Science

Regularly playing a musical instrument changes the anatomy and function of the brain and may be used in therapy to improve cognitive skills.
There is growing evidence that musicians have structurally and functionally different brains compared with non-musicians. In particular, the areas of the brain used to process music are larger or more active in musicians. [...]

Two experimental treatments, a retinal prosthesis and fetal tissue transplant, restored some vision to people with blinding eye diseases. The findings, presented at Neuroscience 2009, the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience and the world’s largest source of emerging news on brain science and health, may lead to new treatments for the blind. Researchers [...]

Genetic information from an extinct species of bison preserved in permafrost for thousands of years could help improve modern agricultural livestock and breeding programs, according to University of Adelaide researchers.
Researchers from the University’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) worked with an international team of genomics researchers to analyse the genetic mutations of an ancient [...]

The perception that antibiotic resistance is primarily the undesirable consequence of antibiotic abuse or misuse is a view that is simplistic and inaccurate, according to a recent report by the American Academy of Microbiology. The reasons behind the spread of resistance are much more complex, including appropriate antibiotic use, lack of proper sanitation and hygiene, [...]

Ever wonder how your eyes adjust during a blackout? When we go from light to near total darkness, cells in the retina must quickly adjust. Vision scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have identified an intricate process that allows the human eye to adapt to darkness very quickly. The same process [...]

Chaotic behavior is the rule, not the exception, in the world we experience through our senses, the world governed by the laws of classical physics.
Even tiny, easily overlooked events can completely change the behavior of a complex system, to the point where there is no apparent order to most natural systems we deal with in [...]

University of Michigan mathematicians and their British colleagues say they have identified the signal that the brain sends to the rest of the body to control biological rhythms, a finding that overturns a long-held theory about our internal clock.
Understanding how the human biological clock works is an essential step toward correcting sleep problems like insomnia [...]

New research in the FASEB Journal demonstrates role of IL-6 on sleep-related consolidation of specific types of memories, particularly during late night REM sleep cycles.
Good news for procrastinating students: a nasal spray developed by a team of German scientists promises to give late night cram sessions a major boost, if a good night’s sleep follows. [...]

As most good students realize, repeated studying produces good memory. Those who study a lot realize, further, that what they learn tends to be preserved longer in memory if they space out learning sessions between rest intervals. Neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) have now discovered how this so-called “spacing effect” is controlled in [...]

Vincent van Gogh cut off his ear. Sylvia Plath stuck her head in the oven. History teems with examples of great artists acting in very peculiar ways. Were these artists simply mad or brilliant? According to new research reported in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, maybe both.
In order to examine [...]

Just as people plug in to computers, smart phones and electric outlets to communicate, electric fish communicate by quickly plugging special channels into their cells to generate electrical impulses, University of Texas at Austin researchers have discovered.
The fish generate electric fields to navigate, fight and attract mates in murky streams and rivers throughout Central and [...]

Sometimes to see something properly, you have to stand farther back. This is true of Chuck Close portraits where a patchwork of many small faces changes into one giant face as you back away.
It may also be true of the frogs of Central America, where the pattern of extinctions emerges clearly only at a certain [...]

A University of Oregon research team has found that evolution can never go backwards, because the paths to the genes once present in our ancestors are forever blocked. The findings — the result of the first rigorous study of reverse evolution at the molecular level — appear in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature.
The team [...]

Mathematicians from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America have resolved the first one trillion cases of an ancient mathematics problem. The advance was made possible by a clever technique for multiplying large numbers. The numbers involved are so enormous that if their digits were written out by hand they would stretch to the moon [...]

New species are not just discovered in exotic locales — even places as urban as California still yield discoveries of new plants and animals. Academy scientists recently named a new species of chimaera, an ancient and bizarre group of fishes distantly related to sharks, from the coast of Southern California and Baja California, Mexico. The [...]

Researchers from the University of Washington and the University of Florida used gene therapy to cure two squirrel monkeys of color blindness — the most common genetic disorder in people.
Writing online Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists cast a rosy light on the potential for gene therapy to treat adult vision disorders involving cone cells [...]

The ancient city of Rome was not built in a day. It took nearly a decade to build the Colosseum, and almost a century to construct St. Peter’s Basilica. But now the city, including these landmarks, can be digitized in just a matter of hours.
A new computer algorithm developed at the University of Washington uses [...]

A tiny neuron is a very complicated structure. Its complex network of dendrites, axons and synapses is constantly dealing with information, deciding whether or not to send a nerve impulse, to drive a certain action.
It turns out that neurons, at one level, operate like another complicated structure — the United States, particularly its system of [...]

Many a historic landmark is defaced with graffiti, but the spray paint can only be removed — if at all — using caustic solutions which risk damaging the underlying surface. A new breathable coating provides efficient, all-round protection against attacks by taggers.
It takes seconds to spray on graffiti, but hours or weeks to remove — [...]

A woman looks familiar, but you can’t remember her name or where you met her. New research by UC Irvine neuroscientists suggests the memory exists — you simply can’t retrieve it.
Using advanced brain imaging techniques, the scientists discovered that a person’s brain activity while remembering an event is very similar to when it was first [...]