Ripples of nerve cell activity that lock in memories may have an unexpected job outside of the brain: Dropping blood sugar levels in the body. Just after a burst of…
Category: Life
How Hans Berger’s quest for telepathy spurred modern brain science
A brush with death led Hans Berger to invent a machine that could eavesdrop on the brain. In 1893, when he was 19, Berger fell off his horse during maneuvers…
Controlling nerve cells with light opened new ways to study the brain
Some big scientific discoveries aren’t actually discovered. They are borrowed. That’s what happened when scientists enlisted proteins from an unlikely lender: green algae. Cells of the algal species Chlamydomonas reinhardtii…
A volcano-induced rainy period made Earth’s climate dinosaur-friendly
The biggest beasts to walk the Earth had humble beginnings. The first dinosaurs were cat-sized, lurking in the shadows, just waiting for their moment. That moment came when four major…
This is the oldest fossil evidence of spider moms taking care of their young
Long before Tyrannosaurus rex walked the Earth, sap engulfed a spider guarding her egg sac. Her corpse, preserved alongside her offspring in amber for 99 million years, is the oldest…
Fossil tracks may reveal an ancient elephant nursery
Fossilized footprints found on a beach in southern Spain betray what may have been a nursery for an extinct species of elephant. The track-rich coastal site, which scientists have dubbed…
Fossils and ancient DNA paint a vibrant picture of human origins
In The Descent of Man, published in 1871, Charles Darwin hypothesized that our ancestors came from Africa. He pointed out that among all animals, the African apes — gorillas and…
This big-headed pterosaur may have preferred walking over flying
In 2013, a police raid at Santos Harbor in Brazil recovered about 3,000 smuggled fossils, including the most intact specimen of a type of big-headed pterosaur ever found. A new…
A deep look at a speck of human brain reveals never-before-seen quirks
A new view of the human brain shows its cellular residents in all their wild and weird glory. The map, drawn from a tiny piece of a woman’s brain, charts…
FDA approved a new Alzheimer’s drug despite controversy over whether it works
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a controversial Alzheimer’s treatment, the first that promises to slow the disease’s destruction in the brain, not just improve symptoms. The drug,…
