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Science Explains Why You Forgot To Take Out The Trash

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

It's often nice to hear a familiar voice, but sometimes we're also guilty of tuning out wives, husbands, parents and even some friends. It turns out that our brains help us tune out spouses more effectively as we age.

Ingrid Johnsrude, a psychologist at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and her colleagues found that a familiar voice helps us organize the voices we hear in a crowd, so we can focus on the familiar voice--or ignore it. As we grow older and/or harder of hearing, we...

Scientists Explain Why Snails Have A Twisted Shell

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Molecules called morphogens control the shapes of organisms. One morphogen, Dpp, makes most snail shells coil to the right as described in a recent report in the journal EvoDevo. Snails belong to the taxonomic class Gastropoda, the most diverse group of molluscs, originating during the Cambrian period about 500 million years ago. Some gastropods, like snails, have coiled shells while others, like limpets, do not. The uneven distribution of the morphogenic (or shape-determining) protein Dpp is...

Chaos, Not Order, Spark Creativity

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Being neat and tidy has always been associated with order, tradition and general good sense. But being a slob may have a worse reputation than it deserves, according to a new study suggestig that a disorderly environment can spark creativity.

The study, led by University of Minnesota management professor Dr. Kathleen Vohs and published in Psychological Science on August 1st, found that an orderly environment encourages such "orderly" behavior as healthful eating, charitable giving, and a sense...

Secrets Of Celestial Relics Revealed

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

A 24-inch iron statue bearing a reverse swastika and dubbed "Iron Man" was discovered by Nazi archaeologists in Mongolia in 1939 on a quest to document the origins of Aryanism and returned to Germany. The reason for recent attention to the provenance of the statue of the Buddhist god Vaisravana is supplied by Dr. Elmar Buchner and his research team from the Institute of Paleontology at the University of Stuttgart who suspect that it came from a meteorite. As described in a 2012 volume of...

Our Alien Gold

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

    All the gold on earth is alien. Every atom of the precious metal probably came to us from violent collisions of dying stars, according to a team from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA.

The research team, led by astrophysicist Dr. Edo Berger, was studying the origins of short gamma ray bursts, two-tenths of a second-long blasts of radiation produced after the collision of two dying stars. Using the Magellan Telescopes at the Las Campanas...

An Unlikely New Home For Insects

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Fly ash deposits, by-products of coal combustion produced around energy power stations, have been found to serve as an alternative home for many insect species, new research shows. Fly ash refers to the fine silica material that rises with the gases produced during combustion. In the past, this material was simply released into the atmosphere. However, this practice raised many environmental and health concerns and prompted laws aimed at reducing such emissions. With stricter pollution control,...

A single gene for claustrophobia?

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Do you panic when you are in a small space? Do you sweat, or shake; does your heart pound? A study in the March issue of Translational Psychiatry reports a genetic defect as the cause of claustrophobia in mice. This is the first time that a single gene has been shown to regulate claustrophobia, moving researchers one step closer to understanding this serious anxiety disorder. The new research, led by Dr Hannelore Ehrenreich at the Max Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Göttingen,...

Celestial Music, at your fingertips

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

In the renaissance an scholar was considered educated only after mastering the so-called "quadrivium", which consisted of four subjects: arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music. Now, a group of astrophysicists has updated the classical quadrivium, by deriving music from astronomical data.

Researchers from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, USA, led by Dr Gerhard Sonnert, have developed a website that produces music made from star-generated sounds. These "star sounds" consist of...

From a great flood came unique underwater life

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

By Andrew Porterfield
 
When studying evolution, scientists don't often get the opportunity to see exactly how a modern species developed from a primordial ancestor--they pretty much rely on fossil evidence of predecessor species, and modern descendants. But small, super-salty basins at the bottom of the sea are showing scientists how one single species branched out into many new species, all adapting to these extreme environmental conditions.

When the Mediterranean Sea dried up 5 million...

SNPing away at Asthma

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Asthma is a chronic disease of the airways that in its most severe form can result in the loss of lung function. In the US, according to the Centers for Disease Control, 26 million people, more than seven million of them children, suffer from asthma. As reported in the Lancet Respiratory Medicine, researchers at Duke University did a study to identify genetic risk factors for asthma in participants in the Dunedin Multidisciplinary Health and Developmental Study and then followed these children...

Social networking makes lemurs smarter

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

Human evolution has been marked by two major milestones: an increase in brain size and the development of social groups. Many scientists have assumed that to solve sophisticated social cognitive problems, brain size and social skills need to go hand in hand.

New research led by anthropologist Dr Evan MacLean from Duke University now shows that, among lemurs, the size of an individual's social networks is the best predictor of how well it can perform cognitive tasks, rather than its brain size....

Snail reveals ancient human migration routes

April 22, 2025 • 03:00 PM

The genetic similarity between one variety of common garden snails found in Ireland and the Pyrenees, in Southern Europe, may be explained by human migrations over 8,000 years ago, says a new study published in PLoS ONE.  This is not the only animal to hitchhike on humans on their way to Ireland, as "other species may show a similar pattern, including the strawberry tree, the Kerry slug, and the Pyrenean glass snail", explains Dr Angus Davison, an evolutionary geneticist from Nottingham...

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