Which one is correct? (Credit: Johns Hopkins University) Most of us learn the ABCs in our youth. We see and say the letters so many times they eventually become etched in our minds. But researchers from Johns Hopkins University discovered that many people don’t know what the most common lowercase print version of the sixth letter of the alphabet really is. Heck, some didn’t even know there were two types. Can You Guess the Correct Version? There are two ways people write t ...read more

Probes that can transmit electricity inside the skull raise questions about personal autonomy and responsibility. (Credit: Hellerhoff, CC BY-SA) Mr. B loves Johnny Cash, except when he doesn’t. Mr. X has watched his doctors morph into Italian chefs right before his eyes. The link between the two? Both Mr. B and Mr. X received deep brain stimulation (DBS), a procedure involving an implant that sends electric impulses to specific targets in the brain to alter neural activity. While brain im ...read more

(Credit: Vadim Sadovski/Shutterstock) Legions of metal nuggets swirl about our solar system. Metallic asteroids number in the millions, but they’re relatively quite rare—bits and pieces of lonely matter that never became planets. Occasionally, they find a home. A tiny fraction of these dull, misshapen hunks of metal have rained onto our planet for millennia, sparking briefly alight as they kiss the atmosphere before biting deep into the planet’s surface—if the ...read more

Regular readers will know of my interest in the theory that ketamine is a rapid-acting antidepressant. I’ve blogged about developments in ketamine-depression research for several years now, my interest being spurred partly by my own struggles with depression. As I’ve said previously, the research on ketamine as an antidepressant is promising, but I do not think it is possible to say yet how ketamine works in depression. I think it is possible that ketamine’s apparently powerfu ...read more

This set of images shows the gravitationally lensed galaxy clusters where astronomers discovered the most distant star ever seen. The star, nicknamed Icarus, is marked by the white arrow in the bottom inset image. (Credit: NASA/ESA/P. Kelly (University of California, Berkeley)) In a study published today in Nature Astronomy, an international team of researchers announced the discovery of the most distant star ever observed. The team detected the blue supergiant star — whic ...read more

The launch of a Zipline delivery drone that can parachute medical supplies to remote hospitals and clinics. Credit: Zipline Delivery drones can be game changers if they go beyond merely offering convenience to becoming lifesaving technologies on a daily basis. That has already become reality in Rwanda, where a Silicon Valley startup called Zipline uses delivery drones to make timely drop-offs to hospitals and clinics across the country. Now Zipline ...read more

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(Credit: frank60/Shutterstock) A commonly used anti-parasite drug could be the next weapon in the fight against malaria. Researchers from Kenya and the United Kingdom report that dosing people with ivermectin, commonly used in heartworm pills, makes them deadly targets for the mosquitoes that transmit malaria. Nearly all of the mosquitoes in the experiment died after drinking ivermectin-laced blood, they say. Deadly Blood While malaria rates have been dropping historically, the disease still a ...read more