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Recent findings—such as that life seems to be everywhere on Earth—have encouraged scientific inquiries into the nature of life’s beginnings, said Szostak.

Two critical needs for life are to create a membrane, which defines a boundary that can contain genetic material, and to replicate. Szostak said it is relatively easy to create a membrane from fatty acids that could have arisen in conditions that mimic early Earth; fatty acids, mixed in water with a little salt, readily create closed structures called vesicles.

The world of the ancient Near East was on a deep level culturally alien to our own, and the period between 1200 and 800 spans a extremely sharp rupture between what came before, and what came after.

I contend that despite the differences of language a modern person might have more in common with a citizen of 4th century Athens, than a citizen of 4th century Athens would have with a subject of the wanax of 12th century Athens.

Mice were then injected with tumor cells, which led to malignancies in all of the control animals within 15 days… The rate of tumor formation in animals living in the enriched environment was significantly delayed, and 15 percent had not developed tumors after nearly three weeks; when tumors were visible, they were 43 percent smaller than the lesions on control animals

In a secret bunker known as the Swiss Fort Knox deep in the Swiss Alps, European researchers recently deposited a “digital genome” that will provide the blueprint for future generations to read data stored using defunct technology.

The capsule is the culmination of the four-year “Planets” project, an 15 million-euro ($18.49 million) project which draws on the expertise of 16 European libraries, archives and research institutions, to preserve the world’s digital assets as hardware and software.

This week, the FBI arrested 11 alleged Russian spies living in New Jersey. How did they catch them? By digging through their photos.

While we Baby Boomers typically place high value on pay, benefits, stability and prestige, Gen Y cares most about fun, innovation, social responsibility, and time off.

What brings this journalistic parable to mind is the arrogantly unapologetic way that Andrew Breitbart has reacted to the furor over the ripped-out-of-context Shirley Sherrod speech excerpt that he posted on his website. Choosing bluster over blushing, Breitbart told Matt Lewis in a Politics Daily interview: "I couldn't wait to get this story. I knew from past experience that I had a news cycle to get this out." Later in the interview, Breitbart underscored his cavalier publish-or-perish approach to fact-checking: "It had to be done at the exact moment in time that the press would notice it." A new report by the Project for Excellence in Journalism details how the Sherrod charade migrated from conservative blogs taking their cues from Breitbart to Fox News and then to CNN.

The extremes of the science and religion debate have had their say. They offer little to us anymore but a tired standard that fails to meet the most important challenge of our moment – the need to create something new.

For starters, they're overwhelmingly white male Americans (plus a handful of Brits and Canadians). Politically they're right-of-centre (by American standards), and libertarian-leaning. They are enthusiastic proponents of space colonization, but will boost any other technological or scientific work oriented in an upward direction (as long as it's carried out by people who look like them: they're somewhat less gung-ho about the former Soviet, and now the Chinese, space programs).

Welcome to the age of mixed blessings, you rapidly wrinkling Janeane Garofalo wannabes!

"Formerly Hot," inspired by Dolgoff's epiphany that "I was no longer who I'd always been -- a pretty girl who navigated the world partially aided by the advantage of her looks," will surely strike a chord with anyone who's ever realized she's never getting comped for drinks again.

But it's ironic that while this is likely the greatest time in human history to be middle-aged (for which I personally thank you for blazing that trail, baby boomers) we're still torn up about it. A person over 40 is no longer immediately set out to die on an ice floe, but that leaves the question, What's left? Are we MILFs and cougars, or just haggard old "formerlies"? We flail awkwardly to finesse this new stage of life, maybe because being older ain't what it used to be. There was a time we'd just consign ourselves to looking like a Dorothea Lange photograph by the time we had the second kid, but those migrant farmworkers weren't of the generation that got Viagra and Nirvana. Can we still rock out? Wear funny T-shirts?

We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different.

As Leinen put it, even if the proposals on the table at Copenhagen had been adopted, we’d still end the century with an atmospheric carbon dioxide of 700 parts per million–more than enough to cause climate upheaval, raise seas dramatically, and so forth.

The art of the "big lie" is to repeat something often enough, and with a powerful enough megaphone, such that your distortions are not challenged.

By trying to rewrite the narrative of the economic cataclysm we have lived through, the deniers are attempting to challenge the common-sense conclusions that flow from an accurate understanding of history.

Greenberg was removed as CEO of AIG by his own board—of its own volition—after his refusal to answer questions about his involvement in fraudulent reinsurance contracts that his company had created. Five people were convicted by a jury in Connecticut in 2008 for their role in these frauds. The federal prosecutor, in his summation, called Greenberg an unindicted co-conspirator in the scheme. In New York, the judge who will hear the case based on these facts, brought by the state when I was attorney general, called the case "devastating" and referred to AIG as a "criminal enterprise." AIG as a corporate entity settled the case with my office in 2006 by restating its financial results and paying a fine of $1.6 billion. Shareholders are now awaiting judicial approval of an additional $750 million settlement to compensate them for damages they suffered from these accounting frauds.

the language is constantly evolving, and all that. Newspapers like The Economist maintain a strict style guide less because of a priggish conservatism than because of the simple need for consistency among dozens or hundreds of writers.

Still, by making this out to be an issue of linguistic freedom versus dictatorship, I think Mr Carey skates over the fact that such debates are most often just a proxy for ad hominem attacks; in other words, when people criticise non-words, it's usually just a lazy way to criticise their users. The anti-George Bush crowd professed to hate how the former president mangled the English language, but secretly they loved it. When someone says "misunderestimated" and "unthaw", or confuses "authoritarian" with "authoritative", sniggering at it is a way to avoid the harder work of actually demonstrating that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Or, to repeat a quote from our stylebook that my colleague used only recently:Nobody needs to be described as silly: let your analysis show that he is.