Humans
We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.
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- Health & Medicine
Body & Brain
Knights’ bodily burden, go-to-sleep nerve cells, rat empathy and more in this week’s news.
- Health & Medicine
‘Wave of death’ may not be a last gasp
A minute after decapitation, a rat's severed head shows signs of life.
- Psychology
Kids share, chimps stash
Divvying up goods comes easily to 3-year-old kids but not to adult chimps, a finding with evolutionary implications.
- Health & Medicine
Body & Brain
The brain sleeps in shifts, plus thinking better with folate, how brains feel the beat and more in this week's news.
- Health & Medicine
Something in the air may cause lung damage in troops
Unexplained breathing problems in soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan come from deposits that damage tiny passages in the lungs.
- Humans
Mirror system gets an assist
Study finds two brain systems are surprisingly active when an amputee observes a task she can’t perform.
- Psychology
Narcissists need no reality check
Masters of vanity know they’re arrogant and disliked, but see own bigheadedness as justified.
- Humans
Crime’s digital past
Computer science makes history, gleaning new findings from centuries' worth of transcripts from a Victorian-era courthouse.
- Health & Medicine
Residents of the brain
It's a zoo in there: Scientists turn up startling diversity among neurons.
- Tech
Airports’ leaden fallout may taint some kids
People who live below the flight path of piston-engine aircraft — or downwind of airports serving such small planes — are exposed to lead from aviation fuel. A new study now links an airport’s proximity to somewhat elevated blood-lead levels in children from area homes.
- Math
Varying efficacy of HIV drug cocktails explained
Steepness of slope in dose-response curve tips off researchers to importance of timing in virus’s life cycle.
