Common sense, or the practical knowledge shared by the majority of the population regarding everyday matters, is ambiguous: It is difficult to know exactly why something is common sense even though it is intuitively clear. Many often assume that something clear to one person is also clear to another, but this may not be the […]
Quantifying common sense: New research suggests it’s not so common Read More »
The physical aging process is commonly dreaded; not many look forward to the decline of their strength or increased susceptibility to various diseases. These natural side effects of aging seem inevitable, but a recent study regarding the development of a novel therapeutic mechanism reveals that this may not be the case. A team of researchers
It is widely believed that one is completely disconnected from the outside world during sleep, unreactive to anything happening around them. New research, however, reveals that this may be far from the truth; in a recent study, researchers led by Delphine Oudiette, Isabelle Arnulf, and Lionel Naccache at the Paris Brain Institute found that during
Subconscious communication: Windows of awareness discovered during sleep Read More »
In 2004, a sudden brainstem stroke left the then 30-year-old Ann Johnson completely paralyzed. It took years of physical therapy for her to regain enough muscle control to express emotion on her face and breathe independently, but the muscles controlling her speech remained stagnant. Her daughter, 13 months old at the time of the stroke,
Defeating paralysis: revolutionary brain implant allows woman to speak after 18 years Read More »
Extending a human’s lifetime sounds like something that would only exist in a fictional realm. A recently published study, though, shows that this ability may one day be achievable in our own world. A common theory regarding the mechanism that drives aging is that the accumulation of genetic mutations eventually causes cells to lose their
Out with the old: Geneticists reversed aging in mice Read More »
Monkeys can play video games with their minds. Rats can control each others’ brains. Previously injured humans can restore sensation and function in limbs. These impossible-sounding events are all achievable with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs), which are systems that use electrical devices to collect neural signals from the central nervous system and, using algorithms, translate them
The power of the mind: Using neural signals to restore movement in paralyzed limbs Read More »
In September of 2022, a research team working at the Gogo Formation sedimentary deposit in western Australia discovered the world’s oldest heart, located inside a fossilized prehistoric fish. The fish, classified as a placoderm, had been dead for approximately 380 million years. The placoderm is crucial to studying the evolution of modern-day vertebrates. Because they
The world’s oldest heart: Evolutionary insights from the 380 million-year-old fossil Read More »
Many believe that death is an instantaneous and irreversible event, yet recent research conducted by a group of scientists at Yale University has shown otherwise. The group’s study, published in Nature, found that pumping nutrient-rich synthetic blood throughout the bodies of pigs that had been dead for an hour could reverse the deleterious processes that
Resurrecting pigs? Cellular activity restored in pig hours after death Read More »
We experience three common spatial dimensions in our universe: depth, width, and length — with time sometimes considered as a fourth dimension. Each progressive dimension adds complexity and therefore requires more information to describe. For example, more information is needed to describe a three-dimensional cube than a less-complex two-dimensional square. Although certain theories have suggested