Immediately after the Big Bang, which occurred around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe was dominated by unimaginably high temperatures and densities. However, after just a few seconds, it had cooled down enough for the first elements to form, primarily hydrogen and helium. These were still completely ionized at this point, as it took almost 380,000 years for the temperature in the universe to drop enough for neutral atoms to form through recombination with free electrons. This paved the way for the first chemical reactions.
Chemistry at the beginning: How molecular reactions influenced the formation of the first stars
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The 1953 Alfred Hitchcock film “I Confess,” based on an earlier play, features a priest suspected of murder. He’s innocent, and has even heard the murderer’s confession—but cannot clear his own name.This post was originally [...]
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Women face an uphill battle to political election, and they continue to confront barriers to success afterward. But the type of legislature in their states can make a difference.This post was originally published on this [...]
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Millions of U.S. students are returning this month to schools that are struggling with strained resources, immigration crackdowns and divisive culture war fights. Teachers are under intense pressure—and UC Berkeley scholar Travis J. Bristol says [...]
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The Australian legal system is grappling with a disruptive new movement that is not only tying up the courts, councils and police, but also posing an unprecedented threat to democracy.This post was originally published on [...]
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Psychologists have long considered how a tendency towards irrational thinking or particular personality traits might predict people’s interest in conspiracies. Yet these individual factors do not explain the group processes through which conspiracy theorists are [...]
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Since 1990, more than 2.5 million people have died as a direct or indirect result of civil conflict in Africa. One of the causes of conflict, which increasingly involves clashes between predominantly Muslim herding and [...]
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Many things account for Haiti’s modern troubles. A good perspective on them comes from going back in time to 1715 or so—and grappling with a far-flung narrative involving the French monarchy, a financial speculator named [...]
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There were tens of thousands of human victims of coerced medical research under the German National Socialist regime. An important approach to processing these crimes involves raising awareness of the individual fates of those affected [...]
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U.S. states are increasingly adopting legislation to address substance use among pregnant and postpartum individuals. But a new study from Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health finds that punitive laws are largely ineffective and [...]
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Australia has recently rolled out some of the world’s toughest laws aimed at curbing the youth vaping epidemic. But new research published in Tobacco Control demonstrates these crucial public health measures could be vulnerable unless [...]
