Medicine & TechnologyWe know, you thought the whole The Dress thing was over-and you were glad. But rather than being a simple Internet meme on the scale of dancing babies and funny cats, The Dress is helping neuroscientists understand the way that the human brain perceives and thinks. Three research papers discussion cognition and perception in light of The Dress have just been published in Current Biology.
Three major universities are now engaged in a patent lawsuit to protect their rights to use genome editing technology called CRISPR-Cas9. The fallout will have far more impact than the simple settling of ownership and intellectual property rights, however; experts believe that CRISPR-Cas9 may be the most efficient route toward a ticking off items on a laundry list of amazing biotechnological discoveries.
A group of scientists in Italy have taken their inspiration from the octopus, creating a robotic arm that can bend, squeeze, and stretch through even cluttered environments. The device was created specifically for surgeons who need to access confined or remote areas of the body more easily.
In our increasingly more narcissistic selfie culture, sometimes the right selfie can deliver a powerful message in an unparalleled way. One woman with skin cancer is trying to use social media to change this part of our American tanning habit by sharing a selfie of her face, blistered and scabbed from skin cancer treatments.
Research has proven that rats place more value on saving others than obtaining a food reward. Rats, especially those who have nearly drowned in the past, will resuce each other from drowning. They experience a kind of empathy.
A Massey University research team has discovered some interesting new truths about the ways arranged marriages affect genetic diversity and the ways that humans follow even important cultural rules selectively-and they may surprise you. The results show that the isolated Indonesian Rindi tribe produces genetic diversity similar to random mating by loosely complying with their rules which mandate arranged, inbred marriages.
It's the ultimate whodunnit: what kills galaxies? A new study, published today in the journal Nature, names strangulation as the primary cause of galactic death.
Honeybees are dying en masse all over the globe, and it's not just lovers of honey that should be concerned. These mass deaths will change our dinner plates forever, not to mention raise the cost of eating generally. In a world where food security and hunger are crucially important, this is bad news for everyone.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has just published a striking picture of Europa, Jupiter's icy moon. In the image the surface looks like shattered glass; it reveals many interlocking cracks in the moon's icy crust which were formed by an ocean below the moon's surface. Now a team from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) led by planetary scientist Kevin Hand has identified the cracks as sea salt.
One of the latest breakthroughs from Yale scientists: the mighty dino-chicken. The Yale team used molecular manipulation to grow chicken embryos with Velociraptor snouts and published their results yesterday in the journal Evolution. The embryos did not hatch.
Scientists at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and GlaxoSmithKline are homing in on a breakthrough in the fight against AIDS-one that has remained out of reach: finding a cure. This partnership between the private company and the public university will marry the longstanding work of each entity to hopefully arrive at more than has seemed possible in even the recent past.
Swedish researchers headed by Jonas Ludvigsson, MD, PhD, of Stockholm's Karolinska Institute, revealed that patients with celiac disease were 2.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with neuropathy. The study, published this week in the journal JAMA Neurology, was conducted among a large group of patients with celiac disease which had been confirmed by biopsy.
NASA's Messenger spacecraft orbited Mercury for four years, and in that time it collected a wealth of data and images as it mapped the planet's gravitational field. Now scientists have announced that Mercury's magnetic field is four million years old.
Ten months ago the perfect storm of weak public health policy, poverty, and the Ebola virus transformed Liberia into a bloody battleground. The epicenter of the disaster was the Logan Town clinic, where workers without gloves or running water tried by candlelight to try to save their first patient in the crisis. Now, less than a year later, the Logan Town Clinic and its employees—like the rest of Liberia—is equipped to handle Ebola and any similar disease epidemic.
In the ultimate poker match between man and machine, man won-at least for this round. In a two-week competition that just ended, four top ten players of Heads-up No-limit Texas Hold'em took on Claudico, an artificial intelligence program created by a Carnegie Mellon University team and won more chips than they lost.