Singing Mice Show Signs of Learning
Like songbirds and humans, male mice have brain circuits and behaviors they may use to learn some of their sounds.
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Climate-Proofing the Insurance Industry
The world’s largest reinsurer has examined the recent rise in the number and severity of natural disasters worldwide, and finds the trend bears the unmistakable fingerprints of climate change. What’s more, America is bearing the brunt of that change. The drumbeat of a warming climate, worsening weather, and the resulting human toll continues, and keeps…
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Peering Inside the Black Box
For much of the 20th century, the question of building mind from matter was considered so difficult that consciousness was a topic non grata. The Behaviorist school of thought held that consciousness was an illusion: The brain was to be understood simply as an input-output black box of reflexes, and that’s where the investigation must…
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A Diamond Bigger Than Earth?
Orbiting a star that is visible to the naked eye, astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of our own made largely out of diamond. The rocky planet, called ’55 Cancri e’, orbits a sun-like star in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18…
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Space Travel: Pioneer Anomaly Solved?
The 100 Year Spaceship Symposium, an international event advocating human expansion into other star systems, has some crucial hurdles to overcome. Basically, interstellar travel will depend upon extremely precise measurements of every factor involved in the mission, which isn’t possible yet. But a University of Missouri researcher thinks he has found the solution to a…
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Why Climate Change Is a Winning Political Strategy
He’s been called “America’s fiercest climate blogger.” And as a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, a former Clinton administration official on clean energy, and an MIT trained physicist, the subjects he covers are vast—ranging from energy policy to the role of rhetoric in communications. But there’s been a recurrent theme over the…
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Extending Einstein’s Theory Beyond Light Speed
University of Adelaide applied mathematicians have extended Einstein’s theory of special relativity to work beyond the speed of light. Einstein’s theory holds that nothing could move faster than the speed of light, but Professor Jim Hill and Dr Barry Cox in the University’s School of Mathematical Sciences have developed new formulas that allow for travel…
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Large Water Reservoirs at the Dawn of Stellar Birth
ESA’s Herschel space observatory has discovered enough water vapor to fill Earth’s oceans more than 2000 times over, in a gas and dust cloud that is on the verge of collapsing into a new Sun-like star. Stars form within cold, dark clouds of gas and dust – ‘pre-stellar cores’ – that contain all the ingredients…
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Unravelling the Ancient Urges That Drive Social Decisions of Fish
Researchers have discovered that a form of oxytocin—the hormone responsible for making humans fall in love—has a similar effect on fish, suggesting it is a key regulator of social behaviour that has evolved and endured since ancient times. The findings, published in the latest edition of the journal Animal Behaviour, help answer an important evolutionary…
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U.S. Scientists Win Chemistry Nobel
Two U.S. scientists shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for learning how cells respond to the world around them, a finding that underpins many prescription drugs on the market today, from beta blockers and antihistamines to various kinds of psychiatric medications. Brian Kobilka, 57, of Stanford University Medical School, and 69-year-old Robert Lefkowitz, of the…