We're bombarded with information at all times, so much that if we had to try and process it all times, we'd be paralyzed. Our cerebellum does information damage control by filtering out what changes. Evolution made it possible for us to conserve energy while still processing anomalies quickly.
Researchers at a breast cancer prevention clinic in Manchester have observed an increased uptake of preventative double mastectomies since May 2013, when Angelina Jolie announced that she had undergone the procedure.
Researchers from the Genesis Prevention Centre Family History clinic report that the number of preventative double mastectomies performed after consultation at the clinic more than doubled from January 2014 to June 2015, with 83 procedures performed during this period, compared to 29 between January 2011 and June 2012.
Montreal, November 24, 2015 -- As world leaders prepare to gather in France for the 2015 United Nations Conference on Climate Change next week, global warming -- and how to stop it -- is a hot topic.
To limit climate change, experts say that we need to reach carbon neutrality by the end of this century at the latest. To achieve that goal, our dependence on fossil fuels must be reversed. But what energy source will take its place? Researchers from Concordia University in Montreal just might have the answer: algae.
The journey for volcanic rocks found on many volcanic islands began deep within the Earth.
Brought to the Earth's surface in eruptions of deep volcanic material, these rocks hold clues as to what is going on deep beneath Earth's surface.
Studies of rocks found on certain volcanic islands, known as ocean island basalts, revealed that although these erupted rocks originate from Earth's interior, they are not the same chemically.
A "dinosaur" fossil originally discovered on Prince Edward Island has been shown to have steak knife-like teeth, and researchers from U of T Mississauga, Carleton University and the Royal Ontario Museum have changed its name to Dimetrodon borealis, marking the first occurrence of a Dimetrodon fossil in Canada.
Fossils of Dimetrodon have now been found in the USA, Canada and Germany.
In comparison to other organs, the human brain has the highest energy requirements. Nerve cells cover their high energy demand with glucose and lactate and a new report shows for the first time in the intact mouse brain evidence for an exchange of lactate between different brain cells.
The intensity of earth's magnetic field has been weakening in the last couple of hundred years, leading some to claim that its polarity might be about to flip.
But the field's intensity is coming down from an abnormal high rather than approaching a reversal. And despite Doomsday prophecies stating otherwise, humans have lived through dips in the field's intensity before. Linking reversals in the more distant past to species extinctions is just speculation that can't be proved or disproved, which makes them ideal fodder for scary stories about nature.
Researcher Christian Duval, PhD, and his team have developed a new, simple and non-invasive approach to create a biomechanical and cognitive profile of football players and more quickly and accurately detect concussions in these individuals. Christian Duval and his post-doctoral student Hung Nguyen, PhD, work at the Research Centre of the Institut universitaire de gériatrie de Montréal, which is affiliated with the University of Montreal. They presented their preliminary research findings at the International Congress on Sport Sciences Research and Technology Support, which was held in Lisbon from November 15 to 17.
A carbon tax of just $11 would offset the CO2 emissions from tourism, according to a paper in the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.
Every time people go on vacation, or journalists go off to climate conferences like the one in Paris, they are using fossil fuel energy. The total emissions from vacations like that would be the sixth largest emitter of CO2 if it were a country - five percent of total human-made emissions of CO2.
Biologists have induced one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering the genomic sequence. The work reveals physiological circuits as a new kind of epigenetics - information existing outside of genomic sequence - that determines large-scale anatomy.
The most direct information about the interior of the earth comes from measuring how seismic acoustic waves--such as those created by earthquakes -- travel through the earth. Those measurements show that 95% of the earth's core is liquid. But, scientists also want to know the composition of the liquid, and that is harder. Now, in research published in Nature Communications, scientists from the Materials Dynamics Laboratory at the RIKEN SPring-8 Center, along with collaborators from the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Earth-Life Science Institute and other institutes, have succeeded in measuring the speed of sound in mixtures of liquid iron and carbon in extreme conditions, allowing limits to be set on the core composition.
Scientists drilling into the ocean floor have for the first time found out what happens when one tectonic plate first gets pushed under another.
The international expedition drilled into the Pacific ocean floor and found distinctive rocks formed when the Pacific tectonic plate changed direction and began to plunge under the Philippine Sea Plate about 50 million years ago.
"It's a bit like a rugby scrum, with two rows of forwards pushing on each other. Then one side goes down and the other side goes over the top," said study leader Professor Richard Arculus, from The Australian National University (ANU).
Researchers have attempted to measure all the material leaving and entering a mountain range over millions of years and discovered that glacial erosion can, under the right circumstances, wear down mountains faster than plate tectonics can build them.
A study of the St. Elias Mountains on the Alaskan coast by researchers from The University of Texas at Austin, University of Florida, Oregon State University and elsewhere found that erosion accelerated sharply about one million years ago.
