With a name that means 'little brain' in Latin, the cerebellum comprises just 10 percent of the entire brain's mass. Don't let that small size fool you, though; with more than three-quarters of the brain's neurons packed within that small space, there's a lot going on inside.
Traditionally it's thought this part of the nervous system located at the base of the skull is mostly concerned with coordinating motor functions like balance and movement. Now new research backs up a hypothesis that's gathering momentum: it also plays a key role in learning.
In this new study, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and Columbia University wanted to build on previous research identifying the cerebellum's posterior-lateral region as playing a role connecting what we see to the movements we make. READ MORE...
Why did humans take over the world while our closest relatives, the Neanderthals, became extinct? It's possible we were just smarter, but there's surprisingly little evidence that's true.
A new, precise measurement of the expansion rate of the Universe is in, and it's serving up a huge cosmic pickle.
Using Hubble data and new observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), a team led by physicist Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University has confirmed that previous measurements are correct after all, despite years of debate.
Based on immense distances from our Solar System to Cepheid variable stars and Type Ia supernovae, which are used to create a 'cosmic distance ladder', our Universe does indeed appear to be expanding at 73 kilometers per second per megaparsec – a rate known as the Hubble constant. READ MORE...
The story of how life started on Earth is one that scientists are eager to learn. Researchers may have uncovered an important detail in the plot of chapter one: an explanation of how bubbles of fat came to form the membranes of the very first cells.
A key part of the new findings, made by a team from The Scripps Research Institute in California, is that a chemical process called phosphorylation may have happened earlier than previously thought.
This process adds groups of atoms that include phosphorus to a molecule, bringing extra functions with it – functions that can turn spherical collections of fats called protocells into more advanced versions of themselves, able to be more versatile, stable, and chemically active. READ MORE...
We finally know what brought light to the dark and formless void of the early Universe.
According to data from the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes, the origins of the free-flying photons in the early cosmic dawn were small dwarf galaxies that flared to life, clearing the fog of murky hydrogen that filled intergalactic space.
"This discovery unveils the crucial role played by ultra-faint galaxies in the early Universe's evolution," says astrophysicist Iryna Chemerynska of the Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris.
"They produce ionizing photons that transform neutral hydrogen into ionized plasma during cosmic reionization. It highlights the importance of understanding low-mass galaxies in shaping the Universe's history." READ MORE...
Scientists have identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain, revealing just how much we still have to learn about its mysterious inner workings.
Excitingly, the discovery hints that our brains might be even more powerful units of computation than we realized.
Back in 2020, researchers from institutes in Germany and Greece reported a mechanism in the brain's outer cortical cells that produces a novel 'graded' signal all on its own, one that could provide individual neurons with another way to carry out their logical functions.
By measuring the electrical activity in sections of tissue removed during surgery on epileptic patients and analyzing their structure using fluorescent microscopy, the neurologists found individual cells in the cortex used not just the usual sodium ions to 'fire', but calcium as well. READ MORE...
Older people in ancient Greece and Rome may not have experienced severe memory problems like many who are aging today.
Researchers in California have combed through a slew of classical texts on human health written between the 8th century BCE and 3rd century CE, and found surprisingly few references to cognitive impairment in older folk.
According to Caleb Finch, who studies the mechanisms of aging at the University of Southern California, and historian Stanley Burstein from California State University, severe memory loss may have been an extremely rare outcome of growing old more than 2,000 years ago. READ MORE...
The ancient Romans were masters of building and engineering, perhaps most famously represented by the aqueducts. And those still functional marvels rely on a unique construction material: pozzolanic concrete, a spectacularly durable concrete that gave Roman structures their incredible strength.
Even today, one of their structures – the Pantheon, still intact and nearly 2,000 years old – holds the record for the world's largest dome of unreinforced concrete.
The properties of this concrete have generally been attributed to its ingredients: pozzolana, a mix of volcanic ash – named after the Italian city of Pozzuoli, where a significant deposit of it can be found – and lime. When mixed with water, the two materials can react to produce strong concrete. READ MORE...
No one has yet managed to travel through time – at least to our knowledge – but the question of whether or not such a feat would be theoretically possible continues to fascinate scientists.
As movies such as The Terminator, Donnie Darko, Back to the Future and many others show, moving around in time creates a lot of problems for the fundamental rules of the Universe: if you go back in time and stop your parents from meeting, for instance, how can you possibly exist in order to go back in time in the first place?
It's a monumental head-scratcher known as the 'grandfather paradox', but a few years ago physics student Germain Tobar, from the University of Queensland in Australia, worked out how to "square the numbers" to make time travel viable without the paradoxes.
"Classical dynamics says if you know the state of a system at a particular time, this can tell us the entire history of the system," Tobar explained back in 2020. READ MORE...
There is no computer even remotely as powerful and complex as the human brain. The lumps of tissue ensconced in our skulls can process information at quantities and speeds that computing technology can barely touch.
Key to the brain's success is the neuron's efficiency in serving as both a processor and memory device, in contrast to the physically separated units in most modern computing devices.
There have been many attempts to make computing more brain-like, but a new effort takes it all a step further – by integrating real, actual, human brain tissue with electronics.
It's called Brainoware, and it works. A team led by engineer Feng Guo of Indiana University Bloomington fed it tasks like speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.
It was slightly less accurate than a pure hardware computer running on artificial intelligence, but the research demonstrates an important first step in a new kind of computer architecture. READ MORE...
Scientists have discovered cannabidiol, a compound in cannabis known as CBD, in a common Brazilian plant, opening potential new avenues to produce the increasingly popular substance.
The team found CBD in the fruits and flowers of a plant known as Trema micrantha blume, a shrub which grows across much of the South American country and is often considered a weed, molecular biologist Rodrigo Moura Neto of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro told AFP in June. READ MORE...
It's impressive enough that our human brains are made up of the same 'star stuff' that forms the Universe, but a wild study published back in 2016 suggests that this might not be the only thing the two have in common.
Just like the Universe, our brains might be programmed to maximise disorder – similar to the principle of entropy – and our consciousness could simply be a side effect, the paper suggests.
The quest to understand human consciousness – our ability to be aware of ourselves and our surroundings – has been going on for centuries. Although consciousness is a crucial part of being human, researchers are still grappling with where it comes from, when it starts, and why we have it.
But the 2016 study, led by researchers from France and Canada, puts forward a new possibility: what if consciousness arises naturally as a result of our brains maximising their information content? In other words, what if consciousness is a side effect of our brain moving towards a state of entropy?
Entropy is basically the term used to describe the progression of a system from order to disorder. Picture an egg: when it's all perfectly separated into yolk and white, it has low entropy, but when you scramble it, it has high entropy - it's the most disordered it can be. READ MORE...
Why would you want to drink boggy old sarcophagus juice when there are more palatable tomb beverages to hand?
In the tomb of the First Dynasty Egyptian queen Meret-Neith, archaeologists have uncovered a wealth of grave goods that includes hundreds of large wine jars – some of which still sealed. These funereal riches, they say, bolster the case that she was a person of great significance, maybe even Egypt's first female pharaoh.
Meret-Neith lived some 5,000 years ago, serving as queen of Egypt some time around 2950 BCE. She was, at the very least, queen-consort and regent. She may have been a ruler in her own right – a pharaoh – but archaeologists have been unable to determine her position with certainty. The first queen known to assume the full royal titulary was Sobekneferu, a millennium later.
There is certainly evidence of Meret-Neith's importance in her tomb, at the royal necropolis of Abydos. She was buried amid the final resting places of male pharaohs, and her own tomb was of comparable size and richness. She was likely the most powerful woman of her time. READ MORE...
A composite image in radio and optical of NGC 4632. (J. English (U.Manitoba), with support of T. Jarrett (UCT) and the WALLABY team: ATNF/ASKAP:Suburu/Hyper Suprime Camera)What we thought was a pretty normal spiral galaxy not far from the Milky Way has revealed a hidden surprise.
NGC 4632, some 56 million light-years away, is circled by a huge ring of gas that wraps around the galaxy at a highly inclined angle to its galactic plane. Why didn't we see it until now? It's invisible in most of the electromagnetic spectrum, appearing only when we stare at the sky with radio telescopes.
The discovery could put NGC 4632 in a class of extremely rare galaxies known as polar ring galaxies – but also suggests that these galaxies might not be as rare as we thought. Rather, NGC 4632 could mean that we've just been looking at them in the wrong light.
"The findings suggest that one to three per cent of nearby galaxies may have gaseous polar rings, which is much higher than suggested by optical telescopes. Polar ring galaxies might be more common than previously thought," says astrophysicist Nathan Deg of Queens University in Canada.
"While this is not the first time astronomers have observed polar ring galaxies, NGC 4632 is the first observed with ASKAP and there may be many more to come."
Polar ring galaxies are pretty much what they sound like: galaxies with a ring of material – dust, gas, and stars – that orbits around, or close to, the galaxy's poles; that is, perpendicular to the galactic plane. READ MORE...
The most high-resolution map yet of the underlying geology beneath Earth's Southern Hemisphere reveals something we previously never knew about: an ancient ocean floor that may wrap around the core.
This thin but dense layer exists around 2,900 kilometers (1,800 miles) below the surface, according to a study published in April. That depth is where the molten, metallic outer core meets the rocky mantle above it. This is the core-mantle boundary (CMB).
"Seismic investigations, such as ours, provide the highest resolution imaging of the interior structure of our planet, and we are finding that this structure is vastly more complicated than once thought," said geologist Samantha Hansen from the University of Alabama when the findings were announced.
Understanding exactly what's beneath our feet – in as much detail as possible – is vital for studying everything from volcanic eruptions to the variations in Earth's magnetic field, which protects us from the solar radiation in space.
Hansen and her colleagues used 15 monitoring stations buried in the ice of Antarctica to map seismic waves from earthquakes over three years. The way those waves move and bounce reveals the composition of the material inside Earth. Because the sound waves move slower in these areas, they're called ultralow velocity zones (ULVZs). READ MORE...
A sprinkling of tiny beads recovered off the coast of Papua New Guinea might have come from a rock with a rather interesting history, having crossed light years of space from its origin around a star that's not our Sun.
While the conclusions are yet to be appropriately reviewed, they're already provoking debate in the scientific community as researchers caution against reading too deeply into the analysis.
The meteor was traced by US government satellites before disintegrating over the Pacific in 2014. The unusual velocity of the bolide meteor, classified CNEOS 2014-01-08 (or more simply, IM1), attracted interest as a potential missile from afar.
It was an opportunity too good to miss for renowned Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb, who founded the Galileo Project in 2021 to search for signatures of technology of extraterrestrial origin. This June, he led an expedition to search for remains of IM1.
Using an array of powerful rare-earth magnets, members of the project's search team sifted hundreds of tiny spherules 0.05 to 1.3 millimeters in diameter out of sediment 2 kilometers (1.2 miles) below the surface, around 85 kilometers north of Manus Island.
A preliminary evaluation of 57 of the mineral objects by a team of researchers from Harvard University in the US suggests at least a few of them don't reflect the kind of chemistry we'd expect of our own Solar System, fueling speculation that IM1 crossed interstellar space before slamming into our planet's atmosphere. READ MORE...
Strange loops in the fabric of reality have finally been witnessed forming in a super cold gas, providing physicists with an opportunity to study the behaviors of a rather peculiar kind of one-sided magnetism.
Known as 'Alice rings' after the Alice of 'Wonderland' fame, the circular structures were observed by a collaboration between researchers in the US and Finland which already has a long list of discoveries concerning the distortions in quantum fields known as topological monopoles.
The isolated equivalent of a pole on a magnet, monopoles truly sound like something Alice would have seen in her hunt for the white rabbit. Cutting a magnet in half won't succeed in separating its north from south, but monopoles can theoretically arise in the quantum machinery that gives rise to various forces and particles.
One version of the monopole takes the form of an elementary particle, one that has defied all attempts to identify so remains, for now, purely hypothetical.
Yet monopoles can emerge in other settings. The frothing of various quantum fields can give rise to their own style of one-sided magnetism as they swirl, pulling and tugging on their surrounds to give birth to short-lived anomalies that stand out for a split moment before vanishing into the churn once more.
As a member of the Monopole Collaboration from Aalto University in Finland, physicist Mikko Möttönen is intimately familiar with a whole variety of whirlpools, strings, and tangles that can emerge in the weave of a quantum fabric. READ MORE...
For the first time, researchers have been able to extract DNA fragments from an ancient clay brick, demonstrating how these building blocks from times long past could be used to catalog flora found in the environment at the time.
When this brick was made some 2,900 years ago in what is now northern Iraq, the process would have involved mixing mud from the banks of the Tigris river, with materials such as chaff, straw, or animal dung.
Small plant particles amid the animal waste and straw can remain protected inside the brick for millennia – as has now been demonstrated by the team from the University of Oxford in the UK and the National Museum of Denmark and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark.
Having extracted a sample of the brick, the researchers used an analytical technique previously used on other forms of porous material, such as bone. This gave them the ability to sequence (or decode) the DNA in the plant matter, identifying 34 distinct taxonomic groups of plants.
"We were absolutely thrilled to discover that ancient DNA, effectively protected from contamination inside a mass of clay, can successfully be extracted from a 2,900-year-old brick," says biologist Sophie Lund Rasmussen from the University of Oxford.
The brick analyzed in this study was found in the palace of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II, located in the ancient city of Kalhu. Dating it to some time between 879 and 869 BCE – the years the palace was under construction – was made easier by an inscription in the clay that specifically mentioned the palace.
Plant families with the most abundant DNA in the brick included Brassicaceae (the cabbage and mustard family) and Ericaceae (heather), while genetic material from Betulaceae (birch), Lauraceae (laurels), Selineae (the family containing carrots and parsley), and Triticeae (cultivated grasses) was also present.
"The brick serves as a biodiversity time capsule of information regarding a single site and its surroundings," says Assyriologist Troels Arbøll, from the University of Copenhagen.
"In this case, it provides researchers with a unique access to the ancient Assyrians." READ MORE...
The basic idea of turning an asteroid into a rotating space habitat has existed for a while. Despite that, it's always seemed relatively far off regarding technologies, so the concept hasn't received much attention over the years.
But, if you're retired and have an underlying interest in researching space habitats, developing a detailed plan for turning an asteroid into one seems like a great use of time.
And that is precisely what David W. Jensen, a retired Technical Fellow at Rockwell Collins, recently did. He released a 65-page paper that details an easy-to-understand, relatively inexpensive, and feasible plan to turn an asteroid into a space habitat.
Fully diving into the report's details would be far beyond the scope of this article, but we can hit the highlights. Dr. Jensen breaks the discussion into three main categories – asteroid selection, habitat style selection, and mission strategy to get there (i.e., what robots to use). Let's tackle each of them in turn.
Asteroid selection focused on which asteroid would make the best candidate to be transformed into a rotating space habitat. Considerations for this part include what the asteroid is made of, its proximity to Earth (and "delta-V," i.e., how much energy it takes to reach), and its overall size. READ MORE...
"A diamond is forever." That iconic slogan, coined for a highly successful advertising campaign in the 1940s, sold the gemstones as a symbol of eternal commitment and unity.
But our new research, carried out by researchers in a variety of countries and published in Nature, suggests that diamonds may be a sign of break up too – of Earth's tectonic plates, that is. It may even provide clues to where is best to go looking for them.
Diamonds, being the hardest naturally-occurring stones, require intense pressures and temperatures to form. These conditions are only achieved deep within the Earth. So how do they get from deep within the Earth, up to the surface?
Diamonds are carried up in molten rocks, or magmas, called kimberlites. Until now, we didn't know what process caused kimberlites to suddenly shoot through the Earth's crust having spent millions, or even billions, of years stowed away under the continents.
Supercontinent cycles
Most geologists agree that the explosive eruptions that unleash diamonds happen in sync with the supercontinent cycle: a recurring pattern of landmass formation and fragmentation that has defined billions of years of Earth's history.
However, the exact mechanisms underlying this relationship are debated. Two main theories have emerged. READ MORE...
