eeing or hearing someone yawn can make you yawn. This phenomenon is not limited to humans; some animals experience contagious yawning, too. But why is yawning contagious? Brain cells called mirror neurons may play a role in contagious yawning, Dr. Charles Sweet, a board-certified psychiatrist and medical adviser at Linear Health, told Live Science in … Read more
NASA’s Curiosity rover has found some of the best evidence yet that ancient life may have existed on Mars — and an answer for what could have wiped it out. When drilling into rocks on Mount Sharp, the central peak of the Red Planet’s Gale Crater, the rover found evidence of siderite, an iron carbonate … Read more
Kangaroos are pretty peculiar on the outside: They’re the world’s largest marsupials, they hop to get around, and they use their tails as a fifth limb. But they’re also pretty unusual on the inside: Female kangaroos have two vaginas — or three, if they’ve given birth. Why could that be? The most likely explanation is … Read more
A brain implant that uses artificial intelligence (AI) can almost instantaneously decode a person’s thoughts and stream them through a speaker, new research shows. This is the first time researchers have achieved near-synchronous brain-to-voice streaming. The experimental mind-reading technology is designed to give a synthetic voice to people with severe paralysis who cannot speak. It … Read more
You may have heard the myth that humans use only 10% of their brains. That statement is patently untrue — most people use all of their brains, all of the time. But for people who have survived a stroke, traumatic brain injuries or brain resectioning surgeries, things do get less clear. In fact, many of … Read more
We think of oxygen as life, sustenance, a literal breath of fresh air. But it’s actually a very reactive element. Anyone who’s burned a log has witnessed this firsthand. So why do so many life-forms breathe oxygen? There are probably thousands of kinds of metabolisms, or chemical processes that maintain life, said Donald Canfield, a … Read more
A bizarre ancient life-form, considered to be the first giant organism to live on land, may belong to a totally unknown branch of the tree of life, scientists say. These organisms, named Prototaxites, lived around 420 million to 375 million years ago during the Devonian period and resembled branchless, cylindrical tree trunks. These organisms would … Read more
Dormant genes on the X chromosome may reawaken in old age, potentially giving the aging female brain a boost that the male brain doesn’t receive. This phenomenon may help to explain why, on many measures, females show a higher level of cognitive resilience in old age than males do. The findings come from a new … Read more
By disrupting a key gene, scientists made chicken feathers more dinosaur-like — but the results didn’t last. In a new study, researchers inhibited a gene during embryonic development to make chicken feathers more primitive, like the kind of simple tube-shaped proto-feathers that likely first emerged in the ancestors of dinosaurs in the Early Triassic 250 … Read more
The emergence of human life may not have been as improbable as scientists once thought, a new model suggests. The finding increases the likelihood of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe, the researchers say. Previously, scientists assumed that for human life to emerge on Earth, it needed to pass through a series of “hard steps” … Read more
