Which way is out again? (Credit: Szasz-Fabian Jozsef)
Graduate psychology students can attest to the monotony of studying lab rats. Drop the animals into a maze, take diligent notes as they scurry around, repeat ad nauseum.
Mazes have been a mainstay in psychological research for more than a century, with scientists running rodents through contraptions to test their memory, learning and spatial skills. But they’ve always had limitations.
Now modern technology is finding its way into maze ...read more
Signs of leprosy mark a skull found in a Danish cemetery in use from the 13th through 16th centuries. (Credit Dorthe Dangvard Pedersen)
One of the most dreaded diseases for millennia, leprosy is still with us — though it has lost much of its menace. But some of its mystery remains, particularly its origins. In a study out today, researchers turned to ancient DNA to discover leprosy’s roots, and the path they followed took them to a surprising place.
Leprosy results from a ...read more
Reconstructing a video from the retinal activity. Left: two example stimulus frames displayed to the rat retina. Middle and right: Reconstructions obtained with two different methods (sparse linear decoding in the middle and nonlinear decoding on the right). Green circles denote true disc positions. (Credit: Botella-Soler et al.)
Using artificial intelligence techniques, researchers successfully took signals from the retinas of rats and reconstructed movies of what they saw, a new study finds. ...read more
Archaeologists have excavated a cave in Kenya showing artifacts over a period of tens of thousands of years, beginning about 78,000 years ago. Some of the artifacts are, from left, red ochre; sea shell beads, ostrich eggshell beads; bone tools; and a close-up of a bone tool showing scrapes from use. (Credit: Francesco D’Errico and Africa Pitch)
Excavation of an East African cave is offering clues to human culture and innovation over an expansive period starting 78,000 years ago.
The arti ...read more
(Credit: thodonal88/Shutterstock)
Earlier this year, a surgical resident was paged to the emergency room to evaluate a man with an angry mass bulging beneath his chin.
Dr. Habib Zalzal half race-walked, half ran to find a panting 40-year-old in obvious distress. In addition to an infection, the man had a choked, high-pitched voice, an elevated tongue, a swollen neck, and a drool. “Please help me,” read the panicked look on his face.
In his patient’s eyes, Dr. Zalzal also saw ...read more
The grassy Eurasian steppes cover thousands of miles, from northwestern China to Hungary, creating what one researcher calls a “highway” for cultural exchange and conquest. (Credit Wikimedia Commons)
A trio of new studies, two in Nature and the third in Science, analyzed genetic material from scores of ancient humans to create a new map of human movement, as well as the spread of language, the hepatitis B virus and horse domestication, across the sprawling Eurasian steppes ...read more
(Credit: Igor ZH/Shutterstock)
On a basic level, it seems that most of the universe can be divided into two kinds of big objects: stars and planets.
A star is a massive ball of burning gas whose main function is fusing hydrogen into helium. They are formed by huge clouds of gas that eventually come together in sufficient quantities to kick off nuclear reactions.
Planets, in turn, come from the material left around the star after its formation. They form from small bits that clump together ...read more
The new report from the National Advisory Council for Environmental Policy and Technology (NACEPT) is out: “Information to Action: Strengthening EPA Citizen Science Partnerships for Environmental Protection.” This report is a follow-up to the Council’s first report, “Environmental Protection Belongs to the People.”
There are ten recommendations to the EPA in the report(s). As articulated on the EPA’s website: The Council’s April 2018 report, Information ...read more
