Our ability to find and share information today is potentially limitless. But how did we get here? From cave paintings to the iPad—how does human innovation bring us here?
Baboons can learn to tell the difference between real four-letter words and nonsense combinations of letters. And once they figure out the patterns, these monkeys can guess with impressive accuracy whether a new word is real or fake. Because baboons can’t actually read, a new study supports the theory that the brains of our primate…
Mars has long held a fascination for those of us on Earth, but recent NASA pictures of Martian landscapes are giving us a much better understanding of the red planet. Meanwhile, scientists across the globe are working on robots and space suits with the hope that humans may soon explore Mars in person. Check out…
‘Extremely’ is the answer. Being hit by a ‘sugar-cube’ of space debris is the equivalent of standing next to an exploding hand-grenade. And the problem is only getting worse
As an undergraduate at Oxford University in the mid-1970s, K. Birgitta Whaley struggled to choose between chemistry and physics. Now, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and director of its Quantum Information and Computation Center, she doesn’t have to: Her research interests span all realms quantum, including both chemistry and physics, as…
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on my parahippocampal gyrus. Scientists at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute have found that suspicion resides in two distinct regions of the brain: the amygdala, which plays a central role in processing fear and emotional memories, and the parahippocampal gyrus, which is associated with…
Species of snakes, spiders and butterflies have all evolved to look like other species to ward off predators. But one of the great mysteries in biology is that most of this copy-cat behavior is not very good, and bad impersonators seem just as abundant as the good ones. A simplistic interpretation of Darwin’s theory of…