Two children who experienced intense, insatiable hunger that drove them to overeat have rare, never-before-seen genetic mutations that interfere with leptin, a key hormone that helps tell the body when it is full, a new case report says. After white fat cells make leptin, it plugs into the brainstem and hypothalamus, brain regions that help … Read more
Elon Musk’s brain-implant company Neuralink has been given clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to carry out its first trials in humans, according to news reports. Neuralink aims to use its brain-computer interface (BCI) technology to restore movement in people with quadriplegia, meaning complete or partial paralysis of the arms, legs and … Read more
You’re walking somewhere you’ve never been before and suddenly feel as though you’ve strolled down the same road already. You’re experiencing the well-known phenomenon déjà vu — but what is déjà vu, really, and why does the strange feeling happen? Déjà vu is a French expression meaning “already seen,” which was first used in 1876 … Read more
After decades of debate, scientists believe they have identified the most recent ancestor of the sister to all animals via the novel use of an analytical technique. The finding settles a central question about the evolution of the entire tree of animal life. All animal life is descended from a single common ancestor — a … Read more
What would Bill Nye the Science Guy get our home planet for Earth Day? The ultimate gift: fusion energy. “We need electricity,” Nye told Live Science in an exclusive interview on Thursday (April 20). “We need not only what we can get right now with existing technologies — with wind, and solar and geothermal energy … Read more
The spread of drug-resistant “superbugs” — including bacteria that have evolved to thwart even the most potent antibiotics — represents an ever-growing threat to public health. Now, scientists have invented a new type of antibiotic that can take down these germs by rapidly rearranging its atoms and thus changing its shape. The researchers described the … Read more
Human beings can generate false memories of events mere seconds after they have occurred, a new study has found. The phenomenon, which researchers have dubbed “short-term memory illusions,” shows how easily and rapidly humans reimagine experiences to fit our preconceptions, rather than accurately recording what takes place. The researchers published their findings April 5 in … Read more
Scientists have long debated the greatest possible age of a person, with previous studies placing the limit at up to 150 years. But in the past 25 years, no one has surpassed the record for the world’s oldest person, held by Jean Louise Calment, who died at age 122 in 1997. “This has led people … Read more
A person’s native language may shape how their brain builds connections between different hubs of information processing, a new brain scan study reveals. The observed differences in these language network structures were related to linguistic characteristics in the native languages of the study participants: German and Arabic. “So the difference we find there shouldn’t be … Read more
Scientists studying a cousin of the bacteria responsible for tuberculosis and leprosy have discovered an enzyme that converts hydrogen into electricity, and they think it could be used to create a new, clean source of energy literally from thin air. The enzyme, which has been named Huc, is used by the bacterium Mycobacterium smegmatis to … Read more
