By implanting transparent skulls into mice, scientists think they may be able to glean new insights into how the brain works as a whole – research that could lead to new treatments for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and other brain disorders. “This new device allows us to look at the brain activity at the smallest level zooming in on specific neurons while
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Before there was life, ribonucleic acid (RNA) ruled the primordial soup. Or so the story goes, according to what’s known as the RNA World hypothesis. But it seems we may have been too hasty in leaving out RNA’s more complex cousin, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Chemists from the UK and the US have shown how both
We still don’t know what dark matter is, but we can strike a line through one option. It is not, as per a theory proposed by the brilliant Stephen Hawking, a bunch of teeny-tiny microscopic black holes. In the most rigorous test of the theory to date, an international team led by researchers from the Kavli
The US government has ended its 30-year practice of breeding and then killing lab kittens used as vessels to harvest parasites. Over 3,000 kittens were bred by the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) for the sole reason of being infected with a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii (T.gondii,) activists from the White Coat Project said in May
Sure, you might think your average acorn-chomping grey squirrel is sort of cute. But seriously, it’s never going to be giant rainbow squirrel from India level of cute. It’s not just our opinion either. When amateur photographer Kaushik Vijayan posted some pics of Malabar giant squirrels (Ratufa indica) on Instagram, they quickly wowed the internet. Vijayan took
For most animals, reproduction is straightforward: some species lay eggs, while others give birth to live babies. But our recent research uncovered a fascinating mix between the two modes of reproduction. In an Australian skink, we observed the first example of both egg-laying and live-bearing within a single litter for any backboned animal. This suggests
When it comes to the weather systems controlling rain and shine across the planet, nothing happens in isolation – everything plays into everything else. Now, for the first time, scientists have explained how volcanic eruptions can influence the formation of hurricanes. Investigating this mechanism has been tricky until now, because in the age of sophisticated
After five decades of intense and expensive policing, the United States’ so-called ‘war on drugs’ has only created a bigger problem, a new study has found. The research is based on a unique geographic model, called NarcoLogic, that was designed to figure out how cocaine smuggling networks have adapted to US drug interception over the years.
Denali National Park in Alaska is home to North America’s highest peak, attracting long queues of humans who are keen to commune with nature. Unfortunately, nature’s call doesn’t always align with convenient amenities, and decades of toilet breaks have added up. Now hiking companies are making it their business to fix the peak’s poo problem.
A mathematician in the UK has found the penultimate solution to a fiendish number problem that’s puzzled the world for centuries, if not even longer. Researcher Andrew Booker, who studies pure mathematics at the University of Bristol, discovered a new solution to a famous Diophantine equation involving the sums of three cubes. The problem, which
Scientists have figured out how to genetically alter bacteria to churn out super-strong spider silk. Pound for pound, spider silk is much stronger than steel, but farming spiders is incredibly inefficient, according to a press release – so finding a way to mass produce the material could lead to super-strong fabrics and perhaps even next-generation
Some want to keep a clean record for future employers while others are merely following their therapist’s orders. In any case, there are plenty of reasons to take a break from Facebook. Before you do something you might regret, though, remember there is a way to deactivate your account without deleting it for good. Instead
In the halo of the Milky Way, a tiny, ancient star called J0023+0307 drifts about, minding its business. It’s very old indeed, which isn’t uncommon for stars in the halo – but it contains no detectable carbon, which is pretty danged weird. So weird that the astronomy team who found it even said the star
Alaska just finished one of its most unusually warm Marches ever recorded. In its northern reaches, the March warmth was unprecedented. Part of a rapid and troubling warming across the Arctic, the month concluded feverishly in the northern part of the state, with widespread temperatures 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. Many areas finished
The head of NASA, Jim Bridenstine, is not happy with how other world leaders are treating space. Speaking at a recent Town Hall, the space agency’s highest ranking official admonished the Indian government for shooting down a satellite in low orbit, calling the test “unacceptable”. “That is a terrible, terrible thing to create an event
Upon first glance, this fossilized sea creature looks more like the Sarlacc from Star Wars’ “Return of the Jedi” than any animal on Earth today. According to a recent study, the Daihua sanqiong – which lived 518 million years ago and was first discovered about a decade ago in southern China’s Yunnan Province – had
Nobody likes a know-it-all, but new research shows that people who are able to admit that their own knowledge and views might not be correct, are actually more knowledgeable. The new study, led by first author and psychologist Elizabeth J. Krumrei-Mancuso from Pepperdine University, examines the concept of intellectual humility, which can be characterised as
NASA’s new planet-hunting space telescope TESS may be primarily searching for alien worlds, but it’s certainly not the only thing the shiny beast can do. She hasn’t even been up there a year yet – and now astronomers have detected the first exocomet in TESS’s data. What’s more, the detection was made in a star’s
Hundreds of years ago, the west coast of South America was ruled by the Incas – a mysterious empire considered to be the most elaborate society to exist in the Americas before the arrival of Columbus. This is not their story. For long before the Incas held dominion over the sweeping lands stretching from Colombia
We tend to think of stars as the objects that make most of the light in the Universe, while planets, moons, rocks, dust and gas reflect this starlight. But it turns out that stars reflect light, too. We haven’t really noticed this phenomenon before, because the amount of reflected light is minuscule compared to the
A prolific cybersecurity research firm says it has managed to make Tesla’s self-driving feature veer off course by sticking three small stickers on the road pavement. Keen Lab, a two-time honoree of Tesla’s “bug bounty” hall of fame program, said in a research paper on Saturday that it found two ways to trick Autopilot’s lane
A team from NASA and MIT has created a new type of airplane wing — and it could make air travel far more efficient. In a paper published in the journal Smart Materials and Structures on Monday, the researchers describe how they built an airplane wing from hundreds of identical, lightweight cube-like structures, all bolted
It’s difficult to remember a time when Google did not oversee, organize and mine every aspect of our existence, but in 2004, its new email service seemed so powerful that it couldn’t be real. Gmail’s announced features were mind-bending: a gigabyte’s worth of storage that blew away other services by 100 times. And it would
Have you reached the right time in your relationship to move in with your significant other? Or even get married? A mesmerising new data visualisation can help you see how your relationship timeline matches up with both modern couples and those from the 1970s. Put together by statistician Nathan Yau based on 3,510 responses to
Since 1978, Garfield the lazy, lasagna-loving feline has been one of the world’s most recognised and iconic comic strip characters. But for almost as long as the comic has been in print, a bizarre environmental mystery featuring the cantankerous cat has been polluting the shorelines of western France, and finally we have an explanation for
The European Southern Observatory has just revealed there will be a huge announcement next week. Yes, we know how that sounds – but as far as we can tell, it appears the world is about to finally see the first ever photo of a black hole‘s event horizon. Of course, we won’t know for sure
There was a big stir when reports emerged that the Curiosity rover had detected methane on Mars. But there was a problem: it could not be ruled out that its sensors were wiggy, or something was misinterpreted. Now it seems we can put that concern to rest – because an independent source has also detected
Their bones were discovered in a cave in Southeastern France in the 1990s. All up, six Neanderthals: two adults, two adolescents, and two children. Across Europe, there are over 200 sites that feature the ancient remains of Neanderthals such as these, but few of them tell the same grisly story this cave contains, according to
When it comes to protecting yourself from mosquitoes at your next garden party, there might be one deterrent you’re not thinking of – blasting Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Spirits at full volume all night. You might annoy everyone present, but according to researchers in Malaysia and Thailand, it works as a bizarre form of
Remember that time astronomers discovered a galaxy with no dark matter? Well, they’re back. They’ve found a second one, and it actually bolsters the case for dark matter‘s existence. As the second galaxy astronomers have found without any dark matter, the new finding – named NGC 1052-DF4 (DF4 for short) – confirms that the first discovery,
In February, Arifa Sultana, 20, gave birth to a baby boy. Then, 26 days later, she gave birth again to a set of twins, The Guardian reported. According to the outlet, Sultana has a second uterus, a condition also known as uterus didelphys. According to Scientific American, about one in 2,000 people have a second
Miniaturised frogs form a fascinating but poorly understood group of amphibians. They have been exceptionally prone to taxonomic underestimation because when frogs evolve small body size they start to look remarkably similar – so it is easy to underestimate how diverse they really are. As part of my PhD I have been studying frogs and
The share of US adults reporting no sex in the past year reached an all-time high in 2018, underscoring a three-decade trend line marked by an aging population and higher numbers of unattached people. But among the 23 percent of adults – or nearly 1 in 4 – who spent the year in a celibate
Sixty-six million years ago, a massive asteroid crashed into a shallow sea near Mexico. The impact carved out a 90-mile-wide crater and flung mountains of earth into space. Earthbound debris fell to the planet in droplets of molten rock and glass. Ancient fish caught glass blobs in their gills as they swam, gape-mouthed, beneath the
A grave dating back to early medieval Italy is a sad testament to the horrors of medicine in the Dark Ages. The skeletal remains of a young woman were found with the skeleton of a foetus between her thighs – and a hole in her skull researchers have determined was likely the result of a
These days we have more information at our fingertips than ever before, so it’s a real puzzle why so many people insist on rejecting the facts. Maybe the answer is: we don’t know how a fact comes to be. A new survey from the Pew Research Center has found that many Americans cannot recognise the
The natural world is a strange and wonderful place. But sometimes biologists come across something that is just… odd. Really, really odd. Case in point: this peculiar arachnid photographed by natural scientist Andreas Kay in Ecuador’s Amazon rainforest in July 2017. By all appearances, it looks like it has the tiny head of a black
Humans will always make the final decision on whether armed robots can shoot, according to a statement by the US Department of Defense. Their clarification comes amid fears about a new advanced targeting system, known as ATLAS, that will use artificial intelligence in combat vehicles to target and execute threats. While the public may feel
When a person dies, cremation is an increasingly popular option. The practice eclipsed burials in the US in 2015 and is expected to make up more than half of all body disposals by 2020, according to the Cremation Association of North America. But instead of storing a loved one’s cremains in an urn or sprinkling
The design for SpaceX’s Starship (aka. Big Falcon Rocket) is really starting to come together! Over the holidays, sections of the Starship Hopper (a miniature version of the Starship) were photographed being put together at the company’s South Texas Launch Site. By mid-January, the parts were fully-integrated, forming the body of the stainless-steel prototype that
We just got some massive news in the ongoing drive to switch to renewable energy: scientists have identified 530,000 sites worldwide suitable for pumped-hydro energy storage, capable of storing more than enough energy to power the entire planet. Pumped-hydro is one of the best technologies we have for storing intermittent renewable energy, such as solar
Feeling down in the dumps? If you want to stop wallowing in your own misery, new research suggests that the best method is to stop focusing on yourself and think kind thoughts about other people instead. Yes, it sounds like the PSA at the end of a children’s show, but among the methods tested by
By now, you may have already seen some of the ‘noisy GIFs’ floating around the internet. They don’t actually contain any sounds, but plenty of people seem to nonetheless be able to ‘hear’ the noise produced in the image. The skipping powerlines is definitely the most popular one we’ve seen, but you might also be able
Two European crows that look quite different from each other are actually diverging from a single species, right before our eyes. In Western Europe, it’s the inky-black carrion crow (Corvus corone). In the east, the grey hooded crow (C. cornix). They overlap in a very narrow zone running along the River Elbe in Germany, where
It started off as an enigma. Biologists at field sites around the world reported that frogs had simply disappeared. Costa Rica, 1987: the golden toad, missing. Australia, 1979: the gastric brooding frog, gone. In Ecuador, Arthur’s stubfoot toad was last seen in 1988. By 1990, cases of unexplained frog declines were piling up. These were
In space, no one can hear an asteroid scream. But astronomers just used the Hubble telescope to see one destroying itself. A 2.5-mile-wide (4 kilometer wide) asteroid called 6478 Gault was first discovered in 1988, and it seemed like many of the other 800,000 known space rocks. But in January, astronomers saw something strange in
Forget mutant turtles. Kangaroo rats are the true ninjas of the animal kingdom. A series of four high-speed videos has recently captured these little fighters flipping and kicking in mid-air as they artfully dance around their arch nemesis, the hungry sidewinder rattlesnake (Crotalus cerastes). It’s a battle between two extreme athletes, and the result is a lightning
A peculiar new paper, published in a little-known scientific journal, has the tabloids stirred up about the possibility of life on Mars. According to this paper, an international team of scientists are now claiming to have found evidence of ‘mushrooms’ growing on the surface of the Red Planet. The ‘evidence’ is primarily based on images,
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