What happens when you replace a human gene with its Neanderthal...
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,…
Headbutts hurt the brain, even for a musk ox
Punishing headbutts damage the brains of musk oxen. That observation, made for the first time and reported May 17 in Acta Neuropathologica, suggests that a life full of bell-ringing clashes is not without consequences, even in animals built to bash. Although a musk ox looks like a dirty dust mop on four tiny hooves, it’s formidable.…
Interaction with locked-in clients in concern after misbehavior finding
Enlarge / A female study participant allegedly responds to a question. Germany’s main research-funding organization, DFG, has determined that a high-profile neuroscientist committed scientific misconduct in his DFG-funded work. That work concluded it is possible to interpret yes-or-no answers from the brain waves of fully paralyzed patients with “locked-in syndrome” due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis…
A game based on Simon shows how people mentally rehearse new...
A brain at rest isn’t always resting. Sometimes it’s rehearsing information it just learned. For the first time, scientists have watched this mental replay in two human volunteers. These neural ruminations, described May 5 in Cell Reports, might play a role in making a new, fragile memory more durable, scientists suspect. Most examples of mental…
Have a Good Trip is a gateway drug to de-stigmatizing psychedelics
Sting, Sarah Silverman, Ben Stiller, and the late Carrie Fisher and Anthony Bourdain are among the celebrities interviewed for the new Netflix documentary Have a Good Trip: Adventures in Psychedelics. Carrie Fisher had a psychedelic-induced encounter with a talking acorn. Grateful Dead drummer Bill Kreutzmann recalls the time he dropped too much acid and his…
An Age-By-Age Guide to Helping Kids Build Executive Function
Photo: Ground Picture (Shutterstock)We usually hear about executive functioning skills in the context of mitigating the executive dysfunction experienced by many adolescents and adults. But executive function doesn’t just crop up in young adulthood to menace young adulting efforts. They are skills that we can use and practice from babyhood.In The Emotionally Intelligent Child, educator…
Researchers make cyborg cockroaches that carry their own power packs
Kenjiro Fukuda, RIKEN Have you ever thought you’d be seeing a cyborg cockroach that runs on solar power and carries a backpack that looks like an electric circuit? A team of researchers at Japan’s RIKEN research institute has turned a regular Madagascar hissing cockroach into a real cyborg insect by connecting a lithium battery, a…
Mice may ‘catch’ each other’s pain — and pain relief
In pain and pain relief, mice may feel for each other. Research has shown that mice can “catch” the emotions of an injured or fearful fellow. When some mice are injured, other healthy mice living alongside them behave as though in pain. Now, a study suggests that not only can pain be passed along, but…
In a Jedi-like feat, rats can move a digital object using...
Like tiny, hairy Yodas raising X-wings from a swamp, rats can lift digital cubes and drop them near a target. But these rats aren’t using the Force. Instead, they are using their imagination. This telekinetic trick, described in the Nov. 3 Science, provides hints about how brains imagine new scenarios and remember past ones.
Rat cells grew in mice brains, and helped sniff out cookies
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