Two species of worms have the same set of 20 neurons that control their foregut (a digestive organ located, naturally, near the front end of the worm. The way those neurons are wired, though, completely changes their behavior. Caenorhabditis elegans eats bacteria, while its worm cousin Pristionchus pacificus, while able to subsist on bacteria, also…
There’s a reason we only ever see one side of the Moon. It’s tidally locked to the Earth, presenting only one side to us as it orbits around the planet. Tidal locking is a fate that befalls lots of planetary bodies, and it can wreak havoc on the surface. Why does tidal locking happen? And…
If there were a celebrity among brain chemicals, it would be dopamine. Supposedly released whenever we experience something pleasurable, it’s forever linked to salacious stories of sex, drugs and wild partying in the popular press. The Kim Kardashian of neurotransmitters, it gives instant appeal to listless reporting and gives editors an excuse to drop some…
Is the world clear out of geniuses? Will we ever have another Copernicus, another Darwin, another Einstein to shatter the foundations of our beliefs? Perhaps not, says a man who ought to know. Dean Keith Simonton, professor of psychology at the University of California-Davis, has dedicated the better part of his career to studying geniuses–people…
Three billion years after inanimate chemistry first became animate life, a newly synthesized laboratory compound is behaving in uncannily lifelike ways. The particles aren’t truly alive — but they’re not far off, either. Exposed to light and fed by chemicals, they form crystals that move, break apart and form again. “There is a blurry frontier…
When discussing magnetic fields, images of the sun’s coronal loops or simulations of Earth’s magnetosphere may come to mind. But now, astronomers have observed the effects of a supersized magnetic field extending tens of thousands of light-years inside the two huge gamma-ray ‘bubbles’ that were discovered projecting from the top and bottom of the Milky…
Does science have a “beauty” problem? David Orrell, a mathematician and consultant, argues that it does—or, at least, that some of its practitioners are in thrall to ideals involving “elegance,” “symmetry,” and “unity” that are beckoning them down false paths. From Euclid and Pythagoras down to 20th-century physicists, many who explore the underlying laws of…
The Hubble Space Telescope has been looking deep into the Cosmos for over two decades returning over a million observations of planets, exoplanets, nebulae, galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The mission has surpassed our wildest expectations, but some of the most intricately beautiful views of the Universe have been released only recently — sometimes in…
The massive amounts of heat produced by cities may be heating up rural areas 1,000 miles away, atmospheric researchers have found in a new modeling study. Scientists have long invoked the “urban island heat effect” to explain why cities are generally hotter than suburban and rural areas. More people, as well as more cars, houses,…
Research projects investigating the “miracle material” graphene and the human brain have won unprecedented funding of up to 1 billion euros each. Under the European Commission’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme, the backing is designed to give Europe an edge in key areas of research. Graphene – a single-layer of carbon atoms – has extraordinary…