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
Scientists have made new improvements to a “brain decoder” that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert thoughts into text. Their new converter algorithm can quickly train an existing decoder on another person’s brain, the team reported in a new study. The findings could one day support people with aphasia, a brain disorder that affects a … Read more
Chemical fingerprints of life have been found on a distant exoplanet by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). It is the “most promising” evidence yet for alien life, scientists say. These chemicals were detected in the atmosphere of an exoplanet named K2-18b, which is located 124 light-years away from Earth and orbits its star in … Read more
For the many wondrous things humans can do, we can’t fly on our own. But if we could, how big would our wings be? Of course, the answer depends on the person’s size. But someone who’s about 155 pounds (70 kilograms) and at least 5 feet (1.5 meters) tall would have a wingspan of about … Read more
How fast do humans think? According to a new study, it’s slower than you might expect. The peripheral nervous system — the network of nerves that deliver information between the brain and the body — takes in environmental information at over a billion bits per second, a speed comparable to a lightning-fast internet connection. But … Read more
