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When you think of a brain, you might imagine a flashing chain of neurons beaming messages to one another. But a new paper suggests that’s not the whole story, and they found this out by PUTTING HUMAN BRAIN CELLS IN MICE AND MAKING THEM SMARTER. The non-neural brain cells they used are known as “glia”–like…
Gentle electrical zaps to the brain can accelerate learning and boost performance on a wide range of mental tasks, scientists have reported in recent years. But a new study suggests there may be a hidden price: Gains in one aspect of cognition may come with deficits in another. Researchers who study transcranial electrical stimulation, which…
In 2008, two events of international significance took place: the Vatican announced that Islam had overtaken Roman Catholicism as the world’s biggest single religious denomination; and scientists at CERN in Geneva switched on the Large Hadron Collider for the first time, reportedly in search of the ‘God Particle.’ Despite the fact that the United Kingdom…
Here you are, a human being, a grand Universe of atoms that have organized themselves into simple monomers, assembled together into giant macromolecules, which in turn comprise the organelles that make up your cells. And here you are, a collection of around 75 trillion specialized cells, organized in such a way as to make up…
Since its daredevil landing on Mars last summer, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been avidly exploring its new home in Gale Crater. But there’s been one worry that several people have voiced since Curiosity launched — what if the rover contaminates the surface of Mars with Earth life? Mars and Earth are very different places. Earth’s…
The rare ships that have ventured through the harsh, icebound Arctic Ocean require reinforced hulls and ice-breaking bows that allow them to plow through dense ice as much as two meters deep, and face hazardous conditions in remote locations for long periods of time. Arctic sea ice now is melting so rapidly each summer due…
Shalosh B. Ekhad, the co-author of several papers in respected mathematics journals, has been known to prove with a single, succinct utterance theorems and identities that previously required pages of mathematical reasoning. Last year, when asked to evaluate a formula for the number of integer triangles with a given perimeter, Ekhad performed 37 calculations in…
Vivek Sharma missed his daughter. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dr. Sharma had to spend months at a time away from home, coordinating a team of physicists at the Large Hadron Collider, here just outside Geneva. But on April 15, 2011, Meera Sharma’s 7th birthday, he flew to California for some…
Coastal areas in the tropics may see some of the largest sea-level rises due to take place this century because of climate change, according to a study. This would particularly affect the Indian Ocean and Western Pacific, which include many small island states, such as the Maldives, and vulnerable coastal deltas, including the Bay of…
Sometimes, I read a news item that pretty much overturns an entire class of pedagogy in my head. Take, for example, the discovery that virus particles steal and repurpose a bacteria’s immune system, and use it against them. My first thought was “holy crap, bacteria have an adaptive immune system?!” Then I remembered reading something…