Under duress, nerve cells get a little help from their friends. Brain cells called astrocytes send their own energy-producing mitochondria to struggling nerve cells. Those gifts may help the neurons rebound after injuries such as strokes, scientists propose in the July 28 Nature. It was known that astrocytes — star-shaped glial cells that, among other […]
Many homeowners go out of their way to make their yards friendly to birds. They plant vegetation or install feeders and birdhouses — and battle the squirrels that try to take advantage of that generosity. But what seems like a good deed for nature may be luring some birds to their deaths, a new study […]
Betty, heralded as a toolmaking prodigy among New Caledonian crows, may not have been such a whiz bird after all. Her apparently spontaneous wire-bending is getting a closer, skeptical look based on new information about what the birds do in the wild. As a lab resident, Betty astounded researchers more than a decade ago by […]
CHICAGO — It’s a Higgs boson bonanza for particle physicists, who are capitalizing on the newest data from the Large Hadron Collider to delve more deeply into the particle’s properties. Scientists are keeping a keen eye out for any deviations from the standard model of particle physics, the overarching theory that describes elementary particles and […]
There’s a new equation floating around the world of physics these days that would make Einstein proud. It’s pretty easy to remember: ER=EPR. You might suspect that to make this equation work, P must be equal to 1. But the symbols in this equation stand not for numbers, but for names. E, you probably guessed, […]
After decades of research revealing their sophisticated lives, Neandertals still can’t shake their reputation as knuckle-dragging cavemen. And it’s the Old Man of La Chapelle’s fault. The Old Man of La Chapelle was the first relatively complete Neandertal skeleton ever found. Three French abbés discovered the bones in 1908. Soon after, geologist and paleontologist Marcellin […]
Venus might have once been prime real estate. New computer simulations suggest that the hellish planet next door could have been habitable in the not-too-distant past, with moderate temperatures, plenty of seaside locales and even a few spots for skiing. Modern Venus is harsh: sulfuric acid rain, crushing atmospheric pressure and a surface temperature around […]
Few of the expletives discussed in cognitive scientist Benjamin Bergen’s new book can be spelled out in this review. But Bergen argues, in a bluntly engaging way, that the largely secret science of swearing reveals much about who we are. Based on surveys of what people in several Western nations regard as unacceptable, the author […]
A spacecraft destined to bring samples of an asteroid back to Earth is scheduled to launch tonight. NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission will launch September 8 at 7:05 p.m. EDT atop an Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Air Force station in Florida. The probe will head for 101955 Bennu, a roughly 500-meter-wide asteroid whose 1.2-year orbit […]
A stretch of ocean off the coast of Cape Cod more than four times the size of Rhode Island has become the first U.S. marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean. President Barack Obama formally announced the new 12,725-square-kilometer monument, called the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, September 15 at the Our Ocean […]