Controlling Soot Might Quickly Reverse a Century of Global Warming

A massive simulation of soot’s climate effects finds that basic pollution controls could put a brake on global warming, erasing in a decade most of the last century’s temperature change.
Compared to the larger, longer term task of getting greenhouse gas pollution under control, limiting soot wouldn’t be hard. Unlike new energy technology and profound changes [...]

Big Bang Big Boom: Stop Motion Animation at Its Finest

If you haven’t seen the latest effort from blublu.org then make sure you have a spare ten minutes before clicking play on the video embedded above. Released at the beginning of this month, this video took months and hundreds of buckets of paints to create. It is a “wall-animation”, but it is so much more and brings much laughter and amazement to the big bang theory. My two boys keep asking to watch it again and again.

Photoshop of Horrors: Wired Readers Show BP How It’s Done

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We asked you last week to help us show BP that when hiring unethical photographers (or photo editors) in the future, they should look for Photoshop proficiency on their resumes.
In response, you put the company’s pathetic photo-doctoring of oil-cleanup press photos to shame. Your work was not only more [...]

Warming of Oceans Will Reduce and Rearrange Marine Life

The warmth of the ocean is the critical factor that determines how much productivity and biodiversity there is in the ocean, and where.
In two separate studies, researchers found that warming oceans have led to a massive decline in the amount of plant life in the sea over the last century, and that temperature is tightly [...]

Dark Dust Trails Form When Whirlwinds Suck Sand Grains Clean

The ephemeral dark trails left in desert sand by dust devils are produced when the whirlwinds blow tiny particles of lighter-colored silt and dust off larger sand grains, a new study shows. Even removing a layer of dust and silt only a few micrometers thick can produce a dark trail visible with satellites, recent field [...]

Marsupial DNA Redraws Family Tree

The kangaroo’s twisted marsupial family tree is now in order thanks to — you guessed it — jumping genes. Genetic evidence shows that a South American ancestor gave rise to all Australian marsupials, and that the South American opossums were the earliest group to branch off from the other six marsupial clans.
Distinctive for raising their [...]

Birth Control Messes With Monkey Business

The powerful hormones in birth-control drugs change how lemurs smell, radically altering the subtle chemical cues that guide their attraction and communication.
Research on a 2-foot-tall primate shouldn’t be extrapolated directly to humans, but the findings resonate with studies in people, which have come largely from behavioral observations and are just beginning to quantify the chemistry.
“I’m [...]

My First Act of Free Will

The British philosopher Galen Strawson doesn’t think much of free will. His argument is fairly straightforward. It goes something like this:
1) I do what I do because of the way I am. If I want to eat Honey Nut Cheerios for breakfast, or listen to Blonde on Blonde, it’s because I prefer, at this moment, [...]

Two Is the Magic Quantum Number

Extending an experiment at the foundation of quantum physics confirms that two is company and three is a crowd. In a new twist on the famous double-slit experiment, researchers have verified a basic tenet of quantum mechanics by showing that adding a third slit doesn’t create additional interference between packets of light.
The double-slit experiment embodies [...]

You Are Sexually Attracted to Your Parents, and Yourself

It’s not an excuse, but there may be a biological reason that jail-bound Aimee Sword was sexually attracted to the teenage son she gave up for adoption.
In a series of experiments where subjects viewed photographs of their opposite-sex parent or a photo morphed with their own face, researchers found that people are turned on by [...]