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Does the brain create the mind? Many neuroscientists would say yes, but most of us—suggests University of Bristol neuroscientist Bruce Hood—carry a conviction that the mind is a special entity, distinct from our physical body. In other words, if it were possible to make an exact copy of someone’s body, including the brain, most people’s gut feeling is that the duplicate’s consciousness would differ in some way from the original. Hood, with colleagues at Bristol and at Yale University, decided to investigate this question with young children to see whether we hold views on this subject early in life....

Ever wonder how it is your brain adds things up? Well, according to a new study there is a set of cells in the top rear of the brain that apparently keeps score. A team of Duke University researchers report in PLoS Biology that they discovered a pocket of “accumulator neurons” in the region of a monkey brain called the parietal cortex that appears to integrate and sum up the total quantity of individual items....

In 2018, the American Cancer Society released an alarming report noting that 20 percent of clinical trials fail because of insufficient patient enrollment and that 56 percent of patients seeking care will not have a clinical trial in their immediate area and another 17 percent will not meet the eligibility requirements. Unfortunately, the report did not lead to significant change in the system. But the COVID-19 pandemic has forced our system to start addressing significant flaws in the current clinical trial infrastructure and find ways to evolve to make sure the “process” no longer interferes with discovery and helps patients when treatments may be working....

In the midst of the nation’s worst drought in 50 years, two of the world’s largest agricultural companies are testing corn that is bred and genetically engineered to withstand low rainfall levels. Monsanto’s DroughtGard hybrid corn – the first-ever hybrid genetically engineered for drought tolerance – was planted this spring in initial field trials. Sowed amid sufficient rain and optimism for a record-breaking crop yield, the company has encountered a close to worst-case scenario to test its product....

Outbreaks of tornadoes—where multiple tornadoes form over an area in just a few hours or days—are responsible for most of the devastating destruction caused by severe weather, and a new analysis has reached a worrying conclusion about the worst of these outbreaks. Outbreaks with many tornadoes are becoming more extreme, particularly the very worst outbreaks, according to a study published Thursday in the journal Science. When researchers looked into what might be causing the trend—and whether it could be linked to expected changes in storm environments due to climate change—they found the opposite of what they expected, pointing to the need for more research on the matter....

Set on a rocky outcrop in southern Siberia, Chagyrskaya Cave might not look like much. But for one family of Neanderthals, it was home. For the first time, researchers have identified a set of closely related Neanderthals: a father and his teenage daughter and two other, more-distant relatives. The discovery of the family—reported on 19 October in Nature — and seven other individuals (including a pair of possible cousins from another clan) in the same cave, along with two more from a nearby site, represents the largest ever cache of Neanderthal genomes....

Hardly anyone reckoned that struggling in high school to calculate the area of a triangle or the volume of a prism could be used one day to influence the outcome of an election. Geometry, however, can be a powerful tool in shaping results of an electoral contest—at least in plurality voting systems. Designing a perfect election system for multiple parties is impossible, even with mathematical tools. But if, by and large, there are only two dominant parties, as in the U....

Cosmologists say that they have uncovered hints of an intriguing twisting in the way that ancient light moves across the Universe, which could offer clues about the nature of dark energy—the mysterious force that seems to be pushing the cosmos to expand ever-faster. They suggest that the twisting of light, which they identified in data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) collected by the Planck space telescope, and the acceleration of the Universe could be produced by a cosmic ‘quintessence’, an exotic substance that pervades the cosmos....

EPA is preparing to Supreme Court-proof President Biden’s ambitions for a carbon-free power grid by looking beyond direct greenhouse gas regulation and relying on the knock-on effect of stricter air, waste and water rules. It’s a “comprehensive approach” to decarbonize the power grid that’s been in the works since the beginning of the Biden administration (Climatewire, Oct. 27, 2021). But now that the Supreme Court has agreed to take up a case that could limit how EPA regulates carbon from the power sector, it has become even more important for the agency to find alternative ways to show it can deliver on the president’s promise of a power grid that is 80 percent clean by the end of this decade—and carbon neutral five years later....

Dear EarthTalk: How can I recycle my old mattress if the place I buy a new one from doesn’t take it? What do mattress companies do with old mattresses when they do take them? Do they recycle any of the material? – J. Belli, Bridgeport, CT A typical mattress is a 23 cubic foot assembly of steel, wood, cotton and polyurethane foam. Given this wide range of materials, mattresses have typically been difficult to recycle—and still most municipal recycling facilities won’t offer to do it for you....

Canada’s tar sand projects sprawl across 600 square kilometers of northeastern Alberta. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has called the industrial effort to extract oil from the deposits “an enterprise of epic proportions, akin to the building of the pyramids or China’s Great Wall. Only bigger.” As traditional oil and natural gas reserves become increasingly difficult to find, and as demand rises, energy companies are turning to unconventional resources that, like the tar sands, are harder and more costly to access....

DETROIT—Democrats running for president expanded their attacks last night about insufficient climate action beyond the usual targets of President Trump and oil companies. They took aim at former Vice President Joe Biden. For the second night in a row, 10 Democrats argued about the best solutions for global warming in a primary debate that revealed different views about how strongly the United States should confront rising temperatures. The digs at Biden, which came mostly from Washington Gov....

It is going to be a very long summer for the US Congress. The House of Representatives voted on June 3 to approve a spending bill that would dramatically reshape research priorities at NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF)—drawing protest from the White House and previewing fiscal battles to come. US President Barack Obama has already threatened to veto the legislation, citing specific concerns over proposed spending cuts to the development of a NASA mission to Mars, the space agency’s Earth-science research, and weather-satellite programmes at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)....

The Martians invaded Houston one morning in October of last year—although in truth some of them already lived there. As home to NASA’s astronaut corps at Johnson Space Center and the NASA-funded Lunar and Planetary Institute, Houston probably has the highest per capita density of aspiring Martians on Earth. The rest of the Martians were a motley crew of scientists, engineers, physicians and bureaucrats who came from around the country and even the globe to fill the Institute’s auditorium for a historic workshop....

By Emma Farge and Gerauds Obangome DAKAR/LIBREVILLE (Reuters) - Alongside dirt roads twisting through the dense tropical forests of Gabon, the scaly bodies of lifeless long-snouted pangolins dangle from sticks stuck in the ground by hunters. The pangolin, a mammal that looks like an anteater but has the tough scales of a crocodile, has long been prized in central Africa as a bushmeat delicacy. But growing demand for it from Asia, where pangolin scales are used in Chinese medicine to help women lactate and to cure skin disorders, now threatens to hasten its demise and rob African countries of a precious resource....

Coyotes in the Crosswalks? Fuggedaboutit! Researcher Stanley Gehrt’s 2009 study on urban coyotes in Chicago is available in The Journal of Mammology. Doing a World of Good Rajiv Shah, administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, says more about his support of GMOs as a solution for world hunger in the New York Times Opinion Pages. The Perfect Kelvin A longer version of the story on better defining how temperature relates to changes in energy was published online....

Neutrinos are notoriously antisocial, nearly always slipping past atoms of matter without so much as a “how do you do.” But new research indicates that on the rare occasion a neutrino and an atomic nucleus do make contact, the interaction is surprisingly involved. By training a beam of neutrinos on a plastic target, researchers at the MINERvA experiment at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., have found that when a neutrino collides with an atom it often knocks free not just one proton or neutron, but two....

Recently, driven largely by opioid-related deaths—predominantly of our white sisters and brothers—President Donald Trump proclaimed that the opioid problem was now a national emergency. He vowed to “spend a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of money on the opioid crisis” because “it is a serious problem the likes of which we have never had.” This is false. Beginning in the late 1960s, the heroin crisis played out in a similar fashion, except that the face of the heroin addict then in the media was black, destitute and engaged in repetitive petty crimes to feed his or her habit....

Since July, NASA’s Perseverance rover has drilled and collected four slim cores of sedimentary rock, formed in what was once a lake on Mars. They are the first of this type of rock to be gathered on another world—and scientists are excited because at least two of the cores probably contain organic compounds. On Earth, organics, which are carbon-containing molecules, are often associated with living things, although they can be formed without the involvement of organisms....

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has discovered two planets that are the most similar in size to Earth ever found in a star’s habitable zone — the temperate region where water could exist as a liquid. The finding, reported online today in Science, demonstrates that Kepler is closing in on its goal of finding a true twin of Earth beyond the Solar System, says theorist Dimitar Sasselov of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who is a member of the Kepler discovery team....