Seeing 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
Some people get the chills or feel moved to tears when listening to certain songs, while others tend to experience a less-intense reaction to music. Now, a new study hints that your level of music enjoyment may be partially written in your genes. According to a study published March 25 in the journal Nature Communications, … Read more
Nearly three fourths of Earth is covered by oceans, making the planet look like a pale blue dot from space. But Japanese researchers have made a compelling case that Earth’s oceans were once green, in a study published in Nature. The reason Earth’s oceans may have looked different in the ancient past is to do … Read more
Dyson spheres, the hypothetical mega-structures that advanced alien civilizations might use to enclose a star and harness its energy, suffer from a fatal flaw: They are catastrophically unstable. But now an engineer claims to have figured out a way to stabilize these structures — and all it takes is two stars. In the 1960s, physicist … Read more
Mercury’s mysterious makeup may be the result of a grazing “hit and run” collision between two similar-sized protoplanets in the early solar system, a new study suggests. Mercury, the smallest and innermost planet in our solar system, has a number of unusual characteristics that have long puzzled scientists. Despite being only slightly larger than Earth’s … Read more
Holograms that can be physically manipulated have made their way out of science fiction and into real life thanks to a breakthrough in mixed reality technology. In a new study uploaded March 6 to the HAL open archive, scientists explored how three-dimensional holograms could be grabbed and poked using elastic materials as a key component … 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
Physicists have discovered a new phase of matter, dubbed “half ice, half fire,” that could open the door to new advancements in fields such as quantum computing. The new phase combines a number of “up” spins of electrons within an atom, which are highly ordered and referred to as cold cycles, with a number of … 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
