Stress may affect brain development in children, altering growth of a specific piece of the brain and abilities associated with it, according to researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Children who had experienced more intense and lasting stressful events in their lives posted lower scores on tests of what the researchers refer to as spatial working…
Sometimes, finding nothing is just as good as finding something. Physicists have made the most sensitive measurements yet in the hunt for a rare event that could undermine the dominant theory of particle physics, and turned up zilch. The scientists, who are searching for a rumored particle decay process called “neutrinoless double-beta decay,” ran a…
Forget clumsy nuclear fission: researchers have now split an atom into two halves, pulled them apart and put them back together again. The University of Bonn team used quantum mechanics, which allow objects to exist in several states simultaneously, to perform the feat. Their experiment involved keeping a single atom simultaneously in two places that…
Astronomers have found the faintest galaxy yet seen in the deep, distant reaches of space, an object whose light has taken 13 billion years to reach us. The tiny galaxy, which existed about 800 million years after the Big Bang created the universe, is among the top 10 most distant objects known. “This image is…
By investing in bike paths and energy-efficient buildings, the capital of Denmark aims to produce no more CO2 than it consumes by 2025
A new study suggests that protein knots, a structure whose formation remains a mystery, may have specific functional advantages that depend on the nature of the protein’s architecture. Relatively little is known about protein folding, the process by which a polypeptide chain with a specific sequence of amino acid chains forms the three-dimensional structures —…
The two telescopes were designed to gaze down upon Earth from space to collect intelligence. Now, NASA hopes to repurpose the instruments to study dark energy, extrasolar planets, and a host of other questions in astronomy. The telescopes were originally supposed to be deployed by the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), which manages the nation’s spy…
In the run-up to the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) in Brazil, much has been written about how to define sustainable development; the balance between environmental sustainability and human development; the kinds of goals and targets that might be adopted; and how these might then relate to goals that follow on from the Millennium Development…
Lucid dreaming technically refers to any occasion when the sleeper is aware they are dreaming. But it is also used to describe the idea of being able to control those dreams. Once confined to a handful of niche groups, interest in lucid dreaming has grown in recent years, spurred on by a spate of innovations…
One hundred thousand years ago, several humanlike species walked the Earth. There were tribes of stocky Neanderthals eking out an existence in Europe and northwest Asia, and bands of cave-dwelling Denisovans in Asia. A diminutive, hobbitlike people called Homo floresiensis inhabited Indonesia. What were essentially modern humans roamed Africa. Then, about 60,000 years ago, a…