In barstool speculation on how long it’s possible for someone to survive without sex, the phrases “old fossil” and “a million years” certainly do turn up. However—meaning no disrespect to snubbed Homo sapiens—our species doesn’t even register in the scientific version of the debate. In this, there are genuine geologic fossils. And a million years? [...]

Plenty of people claim to have theories that will revolutionize science. What’s rare is for other scientists to take one of these schemes seriously. Yet that’s what’s happened since May 2002 when theoretical physicist Stephen Wolfram self-published a book in which he alleged to have found a new way to address the most difficult problems [...]

Registering a memory for the long haul doesn’t happen all at once, according to new studies of how people learn perceptual and motor skills. Instead, building memory is a three-pronged process that rests on sleep.
First, knowledge accrues during training and dips immediately afterward. A good night’s sleep then revives much of what was forgotten, [...]

With nicknames such as Gilgamesh, Aphrodite, and Athena—as well as Elvis—10 recently discovered supernovas are something special. Indeed, these supernovas provide what appears to be proof of one of the weirdest properties of the universe: Something is pushing objects in the cosmos apart at an ever-faster rate.

LDX is a novel experimental device designed to explore the physics of plasma confinement in a magnetic dipole field. What makes it unique? Besides levitating a 1/2 ton superconducting ring, we will conduct the first experimental test on the theory of plasma confinement by adiabatic compressibility.
If this concept turns out to be correct, levitated [...]