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Imagine taking a map of a city, shredding it into 7,400 pieces, and then putting it back together. You have to align the landmarks, fix any tear or rip you’ve created in the process, and make sense of any shred you might have lost. Now imagine doing the same to a preserved human brain. That’s…
When the Large Hadron Collider went online in 2009, most scientists saw it as an unprecedented opportunity to conduct experiments involving the building blocks of the physical world. But to Stanislav Shalunov, a networking engineer, it looked like a whole a new kind of Big Data problem. A few years before the LHC went live,…
Imagine a scientist who does an experiment, and doesn’t like the results. Perhaps the scientist had hoped to see a certain pattern of findings and is disappointed that it’s not there. Suppose that this scientist therefore decided to manipulate the data. She goes into the spreadsheet and adds new, made-up data points, until she obtains…
Aristotle thought that the function of the brain was to cool the blood. That seems ludicrous now; through neuroscience, we know more about the brain and how it works than ever before. But, over the past several years, enthusiasm has often outstripped the limits of what current science can really tell us, and the field…
We live in a world where digital information is exploding. Some 90% of the world’s data was generated in the past two years. The obvious question is: how can we store it all? In Nature Communications today, we, along with Richard Evans from CSIRO, show how we developed a new technique to enable the data…
A new map of the seafloor off the coast of Iberia—the region of Europe that includes Portugal and Spain—has revealed what could be the birth of a new subduction zone. Subduction zones happen when tectonic plates—the large rock slabs that make up the Earth’s crust—crash into one another. The edge of the heavier plate slides,…
IF HUMANS lived as long relative to body size as naked mole rats, we would last for 600 years. These mouse-sized, subterranean African mammals live for over 30 years, and if that wasn’t impressive enough, they don’t get cancer. Now we have a clue why, which could lead to treatments for a variety of human…
Mars had an oxygen-rich atmosphere more than a billion years before the Earth, say scientists. An examination of meteorites and rocks on the planet suggests that oxygen was affecting the Martian surface four billion years ago. On Earth, oxygen did not build up to appreciable quantities in the atmosphere for at least another 1.5bn years….
There is a tendency for people to think science knows more than it knows. We hear phrases like “gaps in our knowledge” all the time, when in fact what we mainly have is knowledge in our gaps. The vastness of our scientific ignorance is especially evident when it comes to explaining how life arose on…
Agricultural pesticides have been linked to widespread invertebrate biodiversity loss in two new research papers. Pesticide use has sharply reduced the regional biodiversity of stream invertebrates, such as mayflies and dragonflies, in Europe and Australia, finds a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1. Previous research has shown similar decreases…