Posts

We are surrounded by mirrors all day, every day—when we drive, brush our teeth, check our hair while heading out the door. Yet for all their ubiquity, mirrors remain somewhat mysterious. In folktales and fiction at least, they can be conduits to spiritual, magical or supernatural realms: mirrors can out the soulless vampires in our midst. They can summon the legendary hook-handed murderer known as Candyman. And the Mirror of Erised—of Harry Potter fame—holds the remarkable power to lay bare its viewer’s deepest desire....

Creating long-term memories means chemically altering the brain. Neuroscientists at Harvard University were recently able to observe, for the first time, new protein being synthesized at the synapses between neurons (red regions in image). The synthesis was observed in fruit flies and occurred as the flies learned to associate an odor with an electric shock. Molecular biologist Sam Kunes said his team “found a new biochemical pathway that determines if and where this protein synthesis happens....

Mosquito larvae will eat microscopic bits of plastic that can stay in their bodies as they metamorphose into adulthood, researchers have shown for the first time. This means they and similar insects could spread the plastic particles that contaminate aquatic ecosystems—where many bugs spend their infancy—to land predators such as birds or spiders, thus “polluting a whole new environment,” says Amanda Callaghan, an associate professor of zoology at the University of Reading in England....

When we look at a photograph, we effortlessly identify people and objects—re-creating a three-dimensional scene in our mind from the two-dimensional image. As easy as that task seems, scientists have long puzzled over exactly how our brain does it; even the most powerful computers still struggle to pick 3-D objects out of 2-D images. Until now, most research has focused on the simpler neural representation of 2-D patterns, but a new study shows for the first time that some neurons are also tuned to 3-D details....

Excerpted with permission from Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World, by Bruce Schneier. Available from W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Copyright © 2015, by Bruce Schneier. Introduction If you need to be convinced that you’re living in a science-fiction world, look at your cell phone. This cute, sleek, incredibly powerful tool has become so central to our lives that we take it for granted....

It seems logical that for a depressed person, the holidays might be especially tough—extra stress, loneliness and sad reminders of lost loved ones—so perhaps the popular belief that suicides spike around Christmastime is no surprise. Yet the data tell a different story. Recent studies from several countries show that rates in December and on Christmas in particular tend to be the lowest of the year, but other major holidays do see spikes, especially New Year’s Day....

Quantum researchers seem to have more theories than they know what to do with. Of the handful of options, take, for example, the many-worlds view, which posits that when a quantum observation is made, reality splits into parallel universes, each representing all potential outcomes. Or there is the relatively new QBism camp, members of which argue that quantum mechanics is subjective to the individuals making predictions about how they will measure an experiment....

Some editorials simply hurt to write. This is one. At least 19 elementary school children and two teachers are dead, many more are injured, and a grandmother is fighting for her life in Uvalde, Tex., all because a young man, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, decided to fire in a school. By now, you know these facts: This killing spree was the largest school shooting since Sandy Hook. Law enforcement couldn’t immediately subdue the killer....

A much-anticipated report from the world’s leading authorities on climate change has reignited a debate over the usefulness of the “carbon budget.” The concept refers to how much carbon dioxide can be emitted before temperatures rise beyond a given threshold. The idea is that informing world leaders about how much carbon will cause a tipping point can help design policies that will prevent the globe from crossing that threshold. And it also helps scientists keep track of how quickly the threshold is approaching....

LONDON – The UK Government has been telling its parliament and the public that because eight large nuclear stations are scheduled to close over the next 10 years, the country needs urgently to build some new ones to keep the nation’s lights on. Yet EDF, the French state-owned company that bought the eight nuclear stations in 2009 for £12.5 billion ($19.6 billion), has no intention of closing any of them....

Arsenic, a deadly poison, kills by blocking the ability of cells to produce and consume energy. Yet, some red and green slime mats in briny hot springs in Mono Lake, Calif., use the potent compound rather than water to carry energy during photosynthesis (the process used by bacteria and plants that converts sunlight into food) new research in Science reveals. The newly discovered microbes steal two electrons from the arsenic in the spring water, turning it into so-called arsenate, and use the energy to transform carbon dioxide into food....

For the first 40 years of their life, Texas resident Kelly Fleming spent a portion of most years in a deep depression. As an adult, Fleming—who uses they/them pronouns and who asked to use a pseudonym to protect their safety—would shave their face in the shower with the lights off so neither they nor their wife would have to confront the reality of their body. What Fleming was experiencing, although they did not know it at the time, was gender dysphoria: the acute and chronic distress of living in a body that does not reflect one’s gender and the desire to have bodily characteristics of that gender....

In our information age, an unprecedented amount of data are right at our fingertips. We run genetic tests on our unborn children to prepare for the worst. We get regular cancer screenings and monitor our health on our wrist and our phone. And we can learn about our ancestral ties and genetic predispositions with a simple swab of saliva. Yet there’s some information that many of us do not want to know....

Google Inc.’s investment in Kenya’s Lake Turkana Wind Power Project is its largest on the African continent to date, but it almost certainly won’t be the last. The California internet giant has shown a growing interest in sub-Saharan Africa since it made its first cash outlay three years ago—a $12 million investment in the Jasper Solar Power Project in South Africa’s Northern Cape Province. The 96-megawatt photovoltaic project, completed in 2014, was built by U....

“I contain multitudes,” says a line in Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself.” Whitman was not thinking in biological terms, but the line has biological resonance. Recent studies suggest that each of us possesses in addition to the trillions of cells descended from the fertilized eggs we once were - a cadre of cells we have acquired from other, genetically distinct individuals. In utero we receive an infusion of them from mom....

Scientists in Wisconsin have succeeded in growing three-dimensional brainlike tissue structures derived from human embryonic stem cells. Unlike previous miniature model brains, the new structures can be easily reproduced and they contain vascular cells and microglia, a type of immune cell. These brain mimics may provide a fast, low cost way to screen drugs and chemicals for their ability to disrupt human brain development, the team reports (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci....

Although city dwellers may not want to admit it, humans and pigeons (also known among detractors as “flying rats”) have been intertwined since ancient times. We domesticated pigeons between 3,000 and 5,000 years ago, maybe even before we let cats inside our homes. Nowadays there are more than 350 distinct pigeon breeds, each created by artificial selection; many of which so tailored to human preferences they could never survive in the wild....

Scientists have been trying unsuccessfully to poke holes in Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity for a full century. So far, however, Einstein’s theory has had it easy. Every assessment to date has been conducted in rather weak gravitational fields. To put general relativity to its greatest test, we need to see whether it holds up where gravity is extremely strong. And nowhere in the universe today is gravity stronger than at the edge of a black hole—at the event horizon, the boundary beyond which gravity is so overwhelming that light and matter that pass through can never escape....

The short answer is yes: certain brain regions do indeed consume more energy when engaged in particular tasks. Yet the specific regions involved and the amount of energy each consumes depend on the person’s experiences as well as each brain’s individual properties. Before we delve into the answer, it is important to understand how we measure a brain’s energy expenditure. Picture the colorful brain images researchers use to display neural activity....

Justin Shamoun began to hate his body a few weeks into seventh grade. He was a year younger than his suburban Detroit classmates, having skipped a grade. Many of his peers were entering puberty, their bodies solidifying into sleek young men. Justin still had the doughy build of a boy. After gym class one day, someone told Justin he could probably run faster if he weren’t so fat. The remark crushed him....