Professor of psychology Michael Gazzaniga is spelling out a cautionary tale about the uses of neuroscience in society.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dinosaur nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said. The hatchery and the baby footprints around it are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough…
ANALOGIES change. Once, it was fashionable to describe the brain as being like the hydraulic systems employed to create pleasing fountains for 17th-century aristocrats’ gardens. As technology moved on, first the telegraph network and then the telephone exchange became the metaphor of choice. Now it is the turn of the computer. But though the brain-as-computer…
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…
The primordial particles of matter that existed just after the big bang are now being re-created in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) to advance understanding of the kind of matter that existed in the first seconds of the universe. Seconds after the big bang, quarks and gluons — basic building blocks of matter — were…
The antimatter version of the hydrogen atom could soon finally give up its secrets. Scientists expect that antihydrogen will have exactly the same properties as hydrogen; but after 80 years, the test is only just becoming possible. Every particle has an antiparticle, which is identical in every respect except that it has opposite charge. The…
Organic molecules — compounds that on Earth can be linked with life — encased within Martian meteorites now reveal biological activity on the Red Planet could not have formed these materials, researchers say. Organic molecules are the carbon-based raw materials that building blocks of life such as proteins and DNA are made from. These organic…