Six thousand, five hundred and twenty-one days: That’s how long I’d been living with my son when he left home for college. I’d spooned applesauce into his gummy mouth when he was a baby. I’d watched him wobble down the street on training wheels when he was a preschooler. I’d learned to rise on tiptoes to kiss his stubbled cheek when he was a teenager. For nearly 18 years, I’d been there for the big moments and the daily nothings. I’d fretted about him an ...read more

How well do we know ourselves? The fossil record of hominins, our ancestors and closest kin, is limited, and the exploration of our collective deep history through genetic analysis is still a relatively new field. Neither excavations nor lab work has been able to reconstruct, definitively, the earliest chapter of the Homo sapiens story. For decades, two competing models of human evolution have dominated the field. One claims that H. sapiens evolved in a single place, Africa, and left that conti ...read more

Can you hear me now? Play the video below to see if you can hear a “voice”. (Credit: YouTube/Patrick Tucker/Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program) Are you hearing voices? Say yes and many people might question your sanity. But hearing voices is exactly what the United States military hopes will happen with a weapon it’s currently developing. The Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program (JNLWD) is building a weapon called the Laser Induced Plasma Effect. Here’s how ...read more

An improved method for recording brain activity could prove a major asset to neuroscience, according to a Nature paper just out: Moving magnetoencephalography towards real-world applications with a wearable system The new device is an improved version of an existing technique, called magnetoencephalography (MEG). MEG scanners detect magnetic fluctuations caused by the brain’s electrical activity. Existing MEG devices, however, are bulky, expensive installations, because they rely on liqui ...read more

Researchers’ tooth-mounted sensor. (Credit: Tufts University) In First World countries, where famine is unheard of, people are instead eating themselves to death. Surrounded by wealth and access to health care, non-communicable diseases are responsible for roughly 38 million deaths each year. Apart from sedentary lifestyles, smoking and alcohol abuse, our daily diets are also a primary driver of poor health. Food-related pathologies such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease are all tick ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Is my car hallucinating? Is the algorithm that runs the police surveillance system in my city paranoid? Marvin the android in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy had a pain in all the diodes down his left-hand side. Is that how my toaster feels? This all sounds ludicrous until we realize that our algorithms are increasingly being made in our own image. As we’ve learned more about our own brains, we’ve enlisted that knowledge to create algori ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Scientists may have found a way to generate environmentally friendly paper from poop—cow and elephant poop that is. Although this may seem strange and unconventional, this poo-per actually offers a more simple and sustainable alternative to the traditional, resource-intense papermaking process. The cows and elephants streamline the papermaking operation by taking up a good chunk of the pre-processing duty in their digestive system. In traditional paper production, ...read more