ISS and Endeavour seen from the Soyuz TMA spacecraft. / Credit: NASA This article was originally published at The Conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights. When we think about the difficulties of colonising another planet, the last thing we probably worry about about […]
The moment we took a stand. Zeresenay Alemseged/University of Chicago Recent analysis of a 3.3-million-year-old hominin fossil found back in 2000 has provided researchers with the most complete spinal column of any early human relative – and gives us a unique snapshot of a crucial transition point as our early […]
From just a bit of genetic information, a human embryo develops into a complete person. So humans have a limited ability to regrow body parts. / Credit: ImageFlow/Shutterstock If you cut the leg off a salamander, it grows back. Humans, however, can’t manage the trick. The reasons are far from […]
Ridges in the ancient Dresser Formation in the Pilbara Craton of Western Australia that preserve ancient stromatolites and hot spring deposits. Credit: Kathleen Campbell Fossil evidence of early life has been discovered by UNSW scientists in 3.48 billion year old hot spring deposits in the Pilbara of Western Australia – […]
Researchers have been debating whether acupuncture has any efficacy for decades. / Thunder Child via Flickr Does medicine have a bias against acupuncture? That’s the verdict of a paper (and an accompanying commentary) published earlier this week in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. While there’s still no medical consensus […]
By expanding brain tissue twice, MIT scientists were able to obtain high-resolution images of neurons in the hippocampus. A group of scientists from MIT have developed a way to make extremely high-resolution images of tissue samples at a fraction of the cost of previous techniques. By expanding tissue before imaging […]
The human brain is a biological masterpiece / F WALSH What really happens when we make and store memories has been unravelled in a discovery that surprised even the scientists who made it. The US and Japanese team found that the brain “doubles up” by simultaneously making two memories of events. […]
From left to right: Kurt Morath, Dr. Costas Koumenis, Dr. James Metz, Dr. Stephen Tuttle. / Credit: Image courtesy of Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania A voice asks the question aloud as a large group gathers in front of a closed door at the end of a […]
SKIP STERLING/QUANTA MAGAZINE IN THE 1950S, the Finnish biologist Björn Kurtén noticed something unusual in the fossilized horses he was studying. When he compared the shapes of the bones of species separated by only a few generations, he could detect lots of small but significant changes. Horse species separated by […]
The crater is buried partly offshore and partly onshore, under Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula / TIM PEAKE/NASA/ESA The crater made by the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs is revealing clues to the origins of life on Earth. Scientists have drilled into the 200km-wide Chicxulub crater now buried under the Gulf of […]