Some male animals may evolve weak immune responses so they can give their mates diseases. | Continue reading
New research shows that that the cognitive benefits of exercise, including improved memory, are more than temporary. | Continue reading
A retiree with super-smelling skills has helped researchers identify compounds unique to Parkinson's suffers -- and it could lead to an earlier diagnosis. | Continue reading
The MarCO spacecraft made it safely to Mars last year, proving the interplanetary worth of tiny satellites. But they've recently lost contact with NASA. | Continue reading
Some missions only became more impressive the longer they lasted. | Continue reading
During peaks of slow-wave sleep, our brains can form new memory traces that the brain harnesses during wakefulness. | Continue reading
In The Matrix, Morpheus tells Neo that their digital appearance is based on their “residual self-image.” That is, the characters look how they imagine themselves to look, based on their own mental models of themselves. In the real world, scientists have been trying to teach robot … | Continue reading
Healthy gut bacteria plays a critical role in regulating allergic responses to food, offering new hope for microbiome-based therapeutics. | Continue reading
“Got the Earth straight out our front window.” As the lunar module Eagle yawed into a windows up orientation, Buzz Aldrin looked away from the computer to see the Earth nearly a quarter of a million miles away. “Sure do,” agreed Neil Armstrong, adding, “Houston, [I hope] you’re l … | Continue reading
Brain surgery is not usually something that people actively seek out. However, there may be an exception: the idea of the removal of the amygdala seems to hold a fascination for many people. Questions about the desirability of an amygdala-free life can be found in many places onl … | Continue reading
China's Chang'e-4 mission is set to land on the far side of the moon. | Continue reading
In the Altai region, million-dollar spacecraft sometimes end their lives as farm implements. | Continue reading
Do you believe that people’s eyes emit an invisible beam of force? According to a rather fun paper in PNAS, you probably do, on some level, believe that. The paper is called Implicit model of other people’s visual attention as an invisible, force-carrying beam projecting from the … | Continue reading
This time last year I wrote(1,2) about a Swedish company called Emotra. Emotra make a device that is supposed to measure suicide risk in people with mental illness. The test is called EDOR® and according to Emotra’s website and materials, it has been shown to be highly effective. … | Continue reading
The eruption surfaced enough lava to cover the U.S. interstate highway system in 19 meters of material. | Continue reading
The genetic modification of crops (GMOs) and the concept of designer babies (thanks to CRISPR technology) may be two of the most recognizable, yet controversial, topics related to the field of genetic engineering. At its core, genetic engineering, also known as bioengineering, … | Continue reading
What should a doctor do if a dying patient confesses to killing people decades ago? This is the question posed by a fascinating case report in the Journal of Clinical Ethics, from New Zealand-based authors Laura Tincknell and colleagues. The facts of the case are fairly straightf … | Continue reading
A very curious feature has long been visible in satellite images of Greenland's ice sheet, but until now, no one really knew what was responsible for it | Continue reading
Dave Mosher over at the Discovery Channel blog collective (not to be confused with our own beloved Discover Magazine Hive Overmind) asked me if I could write down my thoughts about UFOs, so he could post it over at their site to support a show they’re airing about flying saucers. … | Continue reading
At the bottom of a sacred lake two massive ships lay in ruin, remnants of a mad emperor. | Continue reading
‘Oumuamua was born in another solar system, so perhaps all these oddities are normal for something that formed somewhere else. | Continue reading
Earlier this year, I posted on how Sergio Della Salla, the editor of Cortex, criticized a headline-grabbing JAMA paper that had reported neuropsychological abnormalities in US embassy staff exposed to the mysterious Havana ‘sonic attack’. According to Della Salla, the evidence pr … | Continue reading
With new observations, a team of Hungarian scientists have confirmed the existence of two strange "Kordylewski clouds" of interplanetary dust. | Continue reading
NASA's Mars 2020 will soon hunt for life on the Red Planet. Scientists recently met in California to debate the best landing sites. | Continue reading
I just came across a strange but quite charming scientific study claiming that human thought alone can make wine taste better. This miracle of vinomancy is reported in a paper in Explore, a unique if often credulity-stretching Elsevier academic journal dedicated to “healing arts, … | Continue reading
A new observation hints that mergers between neutron stars and other exotic objects may be easier to find than we'd thought. | Continue reading
Unknown 20 years go, massive paleoburrows in southern Brazil are a formidable mystery for the handful of researchers who study them. | Continue reading
First Man is not like other movies about the space race, and I mean that in a very good way. I’ll admit, I was skeptical about the director of La La Land telling the story of Neil Armstrong’s historic landing on the Moon. (Would there be songs? A scowling J.K. Simmons?) It turns … | Continue reading
50 years ago, NASA launched the first crewed Apollo mission into space. While ultimately a success, the grew ended up getting sick and nearly mutinied. | Continue reading
If you’ve ever wondered where all the parts in your laptop came from, take a second to look at this map—or maybe a few minutes, because it is a dense, complicated web. Sourcemap, which has its origins in MIT Media Lab, is a new open source website for mapping global supply chains … | Continue reading
Fruits come in a glorious rainbow of colors. Raspberries, kumquats, lemons, avocados, blueberries, figs; the colorful array rivals a 96-pack of Crayola crayons. But scientists have long debated whether fruits evolved their vibrant pigments to entice animals to eat them and spread … | Continue reading
Even thousands of years ago, people treated their beloved pets just like humans. The animals died naturally and were buried beside treasured items. | Continue reading
A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. On a crisp California afternoon in early December 1968, a square-jawed, mild-mannered Stanford researcher named Douglas Engelbart took the stage at San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium and proceeded to blow everyone’s … | Continue reading
Perhaps we're wrong about some fundamental property of physics - like gravity. Or maybe experiments will confirm dark matter tomorrow. | Continue reading
According to a spectacularly misleading article in the Telegraph: Scientists discover how to ‘upload knowledge to your brain’ Feeding knowledge directly into your brain, just like in sci-fi classic The Matrix, could soon take as much effort as falling asleep, scientists believe. … | Continue reading
Two steppe tortoises made the first successful flight around the moon. The shelled cosmonauts returned safely to Earth, proving life could survive the voyage. | Continue reading
The Crab Nebula is a triumph of the most cooperative of science teams, one stretching across millennia and nations. | Continue reading
Want cleaner drinking water, free of toxins and contaminants? Mother Nature’s here to help. A number of studies have come out over the past year looking at the role different plants could play in remediation, i.e. the removal of dangerous substances. This green technology is know … | Continue reading
When Amos Barkai released 1000 lobsters near Marcus Island, he had no idea they were doomed—or that he was about to discover a predator-prey role reversal. | Continue reading
When Amos Barkai released 1000 lobsters near Marcus Island, he had no idea they were doomed—or that he was about to discover a predator-prey role reversal. | Continue reading
Though evidence of interbreeding is apparent in our genome, this is the first time we've found direct evidence of it. | Continue reading
Over the past few weeks, the stories of three high-profile scientists accused of bullying have emerged: geneticist Nazneen Rahman, psychologist Tania Singer and astrophysicist Guinevere Kauffmann. Each of these researchers are (or were) at the top of their fields, recipients of h … | Continue reading
A scientist’s achievements are often measured in terms of the number of papers they publish (productivity) and how many citations those papers get (impact). These ‘bibliometric indicators’ are widely derided but they have proven remarkably stubborn. Now, in a new preprint on bioR … | Continue reading
On this blog I usually focus on academic, scientific neuroscience. However, there is a big world outside the laboratory and, in the real world, the concepts of neuroscience are being used (and abused) in ways that would make any honest neuroscientist blush. In this post I’m going … | Continue reading
In a slightly depressing new paper, two researchers describe how they tried to get access to the data behind 111 of the most cited psychology and psychiatry papers published in the past decade. The researchers, Tom E. Hardwicke and John P. A. Ioannidis of Stanford, wanted to plac … | Continue reading
Researchers have a model that may resolve which Beatle wrote which songs. | Continue reading
Calculations at 186,282 miles per second. | Continue reading
Pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'cause there's bugger all down here on Earth! | Continue reading