The Sun warms the Earth, making it habitable for people and animals. But that’s not all it does, and it affects a much larger area of space. The heliosphere[1], the area of space influenced by the Sun, is over a hundred times larger[2] than the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
The Sun is a star that constantly emits a steady...
During her chemistry Nobel Prize lecture[1] in 2018, Frances Arnold said, “Today we can for all practical purposes read, write and edit any sequence of DNA, but we cannot compose it.” That isn’t true anymore.
Since then, science and technology have progressed so much that artificial intelligence has learned to compose DNA, and with...
Read more https://theconversation.com/ai-plus-gene-editing-promises-to-shift-biotech-into-high-gear-230183
Everything in biology ultimately boils down to food and sex. To survive as an individual you need food. To survive as a species you need sex.
Not surprisingly then, the age-old question of why giraffes have long necks has centered around food and sex. After debating this question for the past 150 years, biologists still cannot agree on...
I became newly worried about the state of democracy when, a few years ago, my mother was elected president of her neighborhood garden club.
Her election wasn’t my worry – far from it. At the time, I was trying to resolve a conflict on a large email group I had created. Someone, inevitably, was being a jerk on the internet. I had...
Read more https://theconversation.com/why-the-future-of-democracy-could-depend-on-your-group-chats-229597