Vishay Singh

Author Vishay Singh

Here's to the household names and forgotten figures who accomplished incredible feats of knowledge — no capes required. ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

Even though technology has helped measure strength and flag strike zones, earthquakes still have a few mysteries that rattle experts. ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

New research into the cephalopod genome is undermining our assumptions about evolution, and the role that DNA mutations play in updating a species' physiology. Researchers from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole and Tel Aviv University have been studying how cephalopods — squids, octopuses, cuttlefish and nautiluses — edit their genome, and found that instead of relying on DNA mutations to adapt, they have the ability to make changes to their RNA, the genetic "messe ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

A case of left-right confusion misled researchers about how dogs process language. Last August, Hungarian neuroscientists Atilla Andics and colleagues reported that the left hemisphere of the dog brain is selectively activated in response to the lexical properties (i.e. the meaning) of spoken words. This result was very interesting, not least because lexical processing is also lateralized to the left hemisphere in most humans. The paper appeared in the prestigious journal Science. However, ...read more

Author Vishay Singh

On the list of exoplanets that could hold life, GJ 1132b wouldn’t come near making the cut. It’s a super-Earth whose upper atmosphere reaches 500 degrees Fahrenheit (260 degrees Celsius), meaning it only gets hotter as you move down. It’s barely a hair away from its star, completing a year in 1.6 Earth days. Life is incredibly unlikely to survive there. Yet it may be one of the most important planets to come along in the search for life. So why’s that? Well, it’s ...read more