Articles

Humans spend one third of their lives catching some zzzzzz. That may seem like a lot of time, but a koala requires more than double the daily amount of sleep we do. Domestic cats commonly spend half of each day asleep, which is about as obvious as scientific facts come. This visual comparison of the number of hours certain animals sleep and how they do so offers a small insight into some of the complex questions scientists are asking about sleep. In 2011, neurophysiologist Niels Rattenborg joined Carl Zimmer and a distinguished group of scientists at the World Science Festival for “Mind After Midnight,” a conversation about what leading researchers around the world have been learning about how humans and animals sleep and why this research matters. For instance, humans commonly dream while they are asleep, but what else the brain up to during the middle of the night? Do animals dream, too? Spoiler alert: Rats dream, says MIT neuroscientist Matthew Wilson. This is how he knows.

Distinguished explorer and paleoanthropologist Lee Berger has made incredible discoveries in the search for human ancestors. Many of those discoveries are now at the heart of the latest free online course available at World Science U. All students who share Lee Berger’s curiosity about the origin of humans are now invited to follow along on his expeditions in the new Master Class, “Exploring Our Humanity.”

The new year always brings about lots of new ideas for numbers we want to start associating with our bodies. Maybe you’re aiming for eight hours of sleep as opposed to six. Maybe you hope to be a few pounds lighter in a few weeks. Maybe you don’t need that second glass of wine so early in the week. Here are several important numbers you can’t change.

The season for celebrating the joy of giving is here and nothing says ‘I don’t like Black Friday either so I thoughtfully purchased this online weeks later’ more than shipping one of the excellent gifts in this list to yourself, wrapping it up, and handing it to that special scientific someone in your corner of the solar system.

Come for the sun and the sand. Stay for the string theory and the space-time. A collection of the world’s leading thinkers on subjects like astrophysics, string theory, and much more will gather in Brisbane, Australia, this coming March for a full slate of conversations, performances, and events that all explore what makes our universe tick. Fans of science have a lot to choose from.

The challenge of piecing together how the fundamental laws of nature work has been with us since our ancestors started looking up and asking the big questions. Centuries of scientific exploration bring us to what we know right now, including our understanding of quantum mechanics up to general relativity. But that body of knowledge essentially ends on the doorstep to a black hole. The edge of a black hole is called the event horizon and scientists say that studying these horizons — literally, the edges of physical reality – may finally start to reveal answers to questions that keep modern physicists up at night. Those questions are at the core of “The Edges of the Universe” with physicist Andrew Strominger.