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"Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have developed a new mathematical model to describe how the human brain visually identifies objects. The model accurately predicts human performance on certain visual-perception tasks, which suggests that it's a good indication of what actually happens in the brain, and it could also help improve computer object-recognition systems."

As if they weren't considered beastly enough, black holes can dive into nearby stars and devour them from the inside out, scientists now suggest. Such invasions by such black holes could help explain the most powerful explosions in the universe, gamma-ray bursts, whose origins remain elusive.

To see if quantum processes play a role in determining the shape of DNA, Elisabeth Rieper of the National University of Singapore and colleagues modelled each base pair as a cloud of electrons that oscillates around a positively charged nucleus. The team found that quantum entanglement between these clouds helped DNA to maintain its helical structure.

"ScienceDaily (Aug. 25, 2010) - A new study from researchers in Canada and Sweden has shown that biosynthetic corneas can help regenerate and repair damaged eye tissue and improve vision in humans. The results, from an early phase clinical trial with 10 patients, are published in the August 25th, 2010 issue of Science Translational Medicine"

New research looks at the effects of studying a form of meditation on brain connectivity. Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, researchers in China and the University of Oregon describe experiments on 45 students, some of whom were taught a meditation technique known as integrative body-mind training (IBMT). The researchers used brain imaging techniques to examine fibers connecting brain regions before and after training. Students trained in the IBMT approach for 11 hours or more appeared to develop new fibers in a part of the brain that helps a person regulate behavior. Control subjects did not form the new fibers. But what does the presence of those fibers actually mean -- and what is the meditation technique doing? We'll talk about it.

Though an experiment hunting for gravitational waves has yet to find any, its null result helps constrain models of how the universe began.

The benefits of resveratrol. Does it really work to help prevent cancer and alzheimer's disease?

In the past 30 years, a scientific revolution has completely transformed our understanding of babies and young children. Babies both know more and learn more than we would ever have thought possible, and we have recently begun to grasp the mechanisms by which they do this. I wrote The Philosophical Baby to try to show that thinking about childhood can help us answer deep questions about truth, imagination, love, consciousness, identity and morality. Without exaggeration, I believe it can tell us how we came to be human.

Racing against other companies around the globe, International Battery isn the front lines of an effort to build smaller, lighter, more powerful batteries that could help transform the American energy economy by replacing gasoline in cars and making windmills and solar cells easier to integrate into the power grid.

Finding genes that have evolved in humans among our genome's 3 billion bases is no easy feat. But now, a team has pinpointed three genes that arose from noncoding DNA and may help make our species unique.

In embryos and induced pluripotent stem cells, Nanog sets the ground state of pluripotency Nanog, named after the fountain of eternal youth, is considered the key to pluripotency, but its role is puzzling: it can be deleted from embryonic stem cells without causing them to differentiate, and it is not among the collection of genes that can induce specialized cells to become pluripotent. Nonetheless, it does help human cells reprogram and can be used to separate incompletely reprogrammed cells from fully reprogrammed ones.

"A lawyer is trying to convince a jury that his client really is crazy. It's usually a tough argument to sell in a court of law. But what if the lawyer has a picture of his client's brain that shows there's something biologically wrong with it? Can that evidence help persuade a jury? Should it even be allowed as evidence?"

"In the study, researchers took two groups of healthy young adults. Each group completed two learning sessions. The difference was that between the first and second sessions, one group got to take a 90-minute nap. The group that got the nap improved in their ability to learn by 10 percent, while the non-napping group did 10 percent worse."

"A researcher from The University of Western Ontario has helped solve a 37-year old space mystery using lunar images released yesterday by NASA and maps from his own atlas of the moon."

ScienceDaily (Jan. 7, 2011) - Many prescriptions for the top-selling class of drugs, known as atypical antipsychotic medications, lack strong evidence that the drugs will actually help, a study by researchers at the Stanford University School of Medicine and University of Chicago has found. Yet, drugs in this class may cause such serious effects as weight gain, diabetes and heart disease, and cost Americans billions of dollars.

For many years, neurons were thought to be alone in executing this task, and glia were consigned to a supporting role regulating a neuron's environment, helping it to grow, and even providing physical scaffolding (glia is Greek for 'glue'). In the past couple of decades, however, this picture has been changing.

Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system. Using the neurochemical specificity of [11C]raclopride positron emission tomography scanning, combined with psychophysiological measures of autonomic nervous system activity, we found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. To examine the time course of dopamine release, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging with the same stimuli and listeners, and found a functional dissociation: the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses to music. These results indicate that intense pleasure in response to music can lead to dopamine release in the striatal system. Notably, the anticipation of an abstract reward can result in dopamine release in an anatomical pathway distinct from that associated with the peak pleasure itself. Our results help to explain why music is of such high value across all human societies.

Peak Oil is the point at which petroleum production reaches its greatest rate just before going into perpetual decline. In "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," a new video series from The Nation and On The Earth productions, radio host Thom Hartmann explains that the world will reach peak oil within the next year if it hasn't already. As a nation, the United States reached peak oil in 1974, after which it became a net oil importer. Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and the other scientists, researchers and writers interviewed throughout "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate" describe the diminishing returns our world can expect as it deals with the consequences of peak oil even as it continues to pretend it doesn't exist. These experts predict substantially increased transportation costs, decreased industrial production, unemployment, hunger and social chaos as the supplies of the  fuels on which we rely dwindle and eventually disappear. Chomsky urges us to anticipate the official response to peak oil based on how corporations, news organizations and other institutions have responded to global warming: obfuscation, spin and denial. James Howard Kunstler says that we cannot survive peak oil unless we "come up with a consensus about reality that is consistent with the way things really are." This documentary series hopes to help build that consensus. Click here to watch the introductory video, and check back here for new videos each Wednesday.

ScienceDaily (May 23, 2011) - New research by a team of University of Pennsylvania psychologists is helping to overturn the dominant theory of how children learn their first words, suggesting that it occurs more in moments of insight than gradually through repeated exposure.