What makes human beings unique among animals? This ancient question has received countless answers—some modern ones we saw them in our last post—but I want to suggest that one of the most compelling and least appreciated responses comes from understanding humans as the creatures who create and inhabit what might be called inferential prostheses. These […]
Deep beneath the Pyrenees, in a mountain laboratory carved out of rock near the Spanish village of Canfranc, physicists have switched on a machine built to listen for one of the rarest whispers in nature. The detector is called NEXT-100, and it began taking data in May 2024. Its story is not simply one of […]
Authors: Lauren Claire Fong, PhD Candidate in Cognitive Neuroscience, The University of Melbourne and Daniel Feuerriegel, Lecturer and Head of the Prediction and Decision-Making Lab, The University of Melbourne Imagine you’re in line at your favourite bakery, deciding whether to have a doughnut or a tart. You weigh them up, the doughnut wins, and you […]
Wildfires are becoming more frequent and are ravaging new parts of the world due to global warming. A study led by researchers from the University of Gothenburg shows that this change is increasing the vulnerability of thousands of plants, animals and fungi. As global temperatures rise, the incidence of wildfires is increasing in many regions […]
DELTA is a 1.5-GeV synchrotron radiation source operated by the TU Dortmund University. This singular university-based facility with emphasis on research and education, offers high degree of flexibility both for user experiments and accelerator physics and technology. Most of the world’s synchrotrons are designed to provide a continuous supply of radiation to users in a […]
Dark matter is a mysterious, invisible substance that makes up about 27% of the Universe’s total energy content. We cannot see it directly, only infer its presence through the gravity it exerts. For decades, cosmologists have described dark matter haloes as the invisible scaffolding within which galaxies form and live. Every galaxy, including our own […]
Authors: Cordelia Fine, Professor, History & Philosophy of Science program, School of Historical & Philosophical Studies, The University of Melbourne; Kate Lynch, Lecturer in Philosophy of Science, University of Sydney, and Morgan Anna Weaving, Research Affiliate, Stanford Graduate School of Business, Stanford University What causes workplace sexual harassment? How can we continue to better understand […]
Earth’s atmosphere is a vast, swirling engine of weather and climate. Jet streams race across continents, storms spin into hurricanes, and invisible eddies churn the air at every scale. For decades, scientists have struggled to understand exactly how energy and swirling motion flow through these turbulent systems, especially in the layered zones where the air […]
A new study , co-led by researchers at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, demonstrates that genes associated with autism risk are largely the same across people of different ancestries. The findings, based on one of the largest genomic studies of Latin American individuals to date, provide strong evidence that the genetic architecture […]
New research numerically demonstrates how carefully structured materials can control light in ways that are both precise and robust. It brings together ideas from photonics and topology to show how a laser can emerge from the boundary between two distinct optical regimes. The physical system considered in the study is a bilayer photonic crystal. A […]