As a person with life-long hearing loss, I rely on hearing aids to help me navigate my muffled world. Because I have layers of hearing loss in one of my ears, I function as a “one-eared listener,” and sometimes, my hearing aids aren’t enough. The sounds I hear are often garbled due to my auditory processing disorder, which can make language hard to decipher.Yet, I love music. This might seem counterintuitive — how can a person with hearing loss enjoy music?With the help of brain imaging, ...read more

As sessile living things, plants must adapt and respond to their ever-changing environments. And in recent years, understanding how roots may regulate high temperatures has gained traction among scientists.Biologists thought young plant shoots controlled temperature within the plants and acted as a transmitter that signaled the root to alter its growth, said Marcel Quint, a plant biologist and study author at the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, in a statement.Now, plant biologists fou ...read more

We all forget things from time to time. Whether it’s a mistaken name or a misplaced wallet, forgetfulness is a normal part of life. But older adults are particularly prone to worrying about their memory. According to recent research, around 48 percent of adults in their 50s and early 60s anticipate developing dementia in the United States as they age, and around 44 percent worry about the possibility of memory-deteriorating disorders.Of course, that tendency to worry makes sense, since Alzheim ...read more

Supermassive black holes take time to form. That’s why scientists are puzzling over the discovery of one that existed a mere 570 million years after the Big Bang, only 100 to 300 years after the first stars began to form in the nascent universe.Observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) have indicated that the black hole – at the center of an early galaxy, CEERS 1019 – was busy some 13 billion years ago, sucking down gas and growing larger. Meanwhile, its host galaxy was creat ...read more

Human beings have evolved to thrive in the conditions of our planet. Often though, people thrust themselves into extreme environments: scientists studying Antarctic weather patterns, divers recovering wreckage from the deep sea, or explorers mapping sprawling cave systems.What we know is that people are resilient, and the human psyche can adapt to deal with a range of scenarios. But what about being marooned on another planet, with only a thin barrier separating you and your peers from the vacuu ...read more

In its 3.7-billion-year history on Earth, life has had a few setbacks.As far as we know, there have been five major extinction events where a significant percentage of species were wiped out of existence. Several things can cause such a dramatic destabilization of Earth’s life cycles, including super-volcanic eruptions, ice ages and pandemics.However, another mechanism by which life faces existential threat is, of course, gigantic asteroid impacts. And when it comes to these rocks plunging int ...read more

We’ve all occasionally wished that our pets could speak, but their mouths, tongues and vocal cords just aren’t built for it. However, cats do sometimes use their tongues to communicate with us; they just employ a form of nonverbal communication — licking. This simple act sends a message that we, being only human, may not always understand — or appreciate.Anyone who has ever been licked by a cat knows to expect one thing: the sudden sensation of a patch of skin being lightly sanded — ov ...read more

A study led by researchers at the University of Maine spearheaded a new approach to finding where ticks love to lurk. The Maine Forest Tick Survey trained hundreds of woodland owners in Maine to systematically comb their properties for disease-toting ticks to discern how forest management may influence the pest’s prevalence.Ticks pose a growing public health burden. Lyme disease, which can be transmitted by deer ticks, is the second most common infectious disease reported in Maine. Each year, ...read more

Imagine someone chopping vegetables on a cutting board. No, really. Before reading on, take a moment to truly visualize the scene as vividly as possible.Try as you might, odds are your mental image will omit some basic features. Was the picture thorough enough to specify the size of the knife or the material of the cutting board? The kind of vegetables? The person’s gender? The color of their hair and clothes?A recent study published in Cognition found that most people respond “yes” to som ...read more

Many birds survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, but not all. Some went extinct along with the non-avian dinosaurs, and scientists aren’t sure why. When an asteroid hit the Earth, tossing up dust into the sky, why did some winged creatures survive while others fell by the wayside?A pair of new studies, based in part on the discovery of ancient baby bird feathers preserved in amber, suggest that a major factor lies in how the different bird groups molted.Two Different Types of Baby BirdFeat ...read more