Newsweek

There are other doomsayers. What makes this one so unusual is his confounding cheerfulness about the approaching apocalypse. His optimism rests on his faith in Gaia – his revolutionary theory, first formulated in the 1970s, that our planet is not just a rock but a complex, self-regulating organism geared to the long-term sustenance of life.…

In fact, the animals lack the types of bacteria known for breaking down cellulose, the component of plant cell walls that make leaves and plant material difficult for other omnivores, like humans, to break down. Pandas can digest only about 17 percent of what they consume, the scientists calculated.

NASA is striving to create a long-term human presence on Mars, and it wants the public’s input on how to sustain life on our neighboring planet. On Tuesday, the organization announced a “Journey to Mars” challenge asking for submissions that address questions like “What do you need to bring, and how do you minimize the…

Quantum computers, the next generation of high-powered super-computers, are about to transform the business world. And the precursors of this new generation already exist.

Monitoring direction and speeds of advancing fires, establishing safety points, assisting with geographic information system mapping, tracking down illegal logging, illegal cattle grazing and even locations of illegal marijuana plantations. Drones will become a regular part of operations and will help protect the lands and the tens of thousands who come to visit the national…

Around 65 million years ago a large meteorite slammed into the Earth. This catastrophic event likely wiped out the dinosaurs, and a majority of species on Earth. But there was one little-known beneficiary of the asteroid impact: the worm lizard.

You might not expect this, since CDs and DVDs are made to be spun around, but if you rotate one of them very quickly it will shatter, appearing to immediately become a bunch of chunks of sharp plastic.

In the world of physicists, heat and sound are considered very similar, since both are structured from and transported by the vibration of atoms. Now, tor the first time, these types of energy have also both been shown to have magnetic properties.

Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the “new world” in 1492 marked the start of an epoch of mass death. An estimated 50 million inhabitants of North, Central, and South America died between that date and the mid 1600s, from warfare, enslavement and the rapid spread of European disease among the native populations — who had no…