Ker Than is a graduate student at New York University's Science and Environmental Writing Program and a staff writer for LiveScience.com and Space.com. He has an undergraduate degree in biology from the University of California, Irvine and did neuroscience research in the field of learning and memory. He is interested in science in general, but also in its intersection with culture and the arts. Email: [email protected]
A few weeks ago, astronomers announced they had found a new planet in orbit around a dim red star 28,000 light years away. Called OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb, the extrasolar world was not only the latest to be uncovered by planet-hunters, it was also the smallest to be detected around a normal star—only five and a half times…
Most grandparents would never admit it, but studies consistently reveal that they treat some grandchildren better than others. When surveyed, adults said they felt closest to their maternal grandmothers, followed by their maternal grandfathers then paternal grandmothers and finally paternal grandfathers. The pattern was the same whether the researchers tested for emotional closeness, the amount…
The 88 spotlights had been turned on since late afternoon, but it was only as dusk fell that their beams became visible. Wan and informal at first, their lights grew steadily brighter as the evening grew darker. The spotlights were aimed skywards and set up inside a fenced-in lot in lower Manhattan’s Battery Park City,…
In the 1960’s, a chemist named James Lovelock was invited by NASA to help develop instruments that could detect signs of life on Mars. Lovelock came up with the idea of screening the gases in Mar’s atmosphere for signs that their concentrations were being affected in ways consistent with life. On Earth, for example, the…
In 1906 Santiago Ramòn Y Cajal and Camillo Golgi shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their contributions to neuroscience: Cajal for his contributing work that helped lay the foundation for the Neuron Doctrine, and Golgi for the development of his Golgi stain which was crucial for the work of so many neuroscientists,…
2005 is being celebrated as the centennial of Albert Einstein’s miracle year, but it is also the less publicized 50th anniversary of the Russell-Einstein Manifesto, a document signed by Einstein and other scientists and intellectuals of the time urging the abolishment of nuclear weapons and war. The endorsement of the manifesto was one of Einstein’s…