(Credit: Shutterstock) The concept of being able to predict the sex of a baby during early pregnancy or even influence it by eating or doing certain things when trying to conceive has been the subject of public fascination and debate for many centuries. But surely the sex of a fetus is exclusively determined by the father’s sperm, carrying an X chromosome for girls and a Y chromosome for boys? It turns out this is not the full story. Since the 17th century, it has been recognized that sl ...read more

“Our results revealed characteristic patterns of brain activity associated with Gangnam Style”. So say the authors of a new paper called Neural correlates of the popular music phenomenon. The authors, Qiaozhen Chen et al. from Zhejiang in China, used fMRI to record brain activity while 15 volunteers listened to two musical pieces: Psy’s ‘Gangnam Style‘ and a “light music” control, Richard Clayderman’s piano piece ‘A Comme Amour‘. Chen ...read more

La Niña typically cools the Pacific. But this time, large swathes of warmer-than-average sea temperatures have muted the cooling. A comparison of sea surface temperature anomalies in the Pacific Ocean for two seven-day periods: Dec. 28, 1998 to Jan. 3, 1999; and Dec. 26, 2016 to Jan. 1, 2017. The strong La Niña of 1998/1999 is characterized by widespread blue colors concentrated especially along the equator west of South America. Whereas today’s Pacific i ...read more

A remarkable and troubling new paper: Addressing reverse inference in psychiatric neuroimaging: Meta-analyses of task-related brain activation in common mental disorders Icahn School of Medicine researchers Emma Sprooten and colleagues carried out an ambitious task: to pull together the results of every fMRI study which has compared task-related brain activation in people with a mental illness and healthy controls. Sprooten et al.’s analysis included 537 studies with a total of 21,427 par ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) No one wants to catch the flu, and the best line of defense is the seasonal influenza vaccine. But producing an effective annual flu shot relies on accurately predicting which flu strains are most likely to infect the population in any given season. It requires the coordination of multiple health centers around the globe as the virus travels from region to region. Once epidemiologists settle on target flu strains, vaccine production shifts into high gear; it takes approx ...read more

Now SpaceX is eyeing Mars. Since the dawn of the Space Age, science fiction enthusiasts have fantasized about reusable rockets. Over the past year, Elon Musk and his company, SpaceX, made those visions a reality. Now, the tech mogul has his sights set on a bigger, redder prize. SpaceX has tried four times in the past two years to land one of its Falcon 9 rockets at sea; each exploded. But in April, a Falcon 9 successfully touched down on a drone ship in the Atlantic — a first — ...read more

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New insights brought to you by the Dawn spacecraft. Dwarf planet Ceres, found in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, sports a weirdly tall and lonely mountain: Ahuna Mons. After comparing it with domes on Earth, scientists now believe Ahuna Mons formed when a slushy mix of internal ice and natural antifreeze reached the surface along a duct — just as magma builds volcanoes on our planet. Once on Ceres’ surface, the Slurpee-like material couldn’t flow far, and it slo ...read more