What is biological immortality? To be fair, it’s not the promise of a paradisiacal garden. Neither is it the ultimate, or final, defeat of death. Instead, biological immortality has to do with aging. An organism that is biologically immortal does not age. We primarily age (the theory goes) because the cells that comprise us age….
NASA and the European Space Agency announced that the two organizations have partnered on the ESA’s Euclid mission. This mission, a space telescope that launches in 2020, is designed to further astronomers’ understanding of the roles dark matter and dark energy played in the evolution of the universe. “NASA is very proud to contribute to…
Tiny fish trapped in a virtual world provide a window into complex brain connections as a research team at Harvard tries to answer the biggest question in neuroscience: how a doughy mass of neurons in the brain gives rise to an exquisite suite of behaviours, absorbing information from the outside world and generating responses.
Learning becomes more difficult as we age not because we have trouble absorbing new information, but because we fail to forget the old stuff, researchers say. Mice whose brains were genetically modified to resemble those of adult humans showed no decrease in the ability to make the strong synaptic connections that enable learning — a…
Yoga has positive effects on mild depression and sleep complaints, even in the absence of drug treatments, and improves symptoms associated with schizophrenia and ADHD in patients on medication, according to a systematic review of the exercise on major clinical psychiatric disorders. Published in the open-access journal, Frontiers in Psychiatry, the review of more than…
A pulsar that randomly and without warning dramatically changes its pattern of radio wave and X-ray emissions has surprised a team of astronomers, who wrote that it “challenges all proposed pulsar emission theories.” Pulsars are spinning stars the size of a small city, with a mass roughly comparable to our Sun. They have a strong…
In an upcoming paper for the journal Aquatic Mammals, a pair of scientists detail a series of interactions between an adult bottlenose dolphin with scoliosis and a group of sperm whales in the Azores. The scientists describe their research as the first time sperm whales have been observed interacting in a non-aggressive way with a…
The red supergiant star Betelgeuse in the famed constellation Orion is on a collision course with a strange wall of interstellar dust, with the clock ticking down to a cataclysmic cosmic smashup in 5,000 years, scientists say. A new image of Betelgeuse suggests the star will crash headlong into a trail of space dust while…
Praying, fighting, dancing, chanting — human rituals could illuminate the growth of community and the origins of civilization.
How many protons can dance on the head of a pin? The answer is nowhere near as straightforward as one may think — and it might offer new insights into one of the most well-tested theories in physics. An international team of scientists recently tried to find out the actual size of a proton, one…