discovery provides new support for a larger concept about how the brain works.
Victoria Meadows’ Earthly Visions of Alien Life
A living, breathing garden in Seattle serves as the perfect backdrop to an astrobiologist’s search for life on faraway planets.
There Are No Laws of Physics. There’s Only the Landscape.
Scientists seek a single description of reality. But modern physics allows for many different descriptions, many equivalent to one another, connected through a vast landscape of mathematical possibility.
Evidence Found for a New Fundamental Particle
An experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago has detected far more electron neutrinos than predicted — a possible harbinger of a revolutionary new elementary particle called the sterile neutrino, though many physicists remain skeptical.
CRISPR Gene-Editing Pioneers Win Kavli Prize for Nanoscience
The inventors of a “Swiss army knife” for genome editing received prestigious honors, as did pioneering scientists in astrophysics and neuroscience.
The Slippery Math of Causation
If a forest is burning and we don’t know what’s responsible, does it have a cause?
Cores From Coral Reefs Hold Secrets of the Seas’ Past and Future
Layered deposits of coral skeletons hold vast stores of environmental data from thousands of years ago, including annual records of ocean temperatures, water pollution and storm activity.
Questioning Truth, Reality and the Role of Science
In an era when untestable ideas such as the multiverse hold sway, Michela Massimi defends science from those who think it hopelessly unmoored from physical reality.