News Articles

Mice have a healthy concept of fear and so they fear the scent of a predator.   While it seems obvious that brains quickly figure out with a sniff that a predator, like a cat, is nearby, the mechanism is not well understood.In a Nature study, researchers describe a new technique that makes it possible to map long-distance nerve connections in the brain. The scientists used the technique to map for the first time the path that the scent signals take from the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that first receives signals from odor receptors in the nose, to higher centers of the mouse brain where the processing is done. 

Humans have about 23,000 genes and we are at the top of the food chain but the animal with the most genes is the near-microscopic freshwater crustacean Daphnia pulex, or water flea, clocking in around 31,000. Daphnia is the first crustacean to have its genome sequenced.   The findings are part of a comprehensive report by members of the Daphnia Genomics Consortium, an international network of scientists led by the Center for Genomics and Bioinformatics (CGB) at Indiana University Bloomington and the U.S. Department of Energy's Joint Genome Institute.

Coffee can be quite good for you, as any number of studies have shown.   But you still have to take some personal responsibility for moderation because companies like Starbuck's are not going to do it for you.    They're not in the personal responsibility business, they are in the drink business, so when they roll out a new size - the "Trenta" - this spring, all 31 ounces of it, they want you to buy it in any form you want.

There are exceptions, of course - some athletes will never be ethical no matter how much coaching they receive and not all coaches are ethical, but overall coaching helps athletes become more than better athletes.   New survey data from Concordia University says coaches exert moral influence over athletes and how athletes respond.

Biofuels were all the rage in the 1990s, with Vice-President Al Gore declaring them the Holy Grail of fossil fuel replacement.    Unfortunately, no quality science agreed with that assessment yet they have been passed into law anyway by anti-science politicians who saw a way to please part of the voter base.

New papers in arXiv show that the Kepler space telescope continues to fulfill its mission of searching for exoplanets, especially those in the 'habitable' zone, a region where liquid water could exist on a planet's surface, around stars.

Measuring 'intelligence' is a much art as science.   Even using the word intelligence sends people down a philosophical rabbit hole, disagreeing about what the word means.So can there be a 'universal' intelligence test that measures...okay, we have to use the world 'intelligence' despite it being a logical fallacy to use it in its own definition...intelligence regardless of cultural or language?José Hernández-Orallo, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, says he can do even better.   He says his intelligence test can fairly measure the intelligence of adults or kids.  Even robots.

If wearing 3-D glasses makes you feel like we haven't progressed much since the 1950s, you are not alone.   Fortunately, MIT is in the 1970s - namely, the movie "Star Wars" from 1977, using a 2011 Microsoft Xbox Kinect to create streaming holographic video of Princess Leia, among other things.Their work is still research, achieving a few frames per second and low resolution, but it may make 3-D TV irrelevant.

Can olive oil prevent mental illness?A new study says the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of suffering depression and that olive oil protects against this mental illness.  The study by researchers from Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria used 12,059 SUN Project volunteers over the course of six years; the volunteers had their diet, lifestyle and ailments analyzed at the beginning of the project, over its course and at the end of the project. The researchers say none of the volunteers reported depression at the beginning of the study but, at the end, 657 new cases had been detected. 

Astronomers at the Hubble Space Telescope believe they have found the most distant object ever seen in the universe, 13.2 billion light years away, some 3% of the age of universe, making it roughly 150 million light years more distant than the previous record holder, says the report in Nature.This newly found object, named UDFj-39546284, is a compact galaxy made of blue stars that existed only 480 million years after the Big Bang - and it's tiny.   Over one hundred such mini galaxies would be needed to make up our Milky Way.

Frédéric Chopin, composer of "The Last Waltz" and poet of the piano, suffered from tuberculosis and regularly hallucinated. Even for those in the Romantic Revolution, like Liszt, Schumann and Victor Hugo, among others, Chopin was considered frail and hypersensitive and somewhat of a mad genius.   Tuberculosis would claim him at age 39 but a paper published in Medical Humanities says that his hallucinations were not madness, but rather temporal lobe epilepsy.  Hallucinations typically feature in seizure disorders, they say.

In  , it was noted that happiness spikes when wealth increases but then gradually levels off as a factor.   Money does not buy happiness, it was always said, and it may be that money does not buy a better education either.It's what happens when money is expected to increase basic education; achieving that begins to conflict with notions of diversity, equality and inclusion.Inclusion has become a political buzzword, notes Docent Girma Berhanu from the University of Gothenburg in International Journal of Special Education, but educational reform is leading to less of it.