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3 weeks ago | 
quantamagazine.org | Philip Ball
“I had got disillusioned with the state of the art of looking for life on other worlds,” Wong said. “I thought it was too narrowly constrained to life as we know it here on Earth, but life elsewhere may take a completely different evolutionary trajectory.
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1 month ago | 
chemistryworld.com | Philip Ball
Nanotubes are being found in an increasing number of biological contexts, including the developing heartMulticellular existence is collaborative. Our cells are in constant communication, checking out one another’s state and sending signals to modulate or moderate the behaviour of neighbours. The usual textbook story identifies three means of communication.
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2 months ago | 
chemistryworld.com | Philip Ball
Proteins are generally considered to be programmed with a folding code: the sequence of amino acids along their chains determines how they fold into compact, functional shapes.
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2 months ago | 
chemistryworld.com | Philip Ball
Societies should learn from this and speak up to support inclusion
Source: © Grandbrothers/Alamy Stock Photo
Time for a little history lesson. Within months of the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Jewish staff of the German Chemical Society, including some high-profile members, were asked to resign in an act of what historian Ute Deichmann has called anticipatory obedience.
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Jan 20, 2025 | 
chemistryworld.com | Philip Ball
How a quantum view of electron states enabled us to understand the stability of matterIt’s generally agreed that this year has been designated the UN International Year of Quantum Science and Technology to mark the centenary of Werner Heisenberg’s paper describing the first true version of quantum mechanics.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
msn.com | Philip Ball
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Jan 19, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Philip Ball
For scientists, our earliest ancestor wasn’t Adam or Eve but Luca. Luca didn’t look anything like us – it was a single-celled bacterium-like organism. A recent study by a team of scientists based in the UK has delivered rather shocking news about this illustrious forebear. Despite having lived almost as far back as seems possible, Luca was surprisingly similar to modern bacteria – and what’s more, it apparently lived in a thriving community of other organisms that have left no trace on Earth today.
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Jan 3, 2025 | 
theguardian.com | Philip Ball
“The Brain – is wider than the Sky – / For – put them side by side – / The one the other will contain / with ease – and You – beside –,” wrote Emily Dickinson. To all that the world presents to our senses, the mind effortlessly adds things that will not and cannot ever be. We can’t help it: imagination is humankind’s unbidden superpower, perhaps the capacity that most distinguishes us from other animals. In The Shape of Things Unseen, neurologist Adam Zeman attempts to explain how and why this is.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
msn.com | Philip Ball
Microsoft Cares About Your PrivacyMicrosoft and our third-party vendors use cookies to store and access information such as unique IDs to deliver, maintain and improve our services and ads. If you agree, MSN and Microsoft Bing will personalise the content and ads that you see. You can select ‘I Accept’ to consent to these uses or click on ‘Manage preferences’ to review your options and exercise your right to object to Legitimate Interest where used.
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Dec 10, 2024 | 
theguardian.com | Philip Ball
‘From Adam has sprung one mass of sinners and godless men,” wrote St Augustine, arguably the key architect of the Christian doctrine of original sin. The notion that babies are born with this indelible stain, the residue of Adam’s fall in Eden, can seem one of the most pernicious features of Christian dogma. But as Guy Leschziner argues in Seven Deadly Sins, we could interpret Augustine’s austere judgment as an acknowledgment that we are inherently inclined to do things we shouldn’t.
