Physicists at CERN delivered big news when they announced the almost certain discovery of the Higgs boson — the so-called “God particle” thought to be the key to the formation of matter, and life. They were able to detect what they believe to be the Higgs boson by firing particles around a giant, $10 billion…
A mysterious wave discovered in the Milky Way suggests our galaxy is still ringing like a bell from a galactic collision, a crash that possibly occured within the last 100 million years, scientists say. Astronomers discovered that stars north and south of the midplane of the galaxy are distributed differently, suggesting that some recent event…
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) consistently disregarded scientific advice when determining how much land to protect for endangered species during the George W. Bush Administration, a new study shows. The analysis, which includes decisions made between 2002 and 2007, shows that the agency was much more likely to ignore expert advice to increase…
If you aren’t enjoying your meditation practice, a small new study suggests a possible reason why: You aren’t doing the method that’s right for you. Researchers from the San Francisco State University Institute for Holistic Health Studies found that not all people prefer the same kind of meditation practices. The study suggests that the best…
Traumatic events are well known for producing a sense of unreality as we watch a disaster unfold. Most of us can also produce this state far more pleasurably, by getting drunk, for example. For the less fortunate, though, it is also a known, if quite controversial, psychiatric diagnosis of dissociation. This comes in two main…
Traffic is easing as more Americans are deciding to drive less, sell their cars or not buy one at all
It is often assumed that processes such as visual perception work in the same ways in all people, but research now suggests that how we see things may be influenced by our expectations and opinions. Cognitive neuroscientist Yair Pinto and his colleagues asked 45 white Dutch people to perform a binocular rivalry task — a…
Two safeguards for communities’ rights to resources can help implement the Nagoya Protocol, argues biodiversity specialist Krystyna Swiderska. As the recent UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) showed, intergovernmental negotiations on the environment and development can be slow processes that lack ambition. But that is nothing new. One of the outcomes of the original Rio…
A neuroscience team has successfully translated signals in the brains of six healthy volunteers into letters to enable them to spell messages. Likened to a “typewriter for the brain,” the advance may help paralyzed people use their brains to communicate. Some of these paralyzed patients have been forced to rely on eye blinks or muscle…
There’s a strange new brute on the celestial block—the middleweight black hole, a new study says. After nearly three years of spying a superbright object nearly 300 million light-years away, astronomers with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and SWIFT telescope recently announced the discovery of HLX-1, the first representative of a new type of black hole….