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A team of scientists hunting dark matter has recorded suspicious pings coming from a vat of liquid xenon underneath a mountain in Italy

If the signal is real and persists, the scientists say, it may be evidence of a species of subatomic particles called axions — long theorized to play a crucial role in keeping nature symmetrical but never seen — streaming from the sun.

Instead of axions, the scientists may have detected a new, unexpected property of the slippery ghostly particles called neutrinos. Yet another equally likely explanation is that their detector has been contaminated by vanishingly tiny amounts of tritium, a rare radioactive form of hydrogen.

Every culture ever studied has been found to make music, and among the oldest artistic objects known are slender flutes carved from mammoth bone some 43,000 years ago — 24,000 years before the cave paintings of Lascaux.

And though the survival value that music held for our ancestors may not be as immediately obvious as the power to recognize words, Dr. Rauschecker added, “music works as a group cohesive. Music-making with other people in your tribe is a very ancient, human thing to do.”

devised a radical new approach to brain imaging that reveals what past studies had missed. By mathematically analyzing scans of the auditory cortex and grouping clusters of brain cells with similar activation patterns, the scientists have identified neural pathways that react almost exclusively to the sound of music — any music. It may be Bach, bluegrass, hip-hop, big band, sitar or Julie Andrews. A listener may relish the sampled genre or revile it. No matter. When a musical passage is played, a distinct set of neurons tucked inside a furrow of a listener’s auditory cortex will fire in response.Other sounds, by contrast — a dog barking, a car skidding, a toilet flushing — leave the musical circuits unmoved.

When COVID-19 struck, mRNA vaccines in particular were ready to be put to a real-world test. The 94% efficacy of the mRNA vaccines surpassed health officials’ highest expectations.

DNA and mRNA vaccines offer huge advantages over traditional types of vaccines, since they use only genetic code from a pathogen – rather than the entire virus or bacteria.

Gene-based vaccines also produce precise and effective immune responses. They stimulate not only antibodies that block an infection, but also a strong T cell response that can clear an infection if one occurs.

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Hodgson approached the organisers of the California State Fair wine competition, the oldest contest of its kind in North America, and proposed an experiment for their annual June tasting sessions.Each panel of four judges would be presented with their usual "flight" of samples to sniff, sip and slurp. But some wines would be presented to the panel three times, poured from the same bottle each time. The results would be compiled and analysed to see whether wine testing really is scientific.

Results from the first four years of the experiment, published in the Journal of Wine Economics, showed a typical judge's scores varied by plus or minus four points over the three blind tastings. A wine deemed to be a good 90 would be rated as an acceptable 86 by the same judge minutes later and then an excellent 94.

Theories of consciousness come from religion, from philosophy, from cognitive science, but not so much from evolutionary biology. Maybe that’s why so few theories have been able to tackle basic questions such as: What is the adaptive value of consciousness? When did it evolve and what animals have it?

The Attention Schema Theory (AST), developed over the past five years, may be able to answer those questions.

The theory suggests that consciousness arises as a solution to one of the most fundamental problems facing any nervous system: Too much information constantly flows in to be fully processed. The brain evolved increasingly sophisticated mechanisms for deeply processing a few select signals at the expense of others, and in the AST, consciousness is the ultimate result of that evolutionary sequence

CAN you detect someone’s emotional state just by looking at his face?

seems like it

Hundreds of scientific studies support the idea that the face is a kind of emotional beacon, clearly and universally signaling the full array of human sentiments

For the first time ever, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, bizarre ripples in space-time foreseen by Einstein a century ago. The discovery was the final, acid test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.

Einstein has been proven right – again.For the first time ever, scientists have directly detected gravitational waves, bizarre ripples in space-time foreseen by Einstein a century ago. The discovery was the final, acid test of Einstein’s celebrated general theory of relativity, and once again Einstein’s genius held up to scrutiny.

The waves in question arose during the close approach of two black holes some 1.3 billion years ago, when multicellular life began to spread on Earth. Traveling at the speed of light, the waves reached our planet in September -- precisely when a observatory built to detect them was emerging from a long hiatus.

What’s startling is how many mystery infections still exist today.

More than a third of acute respiratory illnesses are idiopathic; the same is true for up to 40 percent of gastrointestinal disorders and more than half the cases of encephalitis (swelling of the brain).

Up to 20 percent of cancers and a substantial portion of autoimmune diseases, including multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, are thought to have viral triggers, but a vast majority of those have yet to be identified.

Near the beginning, not long after the Big Bang, the universe was a cold and dark place swirling with invisible gas, mostly hydrogen and helium. Over millions of years, gravity pulled some of this primordial gas into pockets. The pockets eventually became so dense they collapsed under their own weight and ignited, flooding the darkness with ultraviolet radiation. These were the very first stars in the universe, flashing into existence like popcorn kernels unfurling in the hot oil of an empty pan.

Everything flowed from this cosmic dawn. The first stars illuminated the universe, collapsed into the black holes that keep galaxies together, and produced the heavy elements that would make planets and moons and the human beings that evolved to gaze upon it all.

Astronomers said Wednesday they have found, for the first time, evidence of the earliest stars.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

If a brain can make crazy leaps across the cosmos and bring extra passengers along (like you when you listen to me), then in a metaphorical way, the brain is bigger than what's around it, wrote 19th century poet Emily Dickinson. The brain is wider than the sky,For, put them side by side,The one the other will includeWith ease, and you beside.

"The universe is not only queerer than we suppose," said the biologist J.B.S. Haldane, "but queerer than we can suppose." In Haldane's view, the universe is bigger than the brain. There are things we just can't know, or even conjure with the brains we've got.

To illustrate the near-impossibility of establishing veracity in photography he engaged in what might seem like a mad, hopeless enterprise: to see whether the cannonballs were initially on the road or placed there—posed for ideological impact. An investigation that involved him going halfway around the world to the Crimea to find the road and subsequently interviewing “shadow experts” on the time of day each photograph might have been shot. As one commenter wrote: “Don’t miss the excursus on the use of albatross eggs to provide the albumen for photo emulsions in early film developing. Or the meditation on Descartes’ Meditations. Or the succinct and devastating deconstruction of deconstructionists’ dim witted view of truth (just because we can’t necessarily know it, they rashly conclude it doesn’t exist). This leads to his critique of the correlative misreading of the film Rashomon [it’s not an ‘all points of view are equally valid’ manifesto] and his desire, expressed in a footnote, for a Rashomon about Rashomon.”

How should we choose among these dueling, high-profile nutritional findings? Ioannidis suggests a simple approach: ignore them all.

even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you

studies report average results that typically represent a vast range of individual outcomes.

specifically, why such beliefs even exist in the first place.

how early humans interacted with their natural environment

All of a sudden, you see the grasses in front of you rustling. What do you do? Do you stop and think about what might be causing the rustling (the wind or a lion, for example), or do you immediately take some kind of action?

By using a sewage-handling robot, our laboratory has been able to detect coronavirus in wastewater 30 times faster than nonautomated large-scale systems.

When clinical studies emerged showing that people who test positive for SARS-CoV-2 shed the virus in their stool, the sewer seemed like an obvious place to look for it.

Surveillance depends on concentrating the viral particles from the wastewater to detect these low levels.

Everyday activities are more dangerous now that new Covid-19 variants are circulating

(CNN)Health officials are "extremely" worried about the new Covid-19 variants that have been detected in the US and what they could mean over the coming months, one expert said Monday night.

CDC officials have also said another variant -- called B.1.1.7 and first spotted in the UK -- has been detected in more than 20 states.

The moments we remember from the first years of our lives are often our most treasured because we have carried them longest. The chances are, they are also completely made up.

Around four out of every 10 of us have fabricated our first memory, according to researchers. This is thought to be because our brains do not develop the ability to store autobiographical memories at least until we reach two years old.

Yet a surprising number of us have some flicker of memory from before that age

In 1935, when both quantum mechanics and Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity were young, a little-known Soviet physicist named Matvei Bronstein, just 28 himself, made the first detailed study of the problem of reconciling the two in a quantum theory of gravity. This “possible theory of the world as a whole,” as Bronstein called it, would supplant Einstein’s classical description of gravity, which casts it as curves in the space-time continuum, and rewrite it in the same quantum language as the rest of physics.

His words were prophetic. Eighty-three years later, physicists are still trying to understand how space-time curvature emerges on macroscopic scales from a more fundamental, presumably quantum picture of gravity; it’s arguably the deepest question in physics.

The search for the full theory of quantum gravity has been stymied by the fact that gravity’s quantum properties never seem to manifest in actual experience. Physicists never get to see how Einstein’s description of the smooth space-time continuum, or Bronstein’s quantum approximation of it when it’s weakly curved, goes wrong.

There are many different kinds of intelligence, each reliant on its own set of skills and abilities. One such ability is pattern recognition, without which we’d have trouble recognizing faces, learning languages, or reading other people’s emotions. Because it’s so central to our cognitive and social functioning, pattern recognition is sometimes used by researchers as a shorthand for overall intelligence.

Finding that higher pattern detection ability puts people at greater risk to detect and apply stereotypes, but also to reverse them, implicates this ability as a cognitive mechanism underlying stereotyping,” co-author Jonathan Freeman said in the statement.

Fake news existed long before the internet. In an essay on political lying in the early 18th century, the writer Jonathan Swift noted that "Falsehood flies and the truth comes limping after it." You have to hire a train to pull the truth, explained English pastor Charles Spurgeon in the 19th century, while a lie is "light as a feather ... a breath will carry it."

MIT researchers recently studied more than 10 years' worth of data on the most shared stories on Facebook. Their study covered conspiracy theories about the Boston bombings, misleading reports on natural disasters, unfounded business rumors and incorrect scientific claims. There is an inundation of false medical advice online, for example, that encourages people to avoid life-saving treatments such as vaccines and promotes unproven therapies. (Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop is just one example.)

The psychological research does, however, offer us a silver lining to this storm cloud, with various experiments demonstrating that people can learn to be better lie detectors with a little training in critical thinking.