Researchers said a new computerized model of part of a rat’s cortex predicts connections between neurons, which could help explain how the brains of mammals — including humans — work. “This is a major breakthrough because it would otherwise take decades, if not centuries, to map the location of each synapse in the brain,” said…
The highest-resolution camera ever built has begun its quest to pin down the mysterious stuff that makes up nearly three-quarters of our Universe. The Dark Energy Survey’s 570-million-pixel camera will scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years. The goal is to discover the nature of dark energy, which is theorized to be…
A warp drive to achieve faster-than-light travel — a concept popularized in television’s Star Trek — may not be as unrealistic as once thought, scientists say. A warp drive would manipulate space-time itself to move a starship, taking advantage of a loophole in the laws of physics that prevent anything from moving faster than light….
For decades, the field of regenerative medicine has been promising a future of ready-made replacement organs — livers, kidneys, even hearts — built in the laboratory. For the most part that future has remained a science-fiction fantasy. Now, however, researchers like Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm are building organs with a…
Brace yourself for a tidal wave of Facebook campaigning before November’s U.S. presidential election. A study of 61 million Facebook users finds that using online social networks to urge people to vote has a much stronger effect on their voting behavior than spamming them with information via television ads or phone calls. The study comes…
When His Holiness the Dalai Lama (HHDL) posted on Facebook recently that “religion is no longer adequate,” every journalist with a religious beat was up in arms over his words. What did this mean for the millions of practicing Buddhists, not to mention for his millions of spiritually-curious online followers? But his atheistic-toned words should…
Researchers have taken a key step towards recovering specific brain functions in sufferers of brain disease and injuries by successfully restoring the decision-making processes in monkeys. By placing a neural device onto the front part of the monkeys’ brains, the researchers, were able to recover, and even improve, the monkeys’ ability to make decisions when…
A new algorithm developed at Brown University and the Technical University of Berlin is the first computer application designed for “semantic understanding” of abstract drawings, and the research team says it could improve search applications and sketch-based interfaces. Someday, building on this research and other line-drawing computer recognition, you might be able to finger-draw something…
How many scientists does it take to author a study on the Higgs boson particle? Around 6,000. Two articles by the teams at CERN, about 30 pages each, include 19 pages of single-spaced text with roughly 6,000 names of researchers who peer-reviewed the results of the experiments, making the discovery of the elusive God particle…
Rocks are phenomenal time keepers. Their composition, shape, and age can make an otherwise barren environment reveal its secrets. On Mars, rocks are front and center in the ongoing quest to uncover the planet’s history and find evidence of past life. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to send men to Mars yet; men with their…