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What if you could treat conditions ranging from Alzheimer's to blindness, all with a flash of light? Researchers think it's possible — and they plan on using tiny particles called quantum dots to do it. More »
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Babies are easy to underestimate. This is understandable; after all, when most of us interact with an infant, we see a clumsy, messy creature — one more adept at stringing together strange gurgling noises than distinct consonants and vowels. More »
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Are you more creative when you're drunk? It's one of those soundbites that you're liable to hear a friend spout off somewhere between their fourth and fifth beer — a little factoid that might actually sound somewhat feasible if only there were a scientific study lying around to back it up. More »
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This is Ayumu, he's an 11-year-old chimpanzee who lives and trains at Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute. In his time there, Ayumu has come to excel at an incredibly difficult — albeit very straightforward — memorization game. If you challenge him to this game, you will lose. More »
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This Sensory Substitution Device uses the camera to gather visual data and then uses a rather nifty computer algorithm to translates this data into sound. With a little practice, blind users can identify complex objects, and even read words. More »
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Metaphors and other figurative language are deeply woven into the fabric of human communication, as this very sentence actually demonstrates. But how do our brains translate these metaphors into something they can understand? More »
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Neuroscientists have made huge breakthroughs in our understanding of the inner workings of the mind, particularly how various regions of the brain are linked to specific cognitive processes. This is powerful knowledge... and it could be headed to the battlefield. More »
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The very definition of a phobia is an "irrational fear." Phobias are always overreactions to mild dangers, constant fear of rare dangers, and outright terror of things that are not dangerous at all. Because of their irrationality, it seems like phobias can't have an evolutionary purpose. But why do we have them? More »
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Neuroscientists have developed a way to listen to words you've heard, by translating brain activity directly into sound. Their findings represent a major step towards understanding how our brains make sense of speech, and are paving the way for brain implants that could one day translate your inner thoughts into audible sentences. More »
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There are sound evolutionary reasons why we have two eyes and two ears. By why do we have two nostrils? Researchers at Stanford University have the answer - after doing a study that revealed the weird reason why we don't have one big hole in our nose. More »
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The brain's long-term memory allows us to hold onto experiences long after we initially encountered them. But short-term memory is a more fleeting and mysterious phenomenon, allowing us to hang onto a thought only until we're distracted by something else. More »
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The New York Times has published two thought-provoking opinion pieces relating to Attention Deficit Disorder and the medications used to treat it. More »
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We are living through the golden years of apocalyptic storytelling, and nothing is immune from dystopia fever - even sex. In fact, the sexapocalypse has been with us since at least the days of Hieronymous Bosch, a 15th century Dutch painter famous for depicting the end of days in vast canvasses packed with tiny figures enjoying bizarre sexual scenarios. More recently, novels like The Handmaids Tale and comic Y the Last Man suggest that horrific gender scenarios will play a major role in our dark future. More »
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A mouse embryo grows to maturity in just three weeks, transforming from a microscopic blip to a tiny, wriggling rodent. University of Cambridge biologist Erica Watson studies this transformation because the developing mouse shares with humans many of the same genetic signals that cause this incredible transformation. In this video, she shares some of the images she's captured of mouse embryos as they develop. More »
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Evidence continues to mount that your political leanings are determined, to some extent, by aspects of your biology. The latest installment in this emerging area of research comes from the University of Nebraska, in a study that looks at peoples' responses to certain forms of visual stimuli — politically themed or otherwise. More »
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Scientists this week published a study that reveals what the human brain looks like under the influence of psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical found in magic mushrooms. More »
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Schizophrenia is among the most damaging and least understood of all mental disorders. Now a seemingly minor symptom — the fact that many schizophrenia patients complain of sleeping problems — could actually provide a crucial key to unraveling the disease. More »
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Unless you're a synesthete, you probably don't get very many opportunities to see music. But this 3D data visualization project, Portrait of the Ghost Drummer, by Polish designer Odaibe allows you to do exactly that. More »
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Somewhere back in the vast recesses of time, staying alive required one to get things out of your nose so fast that a mere finger just wouldn't do the job quick enough. Only total involuntary facial evacuation would keep your species struggling along. More »
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Ready for the most counter-intuitive piece of medical research you'll hear about today? University of Oklahoma Neuroscientist Junie Warrington and colleagues have discovered that controlled oxygen starvation can reverse radiation induced brain damage in mice. Does this mean that you can cross the atomic wasteland of your bombed-out city safely just by holding your breath? More »
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This video uses your eye's built-in blind spot to trick your brain into making a man's head vanish. I've seen some pretty awesome optical illusion videos in my time, and I'm calling it now: this is the best one yet. More »
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If you've ever had your arm stuck in a cast, relearning how to write with your off arm may seem like an excruciating and lengthy experience — but in terms of how your brain works, it actually happens with lightning speed. With your primary writing arm out of commission, your brain rapidly rewires to shift its emphasis to using your other hand, moving brain mass in the process. More »
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Every year, Edge.org poses a question to a hand-picked group of the world's "most complex and sophisticated minds." Then they publish the responses. More »
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As we age, vision problems are unavoidable. Age-related macular degeneration breaks down a thin layer of cells in the back of your eye — the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) — on the way to causing vision loss. More »
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Oxytocin is a hormone found to be crucial in the formation of loving bonds between mothers and babies, and it's thought to just generally makes people feel more sympathetic and connected to each other. That's definitely true of rhesus monkeys. More »
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Though desire and its associated effects - lust, love, aggression, ambition - are generally the purview of poets, that hasn't stopped generations of thinkers from trying to explain it scientifically (and pseudoscientifically). Can desire really be described using the scientific method? Here are ten ways that researchers have answered that question with a resounding "yes." More »
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On Charlie Rose last month, Pixar head John Lasseter talked about Pixar's upcoming movies - including the Monsters, Inc. prequel we already knew about, and the untitled "Pixar's take on dinosaurs" movie we're eagerly awaiting. But then he added that the studio has a movie in development that takes place entirely inside a girl's head, with different characters portraying her emotions. This actually sounds truly creative, and we're left wondering — along with Ian Park at Beautiful Brain — whether this will be Pixar's take on neuroscience. Maybe Robert Downey, Jr. can play the voice of the nucleus accumbens! More »
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Most of us have had an experience like this: we turn our heads to the side in bed and see a strange shape. It has a weird line to it, and it's an odd color, and it's suspended in a strange way. We're wary. We're confused. Whatever we're experiencing doesn't 'ring a bell,' for us. And then we turn our heads slightly, and recognition dawns. That thing we're seeing was the fringed scarf that we borrowed from someone last night for the walk home through the rain. It's in that weird position because we hung it between the desk and the doorknob to dry. More »
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Few sensations are weirder than the bizarre feeling that you are floating outside your own body. "Out of body" experiences are a mysterious phenomenon that's often mixed up in the occult, but scientists are still trying to puzzle out how it works. More »
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Scientists have long searched unsuccessfully for the genetic factors that cause schizophrenia. Now we know why: the disorder is actually caused by what happens in cells around the genes. That knowledge could give us our best treatment yet for schizophrenia. More »
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Brain implantation and manipulation is a mainstay of science fiction. Often, characters can gain extra memory or get smarter, by having chips placed within the brain. (Or you can wind up mind-controlled by a psychopath. It's a mixed bag.) More »
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The two halves of the brain are connected through a bundle of fibers called the corpus callosum. There are times when that bundle of fibers is cut, either through injury or surgery. Often, these cuts result in little noticeable change. Other times, they force people into pitched battle against their other selves. More »
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In an effort to test the plasticity of the brain, scientists a decade ago decided to scramble a ferret's brain so that its eyes were hooked up to its auditory cortex. So clearly the ferret was blind, right? Wrong. Find out about the experiment that lead scientists to understand exactly how adaptable our brains can be. More »
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What's your earliest accurate memory? Chances are, it occurred after your third birthday, and until recently, scientists assumed that this was because children do not form accurate memories until the ages of three or four. But a new study from New Zealand suggests that children can correctly recall experiences from when they were two years old. More »
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Unless you're an art expert, your brain is completely unable to distinguish between a genuine masterpiece and a convincing forgery. But if you're told you're looking at a forgery, your brain goes haywire trying to deal with being duped. More »
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Our brains don't like being overfed, as obesity can age the brain prematurely and even make it more vulnerable to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Now we've discovered the opposite effect: a strict diet turns on molecules that keep the brain young. More »
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The naked mole rat is quickly becoming one of my favorite mammals ever. The glabrous little buggers live decades longer than most other rodents, never develop cancer, and have mastered the enviable skill of being able to run backwards as quickly as they do forwards. More »
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Stress makes many of us miserable — but it can also kill you. Besides just causing horrible anxiety and depression, the physiological basis for stress has also been linked to diseases as varied as obesity, postpartum depression, Cushing's syndrome, epilepsy, and osteoporosis. But what if we could just turn your brain's stress response off? More »
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This isn't about odor — honestly, if the species that invented indoor plumbing doesn't smell better, we're in serious trouble. But we have a far better sense of smell than Neanderthals did, and that reveals some crucial differences in our brains. More »
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What price effortless learning? In a paper published in the latest issue of Science, neuroscientists say they've developed a novel method of learning, that can cause long-lasting improvement in tasks that demand a high level of visual performance. More »
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