In many ways, the human brain is still the best computer around. For one, it’s highly efficient. Our largest supercomputers require millions of watts, enough to power a small town, but the human brain uses approximately the same energy as a 20-watt bulb. While teenagers may seem to take forever to learn what their parents regard as basic life skills, humans and other animals are also capable of learning very quickly. Most of all, the brain is truly great at sorting through torrents of data ...read more

We've featured a number of articles about the sexual proclivities of spiders: from oral sex to genital mutilation, arachnids have a wide-ranging sex life. Here's another example -- female brown widow spiders often eat their male partners after mating. That's pretty wild, and it gets even more intense: these scientists found that male spiders prefer to mate with older females, even though these females are less fertile and more likely to eat the men after the deed is done. The ...read more

By now, it's pretty clear that psilocybin, the active compound in "magic mushrooms" has a potent effect on human beings. But psychedelic visions obviously weren't the evolutionary force that caused some fungi to make the compound — it's an unforeseen side effect. With a new genetic analysis, researchers think they've identified why magic mushrooms started producing "magic" in the first place. The culprit, they say, is insects. Psychedelic Genetics By sequencing the genomes of three s ...read more

For doctors, looking at a person’s birth date doesn’t tell them much. Sure, a person might be 75 on paper, but genes, lifestyle and environment all play into health. So it's important to get a good understanding of our how old our bodies really are — a biological age rather than chronological age. A new study, published Monday in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, found that a simple urine test could deliver valuable information about our biological age. Age is Just a Number In ...read more

Meanwhile, frigid polar air has spilled south into Eurasia and western North America. Is there a connection to human-caused warming? It's happening again: In the dead of winter, warm air from the south is surging across the Arctic toward the North Pole. Today, weather models suggest that temperatures there have indeed soared to above freezing. Meanwhile, cold polar air has spilled south into Eurasia and western North America. It's almost as if someone left the Arctic's refrigerator do ...read more

What happens when you're hit by something going 15,000 miles per hour? Total obliteration, more or less. That's a very real scenario that spacecraft engineers must keep in mind every time they put something in space. Collisions with objects in orbit are rare, but they do happen. In the past, paint chips have left craters in the space shuttle and a French satellite was disabled in 1996 after its gravity-gradient boom was severed by a chunk from an exploded rocket. Shields Up! To protec ...read more

Life finds a way, even in the most inhospitable conditions. In extreme environments such as that present in the hyper-arid center of the Atacama Desert, there are still signs of life. In the most Mars-like location on Earth, a microbial community survives, showing episodic biological activity in the near absence of any moisture. In dry areas at of the desert's core, where everything is bombarded by intense ultraviolet radiation, Dr. Dirk Schulze-Makuch and his colleagues detected microbes ...read more

It seems simple right, leave your keys in the key bowl on the kitchen counter and you won’t lose them? Simple? Yes. Do we keep to this routine daily? On occasion. Keys these days seem to grow a pair of legs and find themselves their own “safe spot”, and on a regular basis. According to the "Lost & Found Survey" by Pixie, 28 percent of Americans lose their key at least once a week. That’s a substantial amount of time that could be spent actually getting to work or sch ...read more

“Rockets can’t fly in space! There’s no air for the engine to burn in space! And there’s no air for the rocket to push against in space! WE’VE NEVER LEFT EARTH!” So goes the cry of people who don’t believe we landed on the Moon — at least, this is one of their claims. But it’s wrong. In spite of what they think, rockets can and do fly in a vacuum. Fuel and oxidizer mix and ignite in a combustion chamber causing a controlled explosion that is ...read more

The global footprint of fishing is even bigger than expected. But a novel monitoring tool could help put it on a more sustainable path. To satisfy our hunger, we humans catch something on the order of one trillion fish ever year — a yield that amounts to more than 90 million tons of animal flesh. We're clearly the top predator of the seas. But just how much of the oceans are being fished at an industrial scale, what are the patterns, and how are they changi ...read more