'brains'

Enlarge / Pager, a 9-year-old Macaque, plays MindPong with his Neuralink. The US Department of Transportation is investigating allegations that Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, Neuralink, violated federal transportation regulations when it shipped contaminated implants removed from the brains of deceased research monkeys infected with multiple types of dangerous pathogens. The alleged violations could have…

Enlarge / Building a bigger brain requires new genes, not a workout. On the DNA level, there's not much to distinguish humans from our closest relatives: chimpanzees and bonobos. At stretches of DNA that line up, human and chimp sequences are well over 90 percent identical. And, for the most part, the DNA does line…

Robert Llewellyn / Getty Images Black widows must despise Clint Sergi. While working on his Ph.D. in biology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Sergi spent his time designing little challenges for spiders—which often involved rewarding them with tasty dead crickets or confounding them by stealing the crickets away. “The big question that motivated the work…

It's the middle of October -- and you know what that means. Millions of people are watching reruns of The Shining, tiptoeing through haunted houses and willfully participating in what basically amounts to light psychological distress. During spooky season, we crave fear. On the face of it, deliberately choosing to be scared seems rather unusual. Aren't…

Enlarge / One of the remarkably intact Dmanisi skulls at the time of its discovery. We have an extensive collection of fossils from the lineages that produced us humans. A large number of Australopithecus and early Homo skeletons track the transition to bipedal walking and the appearance of features that mark our present anatomy. But…

Enlarge / The difference between modern human (left) and Neanderthal skulls means there must be some differences in how their brains develop. What are the key differences between modern humans and our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans? For the Neanderthals, there doesn't look to be any sort of obvious difference. They used sophisticated tools,…

Two fourth-graders rock side to side while doing math equations at Charles Pinckney Elementary School's "Brain Room" in Charleston, S.C., in 2015. John McDonnell/The Washington Post/Getty Images hide caption toggle caption John McDonnell/The Washington Post/Getty Images Two fourth-graders rock side to side while doing math equations at Charles Pinckney Elementary School's "Brain Room" in Charleston,…

Jeannine sorts through a binder of writing assignments from her therapy. In keeping a journal about her past experiences with pain, she noticed that the pain symptoms began when she was around 8 — a time of escalating family trauma at home. Jessica Pons for NPR hide caption toggle caption Jessica Pons for NPR Jeannine…

The image on the left shows the brains of pigs that were untreated for 10 hours after death, with neurons appearing as green, astrocytes as red and cell nuclei as blue. The image on the right shows cells in the same area of brains that, four hours after death, were hooked up to a system…

Curiosity snapped this charming selfie of its "head" in early 2018. NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS It can be hard enough to troubleshoot a computer that's right in front of you. NASA has to manage the process on another planet as the Curiosity rover continues to experience glitches on Mars. The latest problem prompted the rover team to switch…