During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, while the rest of us were binge-watching TV shows and baking banana bread, a couple of researchers at Johns Hopkins University took their minds off the healthcare crisis by counting the brain cells of fruit flies and mosquitoes. The researchers, Joshua Raji and Christopher Potter, discovered that the two animals had around 200,000 brain cells on average, mostly neurons, with about 10 to 15 percent non-neuronal cells, such as glial cells. (Glial ...read more

You might have heard stories about someone who has a photographic memory. Perhaps you even thought you or someone you know might have one. But is a photographic memory real? The brain works as a super machine, storing several types of memory. Imagine it as a computer hard drive, where it’s possible to keep large amounts of compartmentalized data. Yet there is a limit to the amount of information we can retain in any given memory. For example, according to German neuroscientist Boris Konrad, †...read more

How did dinosaurs have sex? It sounds like the start of a risqué joke. In the early years of paleontology, it would have been considered beneath the dignity of the field even to pose the question. These days, though, it’s a completely legitimate subject, one to which paleontologists and paleobiologists have devoted years of patient study.The problem is, science may never have a definitive punchline to the question, because we honestly aren’t sure exactly how dinosaurs reproduced, or whether ...read more

The first woolly mammoths were warm, but the last woolly mammoths were warmer. In fact, a paper published in Current Biology states that the most famous features of the woolly mammoths, including their fluffy fur, intensified throughout their 700,000-year stint in Siberia.Love Dalén, one of the authors of the paper, poses with the Yuka mammoth, whose genome was included in the analyses. (Credit: Ian Watts)Woolly, Woolly, Woolier The token trait of the woolly mammoth, its fur, allowed the specie ...read more

If you regularly ignored a playground’s monkey bars, seesaw and slide — and instead made a beeline straight to the merry-go-round — you’re likely familiar with the intoxicatingly dizzy feeling that accompanies a good spin session.The light-headedness may come with a touch of vertigo, causing the world to tilt around you, or even bring on feelings of sudden elation. Sufi whirling dervishes take advantage of these effects, in fact, as a form of meditation and to induce spiritual experience ...read more

Venus, our nearest planetary neighbor in the solar system, has for a long time remained shrouded in a cloud of mystery — literally. The planet is ensconced in a thick, dense carbon dioxide atmosphere that obstructs our direct view of its surface.Recently, however, planetary scientists have made new discoveries about the geography of Venus, which suggest the planet has at least 85,000 volcanoes on its surface (and potentially even more smaller volcanoes). The research is bringing us closer to u ...read more

In Liu Cixin’s famous science fiction series The Three Body Problem, human beings make first contact with the Trisolarans – an alien civilization incapable of deception or lying because they broadcast their thoughts. This ability creates a deep mistrust of human beings on behalf of the Trisolarans, as our thoughts and agendas are private to our own subjective reality. Human beings have no foolproof way to know if someone is telling the truth. Sometimes our intuition can give us clues; strang ...read more

People stop their cars simply because a little light turns from green to red. They crowd onto buses, trains and planes with complete strangers, yet fights seldom break out. Large, strong men routinely walk right past smaller, weaker ones without demanding their valuables. People pay their taxes and donate to food banks and other charities.Most of us give little thought to these everyday examples of cooperation. But to biologists, they’re remarkable — most animals don’t behave that way.“E ...read more

Bronze Age humans, 3,000 years ago, got high on hallucinogenic plant alkaloids so powerful and dangerous that even psychedelic users of today avoid them, according to a new study. The humans may have had out-of-body experiences or thought they were growing fur or feathers as a result of consuming the anticholinergic substances atropine or scopolamine. Symptoms would have started more mildly with dilated pupils, dry skin and a racing heart. As the trip set in, the user would have experienced full ...read more