A smattering of white spots found among the ink in medieval books aren’t just printing errors — they’re actually an amazingly detailed “fossil” record of European beetles, new research finds. The dots represent spots, or wormholes, where hatching beetles chewed their way out of the woodblocks used to print art and illustrations between the 1400s…
At Olduvai Gorge in northern Tanzania, where excavations helped to confirm Africa was the cradle of humanity, scientists now find the landscape once fluctuated rapidly, likely guiding early human evolution.These findings suggest that key mental developments within the human lineage may have been linked with a highly variable environment. Scientists had long thought Africa went…
Stop wrangling over global warming and instead reduce fossil-fuel use for the sake of the global economy. That’s the message from two scientists, one from the University of Washington and one from the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, who say in a commentary in the journal Nature that the economic pain of a…
A bold plan to bring every person on Earth sustainable energy within 18 years will face its first test of international acceptance at the Rio+20 Earth Summit – the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in June. The Sustainable Energy For All initiative is a flagship programme launched by UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon. Its goals…
V.V. Raman says the most important thing the world can learn from India’s religious visions is the doctrine of polyodosism: There are multiple paths for individuals and for groups to attain spiritual fulfillment. Author Metanexus Editors
As the number of species at risk of extinction soars, zoos are increasingly being called upon to rescue and sustain animals, and not just for marquee breeds like pandas and rhinos but also for all manner of mammals, frogs, birds and insects whose populations are suddenly crashing. To conserve animals effectively, however, zoo officials have…