Jessica Irvine 
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain The economic situation of 24,894 people from refugee backgrounds who came to New Zealand between 1997 and 2020 is the focus of the first paper in an ongoing study from the Center for Asia Pacific Refugee Studies (CAPRS) at the University of Auckland. The study asked three broad questions: What are …
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter A metre-long piece of carved wood discovered by chance is more than 6,000 years old – making it the oldest carved wood in Britain, experts say. The decorative …
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/2a/53/2a53262e-38ea-4f91-aca7-7802e9476852/indiana_state_house.jpg "The Significance of Indiana Limestone as a Valuable Building Material in America |Scientific Perspective")
The Indiana Statehouse, opened in 1888 and built—of course—with Indiana limestone. Courtesy Daniel Schwen Nearly all the United States’ greatest structures—the Empire State Building, the Washington National Cathedral, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name just a few—owe much of their grandeur to a humble source that keeps on giving: a band of limestone in …
Bit.bio co-founder and CEO Mark Cotter and Associate Director of Sales Timothy Smith at SynBioBeta 2023 introduced the company’s new custom disease model cells. Unlike earlier stem cell therapies, which are difficult to scale, bit.bio uses synthetic biology to provide consistently pure and defined human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs). These disease model cells enable …
Stellar fossil: imprints of pair instability supernovae from very massive first stars. Credit: NAOC The first stars illuminated the universe during the Cosmic Dawn and put an end to the cosmic “dark ages” that followed the Big Bang. However, the distribution of their mass is one of the great unsolved mysteries of the cosmos. Numerical …
Sign up for a full digest of all the best opinions of the week in our Voices Dispatches email Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter A remarkable archaeological find is likely to shed new light on a key aspect of the origins of Stonehenge. The area around the world-famous prehistoric temple had almost …
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/3c/22/3c22dad8-e58e-4c72-96c3-30d06c6c086c/opener_dsc4153_hi_res.jpg "The Science of Fireflies’ Illumination | A Scientific Explanation")
In the dark of a June evening, Christopher Heckscher stood in the black mud of a New Jersey bog, alert to any flicker of light. He is an explorer, though this wilderness lies in one of the most densely populated regions of the United States: the Northeast megalopolis. And now, as pale stars appeared from …
Can AI (Artificial Intelligence) become consciousness? getty An open letter signed by 140 mathematical consciousness scientists says we need to crack the mystery of consciousness in light of rapid and sometimes alarming AI developments. The letter opens with “…a wakeup call for the tech sector, the scientific community and society in general to take seriously …
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain Liking certain things or styles is an important aspect of peoples’ identities and social lives. Tastes can influence the ways humans act and judge. How to best describe musical taste reliably is—due to the ever-changing diversification and transformation of music—difficult and open to debate. Using an approach which also considered sub-genres, …
Join our Voices Dispatches email to receive a full digest of the week’s best opinions Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter New research suggests that a gentle form of yoga tailored for cancer survivors can improve their chances of survival and reduce the risk of the disease coming back. The study, which has …