Peter Ellerton, Conversation
We who live in Western liberal democracies seem to be in a permanent state of angst about who should be allowed to speak and what they should be allowed to speak about.This angst is acute at the moment, since low-key voices that once represented extreme views on a range of social issues have recently become louder.
Kate T. May, TED Ideas
Climate change, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, overfishing … it can be easy to feel depressed about the ocean. But when you look at the big picture of ocean health, some good news emerges.
Kate Goldbaum, LiveScience
Caffeine — found in coffee, tea, soda and even chocolate — is the most widely consumed psychoactive substance on the planet. Used predominantly as a means to perk people up, the stimulant is legal and unregulated in most parts of the world.
Laura Hampton, NewSci
The discovery of mysterious lifeforms has stunned scientists during a series of dives into the Mariana trench — Earth’s deepest abyss.“It’s just so exciting,” says Shirley Pomponi at the Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institution. “We’re finding new things every day.”
Positron, Physics Central
Microwaves provide more than just a quick meal. The transmission of information via microwaves (the type of light, not the appliance) is fundamental to technologies such as Bluetooth communication, mobile phone networks, satellite televisions, radar, and GPS. A team of scientists from Aalto University in Finland recently created a tiny detector that could lead to big advances in microwave technology and have applications at the cutting edge of science.
Sarah Lewin, Space.com
The incredibly sensitive LUX dark-matter detector, buried under a mile of rock, has come up empty on its 20-month search for dark matter — further narrowing down the possible characteristics of the strange substance.
Jim Davies, Nautilus
Once, I dreamed I was at a man’s funeral. According to the deceased’s instructions, each of his toes were to be buried in tiny, individual coffins. When I woke up, I wondered, “What could it mean?”
Madeline Bodin, Hakai Magazine
Natalie Goodall built a museum for rare marine mammals in one of the world’s least likely places for a scientific institution.
Ross Pomeroy, RCSci
Once primed, a supervolcano can decompress and erupt in under a year, a new study shows, offering little warning before a potentially cataclysmic event. Supervolcanoes, the hulking geological behemoths that they are, slumber for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years in between eruptions.
Dan Falk, Quanta Magazine
According to our best theories of physics, the universe is a fixed block where time only appears to pass. Yet a number of physicists hope to replace this “block universe” with a physical theory of time.
Alex Berezow, ACSH
A few months ago, the Washington Post ran an article titled, “Stop assuming that families with lots of children are religious.” The article supported its case with some data from Pew (2014 Religious Landscape Study), which surveyed 35,000 Americans, and anecdotes about the plight of large secular families that must bear the heavy burden of answering questions from strangers who assume that they’re religious.
Sarah Zhang, Wired
THE FIRST CASE of a mosquito giving Zika to someone in the US was always going to be a matter of when, not if. That “when” may be now. The Florida Department of Public Health announced late yesterday that it is investigating a case of non-travel related Zika in Miami-Dade County, at the very southeastern tip of the state.
Brendan Borrell, Nature
Jim Papadopoulos has spent a lifetime pondering the maths of bikes in motion. Now his work has found fresh momentum.
Rebecca Boyle, NewSci.
A jealous Planet Nine may have shoved its siblings for attention. If a massive ninth planet exists in our solar system, it might explain why the planets are out of line with the sun.
Achenbach et al., WaPo
A terrifying word circulated Tuesday at the Republican National Convention: norovirus. A dozen staffers in the California delegation who had arrived in Cleveland early had fallen ill with the extremely contagious virus, California GOP chairman Jim Brulte said Tuesday.
Astronomy Now
Two astronomers — with the help of social media — have uncovered the strongest evidence yet that an enormous X-shaped structure made of stars lies within the central bulge of the Milky Way Galaxy.