Placebos can make us feel better. Mild electric zaps to the brain can make that effect even stronger, scientists report online May 3 in Proceedings of the National Academy of…
Author: ID
Surprisingly, humans recognize joyful screams faster than fearful screams
Screams of joy appear to be easier for our brains to comprehend than screams of fear, a new study suggests. The results add a surprising new layer to scientists’ long-held…
How fossilization preserved a 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab’s brain
Paleontologists can spend years carefully splitting rocks in search of the perfect fossil. But with a 310-million-year-old horseshoe crab brain, nature did the work, breaking the fossil in just the…
A new book reveals stories of ancient life written in North America’s rocks
How the Mountains GrewJohn DvorakPegasus Books, $29.95 Imagine a world where pigeon-sized dragonflies soar above spiders with half-meter-long legs, where 2-meter-long millipedes slither and 20-kilogram scorpions hunt. About 300 million…
If confirmed, tubes in 890-million-year-old rock may be the oldest animal fossils
Pale, wormlike tubes in 890-million-year-old rock may be ancient sea sponges, a new study concludes. If confirmed, that controversial claim would push back the origin of the earliest sponges by…
3.42-billion-year-old fossil threads may be the oldest known archaea microbes
Threadlike filaments pressed in rock may be the remnants of archaea that burped methane near hydrothermal vents 3.42 billion years ago. If so, these strands in rock excavated in South…
Pterosaurs may have been able to fly as soon as they hatched
Pterosaur hatchlings may have been able to fly right out of the shell — although the flight of those ancient baby reptiles might have looked a bit different from that…
An ecologist’s new book gets at the root of trees’ social lives
Finding the Mother TreeSuzanne SimardKnopf, $28.95 Opening Suzanne Simard’s new book, Finding the Mother Tree, I expected to learn about the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. I had…
As ‘phantom rivers’ roar, birds and bats change their hunting habits
For two summers in a rugged corner of Idaho’s Pioneer Mountains, the roar of rushing white water filled the air. But where the loud sounds prevailed, only gentle streams flowed…
Wild donkeys and horses engineer water holes that help other species
Water drives the rhythms of desert life, but animals aren’t always helpless against the whims of weather. In the American Southwest, wild donkeys and horses often dig into the dusty…
