Everyone knows the color wheel; red, yellow, and blue combine to make orange, green, and purple, all of which combine to make the spectrum. While this system works well for understanding pigments, it breaks down when considering mixtures of light, where red and green make yellow and white is a tertiary color. To explain these […]
Color: The most beautiful lie ever told Read More »
Including President Joe Biden, Emily Blunt, and James Earl Jones, stuttering affects over 70 million people, including 3 million Americans. Denoted by continuous interruptions in the starting and timing of syllabi, stuttering can have dramatic effects. About five percent of children stutter, but approximately 80 percent recover from stuttering by the time they reach adulthood,
The neurological glitches behind stuttering: Causes and arising treatments Read More »
After an amputation, it is quite common that patients experience a vivid perception that their limb is still present. In fact, roughly 80 percent of patients report pain from the phantom limb. According to neurologist Dr. Vilayanur Ramachandran of the University of California, San Diego, within the first few weeks status-post an amputation, many patients
How to amputate a phantom limb Read More »
Death has long been known as the event horizon of neuroscience. While it is still infeasible for neuroscientists to examine the experiences of dead brains, recent studies have provided much insight into the moments preceding death. According to Daniel Condziella of Copenhagen University Hospital, brain death — currently, the most commonly accepted definition of legal
Your brain on death Read More »
In the world of music, being able to know when you’re in tune is key. As any musician knows, it takes a good deal of time, skill, and experience to identify tones, and in most cases, one needs a reference tone, having “relative pitch.” However, some have the ability to identify notes without any reference.
The question of the perfect-pitch brain: Revealing how we process speech and melody Read More »
Archaea are often described as “the weird organisms.” This is certainly apt, considering that they are a strange hybrid between the domain bacteria and the domain eukarya. Although it is important to note that not all archaea are extremophiles — organisms that live in and can withstand extreme conditions — many live in perfectly “normal”
Archaea, the weird organisms Read More »
Cells, the most basic unit of life, have a remarkable property: resilience. Cells are faced with a multitude of stressful situations that test their ability to survive, thrive, and adapt to new situations. Often, when a cell endures stress, proteins within the cytoplasm begin to unravel. In order to prevent this, ubiquitin molecules are used
If cells can recover from stress, so can you! Read More »
Of the approximately 30,000 different species of formally-identified bacteria, less than one percent of them can make people sick. The vast majority of bacteria species are harmless or even beneficial. However, that dangerous one percent becomes more dangerous each year, killing hundreds of thousands of people around the world. How is it becoming more dangerous?
An impending crisis: Bacteria have developed into superbugs immune to antibiotics Read More »
But, like so many other animals, these six-legged, exoskeleton-clad creatures are facing a crisis at the hands of human activity. Our planet is teeming with bugs. Over 1 million insect species are described, and scientists estimate that another four to 7.5 million have yet to be classified. Insects account for a large proportion of animals
Dropping like flies: Human threats to insects and the desperate need for more data Read More »