Two years of painstaking observation on the social interactions of a troop of free-ranging monkeys and an analysis of their family trees has found signs of natural selection affecting the behavior of the descendants. Rhesus macaques who had large, strong networks tended to be descendants of similarly social macaques, according to a Duke University team…
Neuroscientist Yukiyasu Kamitani recorded dream appearances of 20 key objects, such as “male” or “room,” and used a machine-learning algorithm to correlate those concepts with fMRI images to find patterns that could be used to predict what people were dreaming about without having to wake them. Such information could help inform the study of why…
The numbers are in: 2012, the year of a surreal March heat wave, a severe drought in the corn belt and a massive storm that caused broad devastation in the mid-Atlantic states, turns out to have been the hottest year ever recorded in the contiguous United States. How hot was it? The temperature differences between…
Astronomers have spotted a new component of the Milky Way galaxy’s skeleton — a “bone” of dust and gas that contains about as much material as 100,000 suns. The newfound Milky Way bone is more than 300 light-years long but just 1 or 2 light-years wide, giving it the appearance of a slender cosmic snake,…
While innocently surveying the Cosmos, astronomers serendipitously stumbled across a particularly uncouth galaxy. NGC 660 unleashed an epic belch, an event that we could see 44 million light-years distant. This event emanated from the galaxy’s core, around the likely location of a supermassive black hole. Why did the supermassive black hole in the galaxy’s core…
The unbalanced orbit of a so-called “zombie planet” in a dusty star system has astronomers struggling to explain the exoplanet’s behavior. New observations of the planet Fomalhaut b by the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the oddball orbit, which has wild extremes between its closest and farthest points from the parent star and appears to cross…
Blind mice can see again, after Oxford University researchers transplanted developing cells into their eyes and found they could re-form the entire light-sensitive layer of the retina. Videos show the nocturnal mice, which once didn’t notice the difference between light and dark at all, now run from the light and prefer to be in the…
Four years ago, NASA launched the Kepler space telescope in an attempt to learn just how common Earth-sized worlds are in the Milky Way galaxy. Now, scientists have unveiled part of the answer: About 17 percent – one in six – of Kepler’s target stars have Earth-sized worlds orbiting closer to their parent stars than…
A simple, precise and inexpensive method for cutting DNA to insert genes into human cells could transform genetic medicine, making routine what now are expensive, complicated and rare procedures for replacing defective genes in order to fix genetic disease or even cure AIDS. Jennifer Doudna, Martin Jinek, and Emmanuelle Charpentier published a paper in Science…
From Slate’s Bad Astronomy blog: Global warming is real. Temperatures are changing, climate is changing, and most importantly, arctic ice is changing, melting. It is absolutely critical we understand this process better so that we can better understand the implications, and some of the most formidable tools in our possession are Earth-observing satellites. Their keen…