No God Needed To Create Universe, Hawking Says; Your Thoughts?
“The universe can and will create itself from nothing,” famed physicist Stephen Hawking argues in a book, The Grand Design, due out next week. Excerpted in The Times of London (pay wall protected), Hawking’s book makes the case that: “Because there is a law such as gravity, the Universe can and will create itself from [...]
Sheen Spreads After Another Gulf Rig Explodes
An offshore oil platform exploded Thursday and was burning about 100 miles south of the Louisiana coast, with the Coast Guard reporting a mile-long oil sheen had spread from the site. Coast Guard spokesman Chief Petty Officer John Edwards said no one was killed in the explosion and all were rescued and taken to a [...]
Justice Department Appeals Stem Cell Funding Stay
Lawyers for the Justice Department have made their case for a federal judge to restore funding of research with embryonic human stem cells. Last month, a judge’s decision temporarily blocked the government from funding that sort of work while a bigger lawsuit brought by scientists who work with adult stem cells proceeds. The decision has [...]
Heat Waves Are Bad For (Even The Healthiest) Lungs
It’s been the hottest summer on record in many cities on the East Coast. And with that blistering weather has come a lot of days of unhealthy air. On Wednesday, at least 75 areas from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, are warning their residents about high air pollution. In the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area, local [...]
Going Backwards: Time Reversal Reconsidered
If only… If only you could unsay that stupid thing you said, undo that stupid thing you did, not have turned left, touched her when you should have, not cried, not cared, cared more, stayed still. There are so many things we would do differently if we could back up and do it again. But [...]
Our Storied Lives: Narrating, Navigating Adversity
Second of a two-part story. Read Part 1 In Part 1, we met Shaun Parker, a man from Menasha, Wis., who as a teenager was fascinated with the movie Excalibur. “Excalibur made me think that just like Arthur, I had a destiny,” Parker says. That led him to seek true love — his own Guinevere, [...]
Is Believing In God Evolutionarily Advantageous?
Jesse Bering’s mother died of cancer on a Sunday, in her own bed, at 9 o’clock at night. Bering and his siblings closed her door and went downstairs, hoping they might somehow get some sleep. It was a long, hard night, but around 7 a.m., something happened: The wind chimes outside his mother’s window started [...]
The Largest Animals and Plants in the World
Scroll over the illustration to learn more about 29 of the world’s largest animals and plants, as of 1931 that is. The image is from “The Science of Life,” by H.G.Wells, J.S. Huxley and G.P.Wells, published in 1931. Back to the Krulwich Wonders blog post. [Copyright 2010 National Public Radio]
DEET Is No Taste Treat For Bugs
With mosquitoes lining up to bite us by the backyard grill this long hot summer, we’ve been slathering on insect repellant like never before. But how does the stuff work? Two studies, which appeared this week in the journals Neuron and Current Biology, shed a little light on why two common ingredients are such big [...]
Astronomers Identify Two New Solar Systems
In the field of astronomy these days, it’s raining planets. Two leading teams of planet hunters announced this week that they’d found entire solar systems — one with two or three planets, the other with as many as seven. These are not planets where life could actually survive, but many scientists say that detecting planets [...]
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