The world’s smallest snake, a prehistoric ant and microbes that may be 120,000 years old: These are just a few of the species revealed to the world in the last 12 months.
top organic discovery of 2008
Leptotyphlops carlae was found in a patch of forest on the eastern side of Barbados. Thin as a spaghetti noodle and small enough to curl up on a quarter, it’s believed to embody the evolutionary limits of snake smallness.
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After guzzling down a pint of water, soda or a sports drink, most people toss the empty bottle in the recycle bin without a second thought. After all, if it’s getting recycled, something useful will come from it again, right?
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WASHINGTON – Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) held an invitation-only meeting at its Hawthorne, Calif.-based headquarters on Friday for potential customers of its new DragonLab, a free-flying version of the reusable Dragon capsule the company is building for International Space Station resupply missions.
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Well into the eighteenth century, science and natural philosophy were not quite synonymous, but only became so later with the direct use of what would become known formally as the scientific method, which was earlier developed during the Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe and the Middle East (see History of scientific method). Prior to the 18th century, however, the preferred term for the study of nature was natural philosophy, while English speakers most typically referred to the study of the human mind as moral philosophy. By contrast, the word “science” in English was still used in the 17th century to refer to the Aristotelian concept of knowledge which was secure enough to be used as a sure prescription for exactly how to do something. In this differing sense of the two words, the philosopher John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding wrote that “natural philosophy [the study of nature] is not capable of being made a science”.[3]
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Daniel Lende is a neuroanthropologist at the University of Notre Dame. He and Jonah Lehrer, the editor of Mind Matters, discuss what this new field can teach us about craving, capoeira and the link between the brain and culture.
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