Author: Metanexus Editors

Are viruses life forms or not? Scientists have been fighting about it for years, and Anthony has more on the latest wrinkle in this seemingly simple yet age-old debate.

In 1915, an exceptionally bright Italian youngster walked the two miles from his home to the Campo dei Fiori in Rome to hunt for science books in the weekly market fair. His step was determined and his face was grim. His countenance hid the fact that he was trying to recover from a great tragedy,…

“We have found a habitable environment,” said John Grotzinger, project scientist for the Curiosity mission. “The water that was here was so benign and supportive of life that if a human had been on the planet back then, they could drink it.” Their finding is based in part on the discovery of both clays and…

Last week, the Human Connectome Project, supported jointly by sixteen components of the National Institutes of Health, released its first set of data, a massive set of structural and functional images of the brains of sixty-eight adult volunteers—to almost no fanfare whatsoever. The amount of data, two terabytes, is so great that it poses problems…

Traditional methods of fMRI analysis systematically skew which regions of the brain appear to be activating, potentially invalidating hundreds of papers that use the technique, according to Stanford School of Medicine researchers. Pictures of brain regions “activating” are by now a familiar accompaniment to any neurological news story (including some in KurzweilAI — see Editor’s…

As the planet warms, the Arctic is feeling the heat. Trees and shrubs are taking hold on what was once tundra, like this young pine and surrounding shrubs in Norway’s Arctic Finnmark. A new international study of the satellite record of greening landscape shows that the places which were firmly Arctic in climate during the…

When in our evolution did we humans become so clever, so creative, so boundlessly ingenious? Writer Heather Pringle tackles exactly this question in the cover story of the March issue of Scientific American. The answer, in a nutshell, is rather earlier than scientists traditionally thought, which itself raises all sorts of questions about what factors…

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…