Benjamin, the last living thylacine (as far as we know), photographed in 1933 at Tasmania’s Hobart Zoo, three years before his death. Credit: Photographer unknown, Wikimedia Commons.
While I have mixed feelings about de-extinction, particularly for animals that have been out of the picture for thousands of years (I’m looking at you, woolly mammoth), I’d argue the species with the strongest case for giving it a shot would be Thylacinus cynocephalus, better known as the Tas ...read more
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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
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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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The move paves the way for animal-human hybrid research.
Remember the freakish animal-human hybrids in The Island of Dr. Moreau? The science fiction fantasy might return, approaching science fact. In August, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) proposed lifting a funding ban on research that uses human stem cells to create animal embryos. The move would free U.S. scientists to create, under carefully monitored conditions, the genetic equivalent of an animal-human hybrid. These “chi ...read more
New study finds truth in an ancient myth.
According to ancient Chinese texts that mix historical events with legend, about 4,000 years ago a hero named Yu tamed a flood and went on to become China’s first emperor. The story may be largely myth, but geologic evidence reported in Science this August suggests that at least the Great Flood was real — and really Great. “It’s sort of the equivalent of if we found evidence of Noah’s flood from the Bible,” says T ...read more
