Dr. Edith Bone has decided not to cry.
On this autumn afternoon in 1956, her seven years of solitary confinement have come to a sudden end. Beyond the prison gates, the Hungarian Revolution’s final, scattered shots are echoing down the streets of Budapest. Inside the gates, Bone emerges through the prison’s front door into the courtyard’s bewildering sunlight. She is 68 years old, stout and arthritic.
Bone was born in Budapest in 1889 and proved an intelligent — if disobe ...read more
Astronomers are cracking the secrets of our solar system within the oldest rocks — on Earth and beyond.
The oldest object known to humans fell from the sky on Feb. 8, 1969, with the furor of a divine omen. The blue-white fireball streaked over northern Mexico at 1:05 a.m., ending with a staccato of booms heard from hundreds of miles away. A small asteroid had struck Earth’s atmosphere and exploded — raining thousands of fragments over the desert. NASA dispatched scientists ...read more
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Hearing Hairs Restored: Tiny hairs in our inner ears, called cochlear hair cells, are vital to our natural perception of sound, and once we lose them, we don’t grow them back. But scientists published in Cell Reports that they’ve discovered a way to regenerate those cells in mouse, primate and human tissue samples. After exposing supporting cells — cells that can create new cochlear hairs — to a specialized drug mixture, the team saw significant new hair cell growth.
Baby ...read more
With a series of papers out today, Homo naledi gets both a birthdate and more complete.
Discovered in a South African cave, H. naledi first came to light in 2015, in a paper by University of the Witwatersrand anthropologist Lee Berger. Though the remains were undated at the time, estimates put them at anywhere from 100,000 to several million years old. This was based on a physical analysis of the bones, which contained a curious mixture of modern and archaic traits. Now, aft ...read more
The filagree of atmospheric patterns at Jupiter's south pole bears an eerie resemblance to a phenomenon here on Earth
When I spotted this image of Jupiter on NASA's website, I felt a bit disoriented.
At first glance, it looked like a fanciful artist's conception of the giant planet. But it's actually a real image of Jupiter's south polar region, acquired by the Juno spacecraft. (Make sure to click on it, and then click again to enlarge it.)
The image has been enhanced to help bring ...read more
A new paper in the prestigious journal PNAS contains a rather glaring blooper.
The paper, from Oxford University researchers Eiluned Pearce et al., is about the relationship between genes and social behaviour. The blooper is right there in the abstract, which states that "three neuropeptides (β-endorphin, oxytocin, and dopamine) play particularly important roles" in human sociality. But dopamine is not a neuropeptide.
Neither are serotonin or testosterone, but throughout the paper, Pea ...read more
