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A Colombian man’s lung tumors turned out to have an extremely unusual cause: The rapidly growing masses weren’t actually made of human cells, but were from a tapeworm living inside him, according to a report of the case. This is the first known report of a person becoming sick from cancer cells that developed in a parasite, the researchers said. “We were amazed when we found this new type of disease—tapeworms growing inside a person, essentially getting cancer, that spreads to the person, causing tumors,” said study researcher Dr....

Alas! Poor Yorick. I knew him well. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my afterimage he is! Well… that’s what Hamlet would have said, had he been holding the vintage Pear’s Soap advertisement bearing Yorick’s skull in the accompanying slide, rather than a dug up and rotting Danish cranium. In this antique illusion, you can stare at the X in Yorick’s left eye socket for about 10 to 30 seconds, then look away at a flat surface such as a piece of paper, wall, ceiling or sky, and you will see Yorick’s afterimage as a ghostly apparition....

The psychedelic drug ibogaine is known for two things: its reputation in some circles as a panacea for addiction and the visceral hallucinations it induces. Positive anecdotes abound from people who have sought out the illegal drug at underground clinics. Just one dose, they say, brings near-instant relief from cravings and withdrawal symptoms, a veritable miracle for seemingly intractable addictions. But the side effects of this plant-derived substance can be dangerous or even deadly....

MISSOULA, Mont.—Missoula’s new downtown library was teeming with people who might typically spend a Saturday afternoon hiking, biking or otherwise making the most of Montana’s abundant outdoor recreation. One look at the soupy haze blanketing the city and it was clear why. “We’re definitely trying to stay out of the smoke,” Charlie Booher said as his kids picked out books from the stacks. Smoke from the wildfires burning through bone-dry forests and grasslands in the West has damaged air quality this week from California to the Eastern Seaboard....

What makes us who we are? Where is our personal history recorded, or our hopes? What explains autism or schiziphrenia or remarkable genius? Sebastian Seung argues that it’s all in the connections our neurons make. In his new book, Connectome , he argues that technology has now reached a point where it is conceivable to start mapping at least portions of the connectome. It’s a daunting task, he says, but without it, neuroscience will be stuck....

From Quanta Magazine (find original story here). To a sound wave, the cosmos has the consistency of chocolate syrup. That’s one discovery that scientists investigating the Big Bang have made using a new approach that treats the matter in the universe as a peculiar kind of fluid. They have calculated properties that characterize the universe’s behavior and evolution, including its viscosity, or resistance to deformation by sound waves and other disturbances....

Asthma is on the rise worldwide. Virtually unknown at the dawn of the 20th century, the wheezing respiratory disease caused 255,000 deaths globally in 2005, according to the World Health Organization. These recurring attacks of breathlessness from the swelling of bronchial tubes in the lungs is now the most common chronic disease among children—and no one knows why. Theories range from an increase in smog—an attack trigger—to a rise in the use of antibiotics....

If you dropped a giraffe into a deep pool of water, would it float, or would it sink? If it could float, would it swim briskly and confidently to the nearest bit of land, or would it flail around helplessly and drown? Strange as it may seem, the floating and swimming abilities of giraffes—or rather their supposed lack of floating and swimming abilities—have often been written about by experts. It has been asserted that giraffes “sink like stones” and “cannot swim, even in an emergency,” and that “rivers are an impassable barrier to them....

This is the fourth article in the Mind Matters series on the neuroscience behind visual illusions. Benjamin Franklin once said, “Never confuse motion with action.” But if motion is not action, then what exactly is motion? Let’s break it down. Imagine you are pointing your video camera at your favorite ball game. Inside your camera is a lens that focuses the image onto a CCD chip, which is a matrix of light detectors....

Imagine you are on your first visit to a foreign city—let’s say Istanbul. You find your way to the metro station and stand bewildered before the ticket machine. After puzzling out how to pay your fare, you thread your way through the noisy throng and search for the train that will take you to your hotel. You move tentatively, in fits and starts, with many changes of direction. Yet after a few days of commuting by subway, you breeze through the system effortlessly....

As soon as our species abandoned the daily grind of Stone Age feast-or-famine, we went straight to town. Çatalhöyük, Eridu and Ur were the London, Mumbai and Tokyo, respectively, before 5000 BCE. Çatalhöyük’s maze of dwellings are now nothing more than archeological digs. But some things have remained steadfast through the course of millennia. The city then and now is a place to go to break out of old molds and find opportunities....

Neuroscientists have been mapping the physical anatomy of the human brain for over a century, but until recently researchers lacked a clear and comprehensive picture of which genes are used frequently and which are largely dormant in the myriad parts of this complex organ. In 2012 a team at the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle published the Allen Human Brain Atlas, which includes data on the activity of almost every gene at hundreds of locations inside the brains of five men and one woman....

Many a new human mother has complained about a lack of sleep. But in comparison to dolphins and whales that have just given birth, they have it pretty easy. Scientists have discovered that newborn whales and dolphins do not sleep at all during their first month of life and keep their mothers awake as well. Adult killer whales in captivity sleep between five and eight hours a day, floating on the bottom of their pool or near the water’s surface, with periodic breaks for air....

On June 14, the Burst Alert Telescope on NASA’s Swift satellite was belted by gamma rays, the first warning that one of the most powerful explosions in the universe was taking place as a star went through its death throes. Within moments or hours a host of astronomers had trained telescopes all over the world on a galaxy 1.6 billion light-years away (relatively close in the cosmic scheme of things) toward the constellation Indus in anticipation of an incipient supernova–the brilliant demise of a massive star....

Quantum computing has captured imaginations for almost 50 years. The reason is simple: it offers a path to solving problems that could never be answered with classical machines. Examples include simulating chemistry exactly to develop new molecules and materials and solving complex optimization problems, which seek the best solution from among many possible alternatives. Every industry has a need for optimization, which is one reason this technology has so much disruptive potential....

By Ron Cowen of Nature magazineA race between two energetic photons that began more than 7 billion years ago and spanned half the cosmos has ended in a virtual dead heat. The result, if it stands up to scrutiny, would tighten the limits, suggested by some theories, on how `lumpy’ space-time can be.The work, to be presented on January 11 at the 219th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Austin, Texas, by Robert Nemiroff of the Michigan Technological University in Houghton and his colleagues1, relies on an analysis of a short-lived, powerful stellar explosion known as a -ray burst that was recorded by NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope in May 2009 and dubbed GRB 090510A....

Andrée Marion, a 47-year-old accountant from St. Sauveur, Quebec, has mirror movements—involuntary motions on one side of her body that mirror voluntary ones on the other. When she does things that require fine movements, like brushing her hair, reaching for change in her pocket or holding her coffee with her right hand, her left hand strokes, dips or grips in synchrony. She can’t help it; it just happens. It also happens to her 19-year-old son....

Scientists in Italy have engineered a cheap and simple electrochemical sensor that cleans itself when exposed to ultraviolet light. Their system offers a route towards self-cleaning electrodes with myriad environmental and biomedical sensing applications—from detecting pollutants in water to monitoring medications in blood. Open any book on chemical or biological sensors and you’ll find a lot of content on electrochemical devices. This prevalence is testament to the importance and advantages of electrode-based sensing; and electrodes containing nanomaterials are becoming increasingly popular, owing to their high surface-to-volume ratio, which can improve their sensitivity and lower costs....

College students are no more sexually active these days than they were in the 1980s. That’s the finding of a recent study by University of Portland sociologist Martin Monto, who says that the media’s portrayal of a new and pervasive “hookup culture” on college campuses is misleading. Monto examined the responses of 1,800 18- to 25-year-olds who had completed at least one year of college. He compared a first group of responses, taken as part of the General Social Survey between 1988-1996, with a second group who answered the same questions on a survey taken between 2002 and 2010....

Six months into the COVID-19 pandemic, and with summer on the doorstep, scientists are still investigating whether weather and climate affect the novel coronavirus. Experts seem to be converging on a mix of good and bad news. Hotter, more humid weather probably does dampen the transmission of the virus, at least a bit. But it’s probably nowhere near enough to significantly affect the progress of the pandemic. That’s dismal news for U....