Reflecting on Rio
As world leaders gather again in Rio de Janeiro for a follow-up to the 1992 Earth Summit, the world doesn’t seem much closer to attaining the sustainability goals set out at that time. Will Rio+20...
View ArticleThe Mind of God
Scientists are turning the cosmos upside down in their search for a unifying Theory of Everything. But there’s one place most of them won’t look.
View ArticleSeven Billion at the Door
As the United Nations pegs October 31, 2011, as the date when human population passes 7 billion, we can expect increasingly strident calls for a deep evaluation of our planetary role.
View ArticleFinding Our Place
Ever since Edwin Hubble’s discovery of the expansion of the universe in 1929, astronomers have sought an answer to a most basic question: How long ago did the universe begin expanding? To determine an...
View ArticleIt's a Small World
The United Nations has declared 2011 the International Year of Chemistry. While the world celebrates a century of scientific progress, we have to ask how our dreams of a synthetic utopia might end.
View ArticleChernobyl: The Silent Museum
April 26 marks the 25th anniversary of the worst nuclear disaster in history. It’s a good time to revisit our individual and collective responsibilities regarding the energy sources we all depend on.
View ArticleRelating to Water
In The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and Turbulent Future of Water, journalist Charles Fishman reintroduces the reader to life’s most precious resource—water.
View ArticleOne Fish, Two Fish, All Fish, No Fish
Despite recent positive changes in some of the world’s enormous fisheries, the problems of overfishing and habitat destruction remain very real threats to the survival of global marine resources. But...
View ArticleBlinded by the Dark
What happens to eyesight when you live in darkness? A tiny fish serves as a metaphor for the material-spiritual divide that has set science and religion at odds with one another.
View ArticleA Line in the Sand
The earth’s geological record attests to various mass extinctions that have taken place over the ages. But since the advent of the nuclear age, we can bring about our own extinction. Will we cross that...
View ArticleNoah Way
Are we future-positive or future-negative? When we look out at the world today—at its strange combination of human wonders and atrocities, overlaid as they are atop the natural and integrated beauty of...
View ArticleA Change of Cene
As a reflection of the deepening human footprint on the earth, scientists have relabeled the current Holocene Epoch, now calling it the Anthropocene. That we affect our environment in various ways is...
View ArticleHello, Is Anybody Out There?
Billionaire Yuri Milner’s Breakthrough Initiatives to communicate with life beyond Earth bring us closer to Carl Sagan’s vision of the universe. But even if we hear other voices, will we finally get...
View ArticleA Quantum Leap of Faith
Quantum theory is beyond the grasp of most of us. Even physicists struggle to make sense of things that common sense suggests are impossible. Why, then, is faith in science seen as rational while faith...
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