When Herminia Pasantes Ordóñez was about 14 years old, in 1950, she heard her mother tell her father that she would never find a husband. Pasantes had to wear thick glasses for her poor eyesight. In her mother’s eyes, those glasses meant her future as a “good woman” was doomed. “This made my life easier,” […]
A fast-spinning neutron star south of the constellation Leo is the most massive of its kind seen so far, according to new observations. The record-setting collapsed star, named PSR J0952-0607, weighs about 2.35 times as much as the sun, researchers report July 11 on arXiv.org. “That’s the heaviest well-measured neutron star that has been found […]
Hot or not? Peeking inside an animal’s ear — even a fossilized one — may tell you whether it was warm- or cold-blooded. Using a novel method that analyzes the size and shape of the inner ear canals, researchers suggest that mammal ancestors abruptly became warm-blooded about 233 million years ago, the team reports in […]
Human tears could carry a flood of useful information. With just a few drops, a new technique can spot eye disease and even glimpse signs of diabetes, scientists report July 20 in ACS Nano. “We wanted to demonstrate the potential of using tears to detect disease,” says Fei Liu, a biomedical engineer at Wenzhou Medical […]
A dog’s brain is wired for smell. Now, a new map shows just how extensive that wiring is. Powerful nerve connections link the dog nose to wide swaths of the brain, researchers report July 11 in the Journal of Neuroscience. One of these canine connections, a hefty link between areas that handle smell and vision, […]
Two partial skeletons unearthed in northeastern China have dashed the record for the oldest avian relatives of today’s birds. The remains belonged to a species, Archaeornithura meemannae, that lived 130.7 million years ago — about 6 million years earlier than the previous record holders. Fossil hunters discovered bones of the hummingbird-sized creatures embedded in siltstone […]
The 18-year-old had stabbed himself four times in the neck and chest with a pair of scissors. Alone in his dorm room, he had suddenly felt trapped, convinced that the only way to get out was to kill himself. When he woke up hours later in a pool of blood, the psychedelic trip that had […]
On a test of visual perception, children with autism perceive moving dots with more clarity than children without the disorder. The results, published in the May 6 Journal of Neuroscience, reveal a way in which children with autism see the world differently. When asked to determine the overall direction of a mess of dots moving […]
A zap to the head can stretch the time between intention and action, a new study finds. The results help illuminate how intentions arise in the brain. The study, published in the May 6 Journal of Neuroscience, “provides fascinating new clues” about the process of internal decision making, says neuroscientist Gabriel Kreiman of Harvard University. […]
Earth — a planet of oceans, rivers and rainforests — grew up in an interplanetary desert. When the solar system formed about 4.6 billion years ago, shards of calcium- and aluminum-rich minerals stuck together, building ever-larger pebbles and boulders that smashed together and assembled the rocky planets, including Earth. But Earth’s signature ingredient was nowhere […]