Restricting Flavors in ENDS Could Have Repercussions Beyond Youths’ Use

The Ends Have Arrived

The 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine has been awarded to Elizabeth Blackburn, Carol Greider, and Jack Szostak for their contributions to our understanding of how the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes, telomeres, are replicated by a specialized reverse transcriptase, telomerase. I present a personal view of the telomere field, putting the contributions of these three Nobel laureates into ...

Could Morality Have

Could plants have cognitive abilities?

Vegetation is traditionally regarded as passive, doing nothing but what is essential to grow and survive. Evidence is accumulating, however, in support of formerly esoteric notions that plants can communicate, remember, even count--features that one would call cognitive if they were observed in animals. Michael Gross reports.

How Could Language Have Evolved?

The evolution of the faculty of language largely remains an enigma. In this essay, we ask why. Language's evolutionary analysis is complicated because it has no equivalent in any nonhuman species. There is also no consensus regarding the essential nature of the language "phenotype." According to the "Strong Minimalist Thesis," the key distinguishing feature of language (and what evolutionary th...

Strongly-interacting Heavy Flavors beyond the Standard Model A

The origin of mass must lie in physics beyond the Standard Model. Dynamical electroweak symmetry breaking models like technicolor can generate masses for the W and Z bosons. Providing the large top quark mass and large top-bottom mass splitting while keeping ∆ρ and flavor-changing neutral currents small requires new strong dynamics for the top and bottom quarks. In consequence, new particles ar...