Science

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Even in the Brain, Practice Makes Perfect

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

As any athlete or musician can attest, practicing makes a difficult task easier. In fact, repeating an activity can take us to a point where we a no longer conscious of what we're doing; we've perfected the task so we no longer think actively about it. This kind of efficiency also happens in brain cells, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, have found, and this efficiency can led to some surprising brain activity.

Neurobiologist Peter Strick and his colleagues reported in...

The Mind Can Fly a Helicopter

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

A helicopter is a rather complicated craft to fly--it doesn't really glide, and moves by controlling the pitch and power of its rotor blades. Imagine what it would take for a helicopter to fly by mind control.

But it's the brain's motor cortex, and not necessarily centers for imagination, that were proven to navigate an unmanned model helicopter. Bin He, a biomedical engineer at the University of Minnesota, reported in the Journal of Neural Engineering that by hooking up electrodes to a...

Science Explains Why You Forgot To Take Out The Trash

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

It's often nice to hear a familiar voice, but sometimes we're also guilty of tuning out wives, husbands, parents and even some friends. It turns out that our brains help us tune out spouses more effectively as we age.

Ingrid Johnsrude, a psychologist at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and her colleagues found that a familiar voice helps us organize the voices we hear in a crowd, so we can focus on the familiar voice--or ignore it. As we grow older and/or harder of hearing, we...

Scientists Explain Why Snails Have A Twisted Shell

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Molecules called morphogens control the shapes of organisms. One morphogen, Dpp, makes most snail shells coil to the right as described in a recent report in the journal EvoDevo. Snails belong to the taxonomic class Gastropoda, the most diverse group of molluscs, originating during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. Some gastropods, like snails, have coiled shells while others, like limpets, do not. The uneven distribution of the morphogenic (or shape-determining) protein Dpp is...

Chaos, Not Order, Spark Creativity

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Being neat and tidy has always been associated with order, tradition and general good sense. But being a slob may have a worse reputation than it deserves, according to a new study suggestig that a disorderly environment can spark creativity.

The study, led by University of Minnesota management professor Dr. Kathleen Vohs and published in Psychological Science on August 1st, found that an orderly environment encourages such "orderly" behavior as healthful eating, charitable giving, and a sense...

Secrets Of Celestial Relics Revealed

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

A 24-inch iron statue bearing a reverse swastika and dubbed "Iron Man" was discovered by Nazi archaeologists in Mongolia in 1939 on a quest to document the origins of Aryanism and returned to Germany. The reason for recent attention to the provenance of the statue of the Buddhist god Vaisravana is supplied by Dr. Elmar Buchner and his research team from the Institute of Paleontology at the University of Stuttgart who suspect that it came from a meteorite. As described in a 2012 volume of...

Our Alien Gold

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

    All the gold on earth is alien. Every atom of the precious metal probably came to us from violent collisions of dying stars, according to a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The research team, led by astrophysicist Dr. Edo Berger, was studying the origins of short gamma ray bursts, two-tenths of a second-long blasts of radiation produced after the collision of two dying stars. Using the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas...

An Unlikely New Home For Insects

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Fly ash deposits, by-products of coal combustion produced around energy power stations, have been found to serve as an alternative home for many insect species, new research shows. Fly ash refers to the fine silica material that rises with the gases produced during combustion. In the past, this material was simply released into the atmosphere. However, this practice raised many environmental and health concerns and prompted laws aimed at reducing such emissions. With stricter pollution control,...

A single gene for claustrophobia?

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Do you panic when you are in a small space? Do you sweat, or shake; does your heart pound? A study in the March issue of Translational Psychiatry reports a genetic defect as the cause of claustrophobia in mice. This is the first time that a single gene has been shown to regulate claustrophobia, moving researchers one step closer to understanding this serious anxiety disorder. The new research, led by Dr Hannelore Ehrenreich at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen,...

Celestial Music, at your fingertips

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

In the renaissance an scholar was considered educated only after mastering the so-called "quadrivium", which consisted of four subjects: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Now, a group of astrophysicists has updated the classical quadrivium, by deriving music from astronomical data.

Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA, led by Dr Gerhard Sonnert, have developed a website that produces music made from star-generated sounds. These "star sounds" consist of...

From a great flood came unique underwater life

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

By Andrew Porterfield
 
When studying evolution, scientists don't often get the opportunity to see exactly how a modern species developed from a primordial ancestor--they pretty much rely on fossil evidence of predecessor species, and modern descendants. But small, super-salty basins at the bottom of the sea are showing scientists how one single species branched out into many new species, all adapting to these extreme environmental conditions.

When the Mediterranean Sea dried up 5 million...

SNPing away at Asthma

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Asthma is a chronic disease of the airways that in its most severe form can result in the loss of lung function. In the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 26 million people, more than seven million of them children, suffer from asthma. As reported in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine, researchers at Duke University did a study to identify genetic risk factors for asthma in participants in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Developmental Study and then followed these children...

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Christoph Scheuerecker: ,,Ereignis: Erzählung"

Join us at the Kunstraum in der Au for the exhibition titled ,,Ereignis: Erzählung" by Christoph Scheuerecker, focusing on the captivating world of bees. This exhibition invites visitors to explore the intricate relationship between bees and their environment through various artistic expressions,...

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