Whoa! What are these weird whirlpools spotted by satellites at opposite sides of the planet?

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Satellite image of green vortex swirling in the Gulf of Finland on July 18. (Source: NASA Earth Observatory) I hope you’ll excuse the exaggerated exuberance in the headline, but when I saw the image above, and then the animation lower down in this story, my first reaction really was to exclaim out loud “whoa!â€� I was really struck by the two very curious whirlpool-like features on opposite sides of Earth — one giga ...read more

MDMA Makes Octopuses Want to Mingle, Too

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A California two-spot octopus. (Credit: Greg Amptman/Shutterstock) A neuroscientist and a marine biologist got together and decided to give octopuses MDMA. It sounds like a joke, but it really happened, and the results reveal something unique about our neurocircuitry and human evolution. Eric Edsinger is an octopus researcher at the University of Chicago who recently helped sequence the genome of Octopus bimaculoides—the California two-spot octopus. Like most octopuses, this ...read more

You Can Hear A Smile. When You Do, You'll Smile Back.

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(Credit: mimagephotography/shutterstock) Seeing a smile can make a person unconsciously smile in return, and now scientists find that digitally mimicking the voice of a smiling person can also make people reflexively smile. Charles Darwin and his contemporaries were among the first scientists to investigate smiles. Darwin suggested that smiles and several other facial expressions are universal to all humans, rather than unique products of a person’s culture. â€&oe ...read more

How A Stomach Acid Could Help Cure Cocaine Addiction

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When it comes to studying cocaine addiction, one group of researchers has stomach acid on their brains. In a paper published Thursday in PLOS Biology, researchers find that a surgery that diverts some bile acid into the bloodstream seems to cut back cravings among mice with a cocaine habit. It’s a nifty angle on a pernicious problem, but it’s also another piece of evidence that bile acid, a compound produced by our ...read more

This AI Calculates at the Speed of Light

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Signals in the brain hop from neuron to neuron at a speed of roughly 390 feet per second. Light, on the other hand, travels 186,282 miles in a second. Imagine the possibilities if we were that quick-witted. Well, computers are getting there. Researchers from UCLA on Thursday revealed a 3D-printed, optical neural network that allows computers to solve complex mathematical computations at the speed of light. In other words, we don’t stand a chance. Hyperbole aside, research ...read more

How We Discovered the Black Hole at the Center of Our Galaxy

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On Thursday, astronomers announced the first observations of the effect of a black hole’s gravitational redshift — light coming from a star in the gravitational field near a black hole looked redder than it would’ve outside the black hole’s influence. The black hole responsible was Sagittarius A* (pronounced “Sagittarius A-star�), the supermassive black hole at the center of our M ...read more

Supermassive Black Hole Caught Sucking Energy From Nearby Starlight

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Astronomers have long had their eye on a group of stars that precariously circles just outside the supermassive black hole at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. And, in a discovery announced by the European Southern Observatory on Thursday, scientists say they've finally spotted one of these stars as it travels through the black hole’s gravitational field. It's the first test of Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity near a supermassive black hole. The event, recorde ...read more

Secrets Of The Strange Stars That Circle Our Supermassive Black Hole

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High winds are the norm at the center of the Milky Way. Astronomers have now clocked suns orbiting the galactic core at a staggering 3,000 miles (4,800 kilometers) per second. At this rate, Earth would complete its orbit around the sun in a mere three days. What lurks at the galaxy’s core that can accelerate stars to such speeds? Astronomers have considered various possibilities. Does the center of the galaxy harbor a tight cluster of superdense stellar remnants (neutron sta ...read more

How A Worldwide Parasitic Infection Might Shape Human Behavior

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Entrepreneurs are wired different than the rest of us. They’ll embrace huge financial risk to start a business despite statistics showing most startups fail. That chutzpa often gets tied to environmental factors, like how they were raised or where they went to college, or even to an X factor — something unknown but all-important that allows them to accept risk without flinching. Other studies have even hinted at a genetic component to risk-taking, or sensat ...read more

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