A U.S. federal court has found that a stem cell therapy offered by a Colorado clinic meets the definition of a regulated drug. The ruling could spur a U.S. Food and Drug Administration crackdown on other clinics offering untested adult stem cell treatments in the United States. The company, Regenerative Sciences Inc. in Broomfield, Colorado,…
Dating features on the Moon and Mars is guesswork. Scott Anderson is building a tool to change that.
After decades of digging, paleoanthropologists looking for fossilized human bones have established a reasonably clear picture: Modern humans arose in Africa some 200,000 years ago and all archaic species of humans then disappeared, surviving only outside Africa, as did the Neanderthals in Europe. Geneticists studying DNA now say that, to the contrary, a previously unknown…
The huge NASA rover speeding toward an August landing on Mars may be the most capable and complex Red Planet explorer ever launched, but it’s far from the first. The 1-ton Curiosity rover — which will search for evidence that Mars is, or ever was, capable of supporting microbial life — represents humanity’s 40th effort…
Your brain may be more likely to recognize new things as new when the unknown is already on your mind, according to new research. The findings suggest that memories are not made or recalled in a vacuum, said study researcher Lila Davachi, a psychologist at New York University. Instead, memories are built with the influence…
From David Barash’s post, The Hare, the Tortoise, and the Aurora Madman, in reaction to the tragedy in Colorado, from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Brainstorm blog: Far more than any other critter, we Homo saps are stuck between two worlds, biological evolution and cultural evolution. The former is a Darwinian, genetic process, necessarily slow…
Ever since Darwin first published The Origin of the Species, scientists have been striving to identify a last universal common ancestor of all living species. Paleontological, biochemical, and genomic studies have produced conflicting versions of the evolutionary tree. Now a team of researchers has developed a novel method to search the vast archives of known…
Innovation researcher Maria Clara Couto Soares calls for a new debate on expanding the reach of grassroots social innovations.
A glimpse at the magazine rack in any supermarket checkout line will tell you that women are frequently the focus of sexual objectification. Now, new research finds that the brain actually processes images of women differently than those of men, contributing to this trend. Women are more likely to be picked apart by the brain…
A new study has provided the first evidence that mindfulness meditation reduces loneliness in older adults. The researchers, led by Carnegie Mellon University’s J. David Creswell, also found that mindfulness meditation — a 2,500-year-old practice dating back to Buddha that focuses on creating an attentive awareness of the present moment — lowered inflammation levels, which…