A Brazilian court has rejected a bid by academics, animal rights campaigners and environmentalists to have a chimpanzee who paints every day released from a zoo. Jimmy, nicknamed the Cezanne of the Simians, has lived for around 12 years on his own in a 61 square metre cage at Niteroi […]
A team of researchers at the University of Arizona has brought a high-tech tool to bear on the study of a familiar and age-old emotion — guilt. What makes the investigation unique is the use of fMRI scans to target the regions of the brain associated with guilt. It also […]
About one third of all food produced for human consumption goes to waste, according to a study commissioned by the United Nations food agency. That amounts to more than one billion tonnes of waste around the world every year. The study recommends that developing countries should improve production and distribution, […]
TEMPE, Ariz. — Like Einstein, he is as famous for his story as for his science. This week: A rare interview with a physics superstar, and up in the trees with a sleeping bird. At the age of 21, the British physicist Stephen Hawking was found to have amyotrophic lateral […]
The Islamic Golden Age — a period that spanned the 7th to the 13th centuries A.D. — saw a flourishing of scholarship in the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates, which at their greatest extent stretched across North Africa and the Middle East. Contrary to traditional views of Islamic science in this […]
Islamic science had its heyday in the ninth century, thanks to Ab? Ja’far al-Ma’m?n’s House of Wisdom, says Jim al-Khalil. The Bab al-Sharji district in the centre of Baghdad derives its name, which means east gate, from the medieval fortifications of the city. These walls were probably built around the […]
Since my visits to Hawaii islands and Bermuda, starting in 2004, I have become a staunch believer in evolution, by which I mean common descent of all living beings on the planet earth. The two main proofs for the theory of evolution are molecular biology and biogeography. We do not have […]