Nova next

[:eu]Life has been making its own hard parts for at least 810 million years, about 200 million years longer than previously thought. It’s the first occurrence of what scientists call biomineralization, and it could give us deeper insight into both the evolution of living things and Earth’s early climate.[:]

[:eu]In 1987, a group of researchers in France discovered something peculiar. When they protected single-celled organisms from background radiation—the sort that comes from cosmic rays and radioactive rocks—the creatures’ growth was stunted. Colonies that receive a background dose of radiation actually grew more quickly than their shielded brethren. That’s radiation—not vitamins, not nutrition, not anything…

[:eu]As renewable energy sources like wind and solar drop in price and become competitive with new fossil fuel plants—something which has already happened in Africa and China—grid operators will need better tools to balance supply and demand. More detailed and accurate weather forecasts will certainly help by predicting when and where sun and wind will…

[:eu]More than half of ten predominantly Republican states in the Great Plains are running initiatives that reduce humans’ contribution to global warming. But policies were rarely framed as climate change programs. Instead, in an effort to attract more universal support, policies that mitigated climate change were branded as economic development, sustainability, resource management, or public…

[:eu]Inspired by birds, bats, and the Wright brothers, engineers are building the next breakthrough in aviation.[:]

[:eu]Self-driving cars could deliver us a comparatively utopian future, where trips are quicker and the environmental impact is far lower.[:]

[:eu]For a few physicists, the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of the universe. Rather, they say, the universe existed before that point, stretching forever into the past as well as the future. While the universe is expanding today, it was contracting in the time before the Big Bang. In this picture, the Big Bang isn’t…

[:eu]While not a classical psychedelic in terms of its chemical structure or effects, MDMA-assisted therapy is closely modeled on earlier work with LSD, mescaline, and psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in “magic mushrooms.” Those drugs, too, are seeing a resurgence of interest in their use as medicine.[:]

[:es]The device releases a small amount of current, so small that most people don’t even feel it. The electrodes stimulate certain sections of the brain, but not enough to actually cause a neuron to fire.[:]