I only had a gun pulled on me once during my time at Drumpe. It was on a chill October morning at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, and the military guards, still at their post from the Cold War with AK-47s at the ready, hadn’t […]
Enamel, the hardest and most mineral-rich substance in the human body, covers and protects our teeth. But in one of every 10 people — and in one third of children with celiac disease — this layer appears defective, failing to protect the teeth properly. As a result, teeth become more […]
Astronomers may have discovered the first evidence of heavy black hole « seeds » in the early universe. These so-called seeds could help explain how some supermassive black holes with masses equivalent to millions, or even billions, times that of the sun could have grown quickly enough to exist less than 1 […]
About 2,200 years ago, the subjects of Chinese emperor Wen sacrificed a giant panda and a tapir and buried their remains near the ruler’s tomb in Xi’an, China, new research finds. The discovery of the tapir skeleton surprised archaeologists, as it suggests that this animal — whose range no longer […]
Researchers have discovered an otherworldly, 20-tentacled creature lurking in the freezing depths of the Antarctic Ocean. Resembling an alien or a Lovecraftian horror, the Antarctic strawberry feather star (Promachocrinus fragarius) is one of four new species of crinoids that scientists found at the bottom of the ocean. Crinoids are a […]
The neurons highlighted in this composite image of the male mouse brain — the preoptic hypothalamus (POA), in green, and the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST), in pink — are connected and regulate sexual behavior, a new study finds. Scientists may have uncovered the brain’s « on switch » for […]
Artist impression of Venetorapter gassenae, which lived around 230 million years ago. An ancient reptile with massive hands and long, sword-like claws has been unearthed in southern Brazil. Its « hands and claws, which look a bit like those of Edward Scissorhands, may have been used to catch prey or climb […]
How can the amazing abilities of our memory be explained on the basis of brain anatomy? It is known that different brain functions are anchored in different areas and structures of the brain. For example, we know that certain areas of the cerebral cortex are responsible for perception of the […]
Scientists at Université Laval and the University of Lethbridge have succeeded in reversing certain cognitive manifestations associated with Alzheimer’s disease in an animal model of the disease. Their results have been published in the scientific journal Brain. « Although this has yet to be demonstrated in humans, we believe that the […]
Discovered by sheer accident in the late 1920s, penicillin was the world’s first antibiotic.
