A new paper asks why neuroscience hasn’t had more “impact on our daily lives.”
The article, Neuroscience and everyday life: facing the translation problem, comes from Dutch researchers Jolien C. Francken and Marc Slors. It’s a thought-provoking piece, but it left me feeling that the authors are expecting too much from neuroscience. I don’t think insights from neuroscience are likely to change our lives any time soon.
Francken and Slors describe a disconnect betwee ...read more
(Credit: Modern Meadow)
Leather jackets are a must-have in many wardrobes. While some adore genuine leather straight from our bovine buds, others seek alternatives to genuine leather, whether due to price or their stance on animal products. This could be their new go-to substitute: lab-grown leather.
New York-based Modern Meadow has ditched the cow in favor of growing leather in a lab. Growing materials otherwise found in nature isn’t new; we’ve seen scientists working on in vitro ...read more
Watch out dummy, there’s a drone coming at you! (Credit: Virginia Tech)
Thanks to a dummy we now have a better idea of what happens when a drone hits a person’s head.
A study by researchers at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) one of the Federal Aviation Administration’s UAS (unmanned aircraft systems) test sites, suggests that commercial-sized drones can cause a wide range of injuries to people on the ground.
In the United States, drone fligh ...read more
The remains of a Neanderthal boy who died 49,000 years ago is revealing information about the skeletal and physiological growth of our instinct cousins. (Credit: Paleoanthropology Group MNCN-CSIC)
Though his life was short — he never reached the age of 8 — his fossil remains could have far-reaching influence in hominin research.
A paper to be published Friday in Science reveals the discovery of the well-preserved skeleton of a Neanderthal boy who lived in Spain 49,000 yea ...read more
Upside-down jellyfish in a tank. (Credit: Caltech)
Bees, sharks, anteaters, humans, we all share the need for sleep. Why we do it is of course still largely a mystery, but the fact of it remains incontrovertible. Now, new research on jellyfish is pushing the origin of sleep even further back down the evolutionary tree, before even the appearance of brains.
It’s long been known that any creature with a central nervous system needs to sleep, but jellyfish are effectively bra ...read more
The Parkes radio telescope “heard” the first fast radio burst in 2001. Could bursts actually be going off every second? (Credit: CSIRO)
Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are one of the hottest topics in astronomy right now. These short but extremely powerful bursts last only milliseconds, but release tremendous amounts of energy during that minute period of time. Since publication of their initial discovery in 2007 (the burst itself occurred in 2001), just over 25 of these sources have been ...read more
Like many people, I was first introduced to the world of archaeology by Indiana Jones, that adventuresome character who lit up the big screen rescuing artifacts from villains by the skin of his teeth.
Indy was awesome and will always have a place in my heart. But while he succeeded in making archaeology seem romantic, I never understood why it was important or believed I could join the adventure until I was introduced (via the small screen) to a real life archaeologist named Sarah Parcak.
Parcak ...read more
(Credit: Shutterstock)
Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and hackers have plenty of will and countless ways to attack a secure network—even if it’s not connected to the internet.
In the latest demonstration proving no network is safe, researchers at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev used security cameras equipped with night vision to send and receive data from a network that wasn’t even connected to the internet. Firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention s ...read more
