These footprints were made by ancient humans’ muddy feet as they traversed a lakeshore in Saudi Arabia about 120,000 years ago. STEWART ET AL., 2020 One day about 120,000 years ago, a few humans wandered along the shore of an ancient lake in what is now the Nefud Desert in […]
Time-sensitive neurons fatigue and skew our perception of time. On some days, time flies by, while on others it seems to drag on. A new study from JNeurosci reveals why: time-sensitive neurons get worn out and skew our perceptions of time. Neurons in the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) fire in response to a […]
Credit: CC0 Public Domain People are starting almost all the wildfires that threaten U.S. homes, according to an innovative new analysis combining housing and wildfire data. Through activities like debris burning, equipment use and arson, humans were responsible for igniting 97% of home-threatening wildfires, a University of Colorado Boulder-led team […]
Two major theories have fueled a now 1,500 year-long debate started by Saint Augustine: Is consciousness continuous, where we are conscious at each single point in time, or is it discrete, where we are conscious only at certain moments of time? In an Opinion published September 3 in the journal Trends […]
New Brain Study Shows How Obeying Orders Can Dull Our Empathy War atrocities are sometimes committed by ‘normal’ people obeying orders. Researchers from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience measured brain activity while participants inflicted pain and found that obeying orders reduced empathy and guilt related brain activity for the inflicted […]
ANU, Author provided Prehistoric axes and beads found in caves on a remote Indonesian island suggest this was a crucial staging post for seafaring people who lived in this region as the last ice age was coming to an end. Our discoveries, published today in PLOS ONE, suggest humans arrived on the […]
It’s important for successful adult-ing, experts say. Friendships can be made stronger through play-acting and problem solving. Robert Collins/Unsplash Archaeological records— and the modern-day antics of our primate relatives—make it clear that monkeying around goes way back. Less certain, however, are the developmental and evolutionary advantages that underlie our instinct […]
ANIMATION Our brains have an upper limit on how much they can process at once due to a constant but limited energy supply, according to a new UCL study using a brain imaging method that measures cellular metabolism. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, found that paying attention can […]
Study shows how traumatic experiences can leave their mark on a person’s eyes. New research by Welsh academics shows that a patient’s pupils can reveal if they have suffered a traumatic experience in the past. Post-traumatic stress disorder can occur when a person has experienced a traumatic event such as […]
Chiquihuite Cave in Mexico. Devlin A. Gandy, Author provided Humans lived in what is now Mexico up to 33,000 years ago and may have settled the Americas by travelling along the Pacific coast, according to two studies by myself and colleagues published today. It has been commonly believed that the first […]