ScienceAlert


Neuroscientists think they have identified the large-scale neural network that keeps the brain's creative juices flowing.
Unlike specific movements or sensory responses, creative thought isn't confined to any one part of the brain's wrinkled outer cortex. But a team of researchers, led by Baylor College of Medicine, think they have found the brain circuits fundamental to some types of creativity.



					
			

When nine adult participants had specific parts of their default mode network (DMN) temporarily suppressed via deep brain stimulation, they were no longer able to think outside of the box to the same extent.
The DMN's web activates when the mind is wandering...

Scientists Identify Neural Network Vital For Creativity in The Brain


Evidence continues to mount against the interpretation of a cave filled with ancient hominid bones as a sacred burial ground, one used long before modern humans were burying their own dead.



					
			

The Rising Star Cave system in South Africa contains the remains of an unusually high number of individuals of the hominid species Homo naledi that lived around 300,000 years ago, and their peculiar deposition has continued to puzzle scientists.
Then, last year, a bombshell dropped. A team led by paleoanthropologist Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand published a preprint making the jaw-dropping claim that the burials were deliberate, a...

Did This Ancient Species Really Bury Its Dead Before Modern Humans?


The  virus responsible for  COVID-19 is now widespread in wildlife. A new study in the US identified exposure rates of up to 60 percent in some species.
"I think the big take-home message is the virus is pretty ubiquitous," says Virginia Tech conservation biologist Amanda Goldberg. "We found positives in a large suite of common backyard animals."



					
			

Testing almost 800 nasal and oral swabs from animals in rehabilitation centers or that were trapped and released in the wild, the researchers identified six different species with  antibodies indicating they'd been infected with  SARS-CoV-2 at some point.
Most of the infected...

Virus Behind COVID-19 Now Rampant in Wild Animals, Study Finds


While we remain skeptical of  artificial intelligence's storytelling and filmmaking abilities, it is proving to have genuinely useful applications in science. As a new study shows, AI can even perform better than clinical tests at predicting the progress of Alzheimer's disease.



					
			

That could mean people showing signs of the early stages of dementia can be better informed about the risk of the condition progressing, and treatments and precautions can be put in place sooner, if necessary.
The research was led by a team from the University of Cambridge in the UK, and used a  machine learning approach to train AI...

New AI Tool Predicts Alzheimer's With Higher Accuracy Than Clinical Tests


Scientists looking to tackle our ongoing obesity crisis have made an important discovery: Intermittent calorie restriction leads to significant changes both in the gut and the brain, which may open up new options for maintaining a healthy weight.



					
			

Researchers from China studied 25 volunteers classed as obese over a period of 62 days, during which they took part in an intermittent energy restriction (IER) program – a regime that involves careful control of calorie intake and relative fasting on some days.
Not only did the participants in the study lose weight – 7.6 kilograms (16.8 pounds) or 7.8 percent of their body...

Fasting-Style Diet Seems to Result in Dynamic Changes to Human Brains


If you've got a high school yearbook you can flick through, you might find that the least attractive people run a slightly higher risk of living a comparatively shorter life, according to a new study.



					
			

Researchers in the US analyzed the fates of thousands of teenagers who graduated high school in the US in the late 1950s, to take a closer look at how looks might be linked to mortality risk.
It's not implausible that features we find attractive might convey information about our state of health. Past research has identified links between our immune systems and ratings of beauty.
Yet there is...

Your High School Yearbook Photo Could Predict How Long You'll Live


Humans have an incredible ability to guess a person's name simply based on the appearance of their face.
A new study has found it could be a case of self-fulfilling prophecy.
When a photograph of an adult was shown to participants with four possible name choices, they chose the correct name at a rate well above chance. When child faces were shown, however, the study's participants weren't nearly as good at matching faces to names.



					
			

The findings suggest that we tend to alter our appearance as we mature to better suit our own names, whether it be through hairstyles, makeup, glasses, piercings, or...

Wild Study Finds Your Name Has an Incredible Effect on Your Face


Every now and again, the night sky lights up with a spectacular explosion that blazes with the most energetic light our Universe can produce. Known as gamma-ray bursts, they can release in a few seconds what our Sun will emit over its lifetime.
Now scientists have found a never-before-seen signal buried in the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation delivered by the brightest gamma ray burst ever recorded.
That signal is an emission light – a bright region in the gamma-ray spectrum produced by something emitting light in that specific wavelength range. And that something, scientists have determined, is complete and utter destruction: the...

Signal Buried in Biggest Explosion Ever Seen Hints at Total Annihilation


It's been nearly a century since scientists discovered single-celled organisms capable of spewing methane into the environment.
While these microscopic cousins to bacteria occupy a variety of extreme habitats – under kilometers of ice, among the hot sands of deserts, near hydrothermal vents in the deep sea, and within landfills and wastewater – they have all belonged to the same superphylum within the Archaea kingdom, called Euryarchaeota.



					
			

It turns out, they are not alone.
Around ten years ago, scientists working around oil fields and hot springs uncovered DNA from undescribed microorganisms, which suggested they might produce methane gas. Unlike every other 'methanogen' known...

Whole New Group of Methane-Burping Microbes Discovered in Yellowstone Springs


There are literal oceans' worth of liquid water hiding out on Mars. There's just one big problem. That water is actually in Mars, at depths that are too far below the surface for us to access.



					
			

That's according to new analysis of seismic data collected by the  Mars InSight lander, for which huge reservoirs of liquid water are the best explanation. And, although that water is out of reach, it is an important piece of the strange puzzle of the aquatic history of our dry, desiccated, dusty neighbor.
"Understanding the Martian water cycle is critical for understanding the evolution of the...

Scientists Just Found Oceans of Liquid Water on Mars – But There's a Catch

Homo floresiensis holds the record for the smallest human species to have ever graced our planet, but some of them might have been even smaller than we first imagined.
A 700,000-year-old fragment of an adult humerus uncovered in 2013 has recently been classified as belonging to an early representative of a species once colorfully described as 'hobbits'.



					
			

Smaller than any in the fossil record – from this ancient cousin or any other hominin for that matter – the piece of upper arm bone expands the picture we have of an unusual relative that walked on Earth alongside us until as recently as...

Smallest Known Species of Human May Have Had an Even Smaller Ancestor


Rampant solar shenanigans are about to slam Earth and make some real purty lights in the sky.
In recent days our Sun has erupted repeatedly, unleashing several coronal mass ejections (CMEs) and solar flares in Earth's direction. It's unclear when exactly the blasts of CME material will arrive at Earth, but the next few nights are forecast to come alive with dancing auroras.



					
			

The reason? There's a cluster of sunspot regions speckling the solar equator, currently rotating right past Earth as it belches out fire and fury.
At time of writing, the past 24 hours had seen six M-class flares and one X-class...

Cannibal CME Is About to Deliver Spectacular Auroras to Earth's Atmosphere


Every now and again, our planet ponies up a fossil so spectacular that almost all you can do is gape in wonder.
Sometimes those fossils are the magnificent remains that once trod Earth's surface with thunderous feet. Sometimes, they are mere motes, particles at which you may not look twice – but contain within them the secrets of multitudes.



					
			

Such is the fossil of a sesame-seed-sized baby worm discovered encased in rock in China. Hailing from the Cambrian period some 520 million years ago, the larva represents a whole new genus and species of euarthropod called Youti yuanshi.
Such a small speck of...

520-Million-Year-Old Fossilized Larva Found With Preserved Brain And Guts


Llamas – those bored-looking, slow-munching camelids from South America – are prized for their wool and leather. Yet beneath their fur and skin, these domesticated pack animals also hide another powerful tool that humans are trying to make use of.



					
			

When llamas (Llama glama) are exposed to certain deadly human viruses, scientists have found their bodies create powerful immune proteins unlike any produced in our own species.
Using this knowledge, researchers working at the United States National Institutes of Health (NIH) have now engineered a human-llama hybrid antibody that can subdue one of the craftiest contagions known to humankind: HIV.
The human immunodeficiency...

A Hidden Defense Inside Llamas Could Be The Secret to Fighting HIV

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"They accidentally gave us 2 washers and a dryer when we only ordered 1 of each". Last month, Lowe’s experienced a glitch that lowered the price of its $2,300 Midea jumbo capacity refrigerator to just $169.

‘Lowe’s messed up’: Shopper says they got $2,300 fridge at Lowe’s for just $169


Simulations of  Mercury's childhood suggest the runt of the Solar System may have inherited a fortune in the form of a 15-kilometer (9-mile) thick layer of solid diamond.
Sandwiched between the core and the mantle hundreds of miles beneath the surface of a world that orbits within a whisker of our blazing hot Sun, the hypothetical bonanza is decidedly safe from any future spacefaring heists.



					
			

But the findings could have implications for the development of rocky planets like Mercury, and possibly explain a thing or two about the tiny planet's mysteriously persistent magnetic field.
A team of scientists from research institutes in...

A Fortune of Hidden Diamonds Could Be Concealed Inside Mercury

It's the iris in the great eyeball of  Jupiter, revolving to gaze balefully out upon the cosmos: the Great Red Spot, the single largest, longest-lived storm in the entire Solar System.



					
			

Humanity has been observing it for centuries, a colossal anticyclone currently a little bit larger than Earth, with winds that howl around in an anticlockwise direction at up to 680 kilometers (425 miles) per hour.
As mighty as it rages, however, the Great Red Spot has significantly diminished since the first definite records of its existence in 1831. The storm was once much larger; over time, it has dwindled, and...

The Mystery of Jupiter's Shrinking Great Red Spot Might Be Solved


The face of an ancient Egyptian mummy set in a gaping rictus may be the result of a death so painful, her face may have become locked in a scream.
Her name is unknown; but so striking is her grim facial expression that she is referred to as the Screaming Woman mummy. In spite of the feelings this face engenders, researchers had previously attributed it to the relatively benign cause of a shoddily performed mummification. New research, however, suggests that this wasn't the case.



					
			

Radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University and anthropologist Samia El-Merghani of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities...

Grim Mystery of Ancient Egypt's 'Screaming' Mummy May Finally Be Solved

A lady is cautioning others about purchasing budget earrings from Amazon, Shein, and H&M, after she experienced keloid formations on her earlobes due to wearing them. On a TikTok post that has garnered more than 334,000 likes, Sailor Rozema (@sailor.rozema), a content creator, shares a warning with her community of "dangly earring girls": the inexpensive jewelry found in fast fashion can have negative impacts on your well-being.

‘I’ll never be wearing earrings for the rest of my life’: Customer warns against buying from Shein


A 58-year-old man in the United States is the first person in the world to have had his failing heart replaced with a temporary, titanium blood-pumper.
The metal organ looks like it was made for the Tin Man, but it was actually designed by the medical device company BiVACOR to replace the full function of a flesh-and-blood human heart for as long as possible.



					
			

BiVACOR's Total Artificial Heart (TAH) is not designed to beat like a real one. But even without flexible chambers or pumping diaphragms, BiVACOR claims it is powerful enough to sustain a man during exercise, and small enough to...

World First: Heart Made From Titanium Kept a Man Alive For Days

NewsBreak

Cannibal AIs Could Risk Digital 'Mad Cow Disease' Without Fresh Data


It's only by gobbling up vast amounts of images, text, or other forms of human expression that generative AI models can churn out their own borderline...

Cannibal AIs Could Risk Digital 'Mad Cow Disease' Without Fresh Data

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