Motherboard

The “habitable zone” in astronomy-speak is the area around a star where liquid water could exist. It’s not, like, some cozy astronaut campground off in the cosmos. We know now for sure that about 600 light years away the planet known as Kepler-22b orbits in one, even coming awfully close to an orbit around its star matching an Earth-year. We also know that Kepler-22b is a bit over twice the size of Earth, making it the smallest planet we’ve found in a habitable zone.

The giant datasphere that represents the digitized collective knowledge of the entire human race is experiencing growing pains — us.

Winter holidays are important. Whatever holiday you spend your November and December celebrating, they all kind of attempt to fix the same problem: winter is cold and dark and makes you think about your own mortality. And the efforts taken to fix this problem (resulting with the same solution)? Copious amounts of alcohol and the cooking and eating of large birds. America has Thanksgiving at the end of November and then, according to a 2010 gallup poll, about 95 percent of the population celebrates Christmas in December. That makes for one long month of drinking and eating and passive-aggressively comparing careers with people you went to high school with. And America’s frosty bacchanalia is fueled almost entirely by marketing.

In case you were wondering, as I’ve been, as to what recently compelled the U.S. to renege on an international accord impelling signatory states to dismantle their weapons of mass destruction by the end of April 2010, Georgetown researcher Phillip A. Karber may have an unsurprising answer: China.

Last night I took my lovely girlfriend out for a birthday dinner to one of those wackily-hip places with crazy neon mood lighting, a cacophony of Top 40 hits and a damn pond in the middle of the place. Ending up at a club for dinner wasn’t the worst thing in the world, but I’ll tell you what was: Hearing “Happy Birthday” sung loudly and poorly at ten other tables over the course of the night while children hopped up on caffeine and duck sauce ran around twitching and screaming like medalists at the Meth Olympics.

Frozen in Arctic and northern soils are trapped some 1,700 billion gigatons of organic carbon, more than four times the amount of carbon ever released by human activity. In a stable global ecosystem, much of it might just stay there, getting pushed deeper and deeper by freezing and thawing cycles. Of course, we don’t live in a stable global ecosystem and, as the arctic warms and melts, the carbon is going to head skyward — making global warming even worse.

Whether you support it or not, there’s no denying that the War on Drugs has been absurdly costly. With people freaking out over budget minutiae and border cities like Ciudad Juarez looking like straight-up war zones (and, with heads being rolled around, possibly worse), politicians are in a tough spot. To give up the drug war means both admitting defeat and, in the eyes of some of their constituents, basically legalizing drugs. To continue down the road we’re on means continuing to commit billions of dollars to trying to at least stem the flow of narcotics into and around the U.S.

The Cold War looks like a pillow fight compared to the ancient arms race between humans and the vicious microbes that mate and feed inside them. Consider the pervasive, mysterious brain parasite Toxoplasma gondii. Once a little-known cat parasite, T. gondii is now implicated in behaviors from pregnant womens’ innate fear of cat feces (where the parasite matures after reproducing in cat intestines) to schizophrenia. Or how about the most prolific annual murderer of humans in the world, Plasmodium falciparum, the parasitic source of malaria. It seems that as biology moves forward, more and more parasites are discovered, and more and more human pathologies are tied to them.

Our ideas about gender, race, and countless other unconsciously held beliefs affect the way we frame diseases and disorders. But sometimes they create those diseases too.

Fewer sunny days and a warming climate are making ladybugs off the coast of the Netherlands turn from black to red. Mammals might adapt to a warming climate by, say, losing fur over generations or developing more sweat glands. Fish might adapt by moving to deeper, cooler water. Ladybugs apparently change color.