Cotard’s syndrome, or Cotard’s delusion as it is often called, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person believes they are dead, that they do not even exist, or sometimes that the world itself does not exist.The condition was described in 1880 by Jules Cotard, a French neurologist and psychiatrist. In a presentation to the Société Médico-Psychologique, Cotard reported the case of a 43-year-old patient who believed she had “no brain, nerves, chest or entrails, and was just ...read more
A new paper claims to have solved a long-outstanding mystery in neuroscience – how, exactly, do the cells of people with Huntington’s disease produce damaging amyloid proteins from other proteins in a game of maladaptive Lego?Amyloids accumulate in nerve cells, forming plaques that result in cell death and contribute to the progressive symptoms of Huntington’s. The disease that killed Woody Guthrie causes changes in mental state and problems with moving, speaking and breathing.The new rese ...read more
Yes, Einstein wrote something along the lines of “time is an illusion.” But it’s not altogether clear what Einstein meant — and to understand what he might have been saying, we must dig into the circumstances that caused him to write it.A Stubbornly Persistent IllusionA close friend of Einstein’s, Michele Besso, passed away in 1955. Only a month before his own death, Einstein wrote to Besso’s grieving family.His letter said, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahe ...read more
Tunicates, strange tube-like creatures in various colors, shapes and sizes, are found on ship hulls, larger seashells, pier pilings, seafloors and the backs of enormous crabs in oceans worldwide. Their basic shape is a short, barrel-like sack with two siphons or openings that filter feed water from one siphon for plankton before shooting it back through the other. About 3,000 species of tunicates worldwide reside in saltwater habitats. Despite this, there were no solid records of them in rock de ...read more
Between 1909 and 1913, a field expedition led by Berlin’s Natural History Museum dug a whopping 230 tons of late-Jurassic fossils out of Tanzania’s Tendaguru formation. While nearly 95 percent of the total fossil haul has been prepared and many specimens are on display in museums today, 46 original transport cases and crates from the expedition remained stowed away and unpacked for decades in museum storage. Now 100 years later, the cases themselves are historical artifacts. To peer inside t ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine
