Two children who experienced intense, insatiable hunger that drove them to overeat have rare, never-before-seen genetic mutations that interfere with leptin, a key hormone that helps tell the body when it is full, a new case report says. After white fat cells make leptin, it plugs into the brainstem and hypothalamus, brain regions that help … Read more
A method for “reanimating” organ donors’ hearts works just as well as the standard approach to collecting hearts for transplantation, new trial data shows. If widely applied, the method could increase the heart donor pool by an estimated 30%. “Honestly if we could snap our fingers and just get people to use this, I think … Read more
The Nazca Lines, a group of hundreds of mysterious geoglyphs etched into the desert in Peru, have mystified scientists for nearly a century. People from ancient civilizations made the drawings over a period of hundreds of years, beginning around 200 B.C. By analyzing the style and subject matter of the drawings and the methods used … Read more
Spaceflight is anything but safe, and the quest to explore the final frontier comes with huge risks for the astronauts leading the charge. But has spaceflight actually cost people their lives? Yes, 21 people have died in space, Nigel Packham, NASA’s associate director of safety and mission assurance, told Live Science. Five spaceflight missions — … Read more
Since the first direct detection of the space-time ripples known as gravitational waves was announced in 2016, astronomers regularly listen for the ringing of black holes across the universe. Projects like the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (better known as LIGO) have detected almost 100 collisions between black holes (and sometimes neutron stars), which shake up … Read more
Astronomers have discovered hundreds of strange, stringlike structures at the center of our galaxy, possibly tracing the violent path of an ancient black hole eruption. According to new research published June 2 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, each of these previously unknown “filaments” measures between 5 and 10 light-years in length — thousands of times … Read more
Stephen Hawking’s most famous theory about black holes has just been given a sinister update — one that proclaims that everything in the universe is doomed to evaporate. In 1974, Hawking proposed that black holes eventually evaporate by losing what’s now known as Hawking radiation — a gradual draining of energy in the form of … Read more
Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink has been given clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to carry out its first trials in humans, according to news reports. Neuralink aims to use its brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to restore movement in people with quadriplegia, meaning complete or partial paralysis of the arms, legs and … Read more
The sun is an ordinary star, but it’s not the only kind of star out there. Most stars in our galaxy are M dwarfs (sometimes called red dwarfs), which are significantly smaller and redder than the sun — and many of them may have the potential to host life, new research shows. A new reanalysis … Read more
Locked away in frigid Arctic soils and riverbeds is a world teeming with ancient microbes. Bacteria and viruses that existed thousands of years ago are frozen in time inside prehistoric layers of permafrost. Warming temperatures could cause much of the ice to melt and unleash these microbes from their frosty prisons. Once free, unknown pathogens … Read more
