Category: Science
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Primitive. Simple. Advanced. Complex.
Scientists have developed a new approach for generating layered, difficult-to-combine, heterostructured solids (materials composed of layers of dissimilar building blocks), opening new avenues for electronic and energy applications. The technique for making them is simple, and counterintuitive -- it involves smashing the pristine materials to build new ones. Smashing things together by milling seems like…
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Death from the sky. Life from below…
Although tales of people being killed by meteorite impacts date back to biblical times. But few deaths, if any, have been documented. Turkish researchers uncovered the earliest evidence that a meteorite killed one man and paralyzed another when it slammed into a hilltop in what is now Iraq in August 1888. Documents chronicling the event…
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Genetics. The greatest farce?
DNA may not be life's instruction book -- just a jumbled list of ingredients: The common view of heredity is that all information passed down from one generation to the next is stored in an organism's DNA. But one researcher suggests this might not be so. In two new papers, he argues DNA is just…
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Old forts… New battles…
Archaeologists verify Florida's Mound Key as location of elusive Spanish fort: Florida and Georgia archaeologists have discovered the location of Fort San Antón de Carlos, home of one of the first Jesuit missions in North America. The Spanish fort was built in 1566 in the capital of the Calusa, the most powerful Native American tribe…
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Primitive. Actions. Ecology. Pendulums.
Fossil data, historical records, and underwater survey data have been used to reconstruct the abundance of staghorn and elkhorn corals over the past 125,000 years. Researchers show that these corals first began declining in the 1950s and 1960s, earlier than previously thought. (1) Even the most primitive actions of people alter the planet. Even the…
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