Research exploring how people forget things appears to have unintentionally stimulated better memory among its participants, a new study suggests. The experiment was originally conducted in 2012 and was supposed to explore the role of the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in voluntary forgetting. While the 2012 experiment successfully demonstrated forgetting was something actively managed
Month: September 2021
When it comes to the weather report, it’s not just tomorrow’s weather that meteorologists try to discern. As well as long-term forecasts, weather models are often tasked with predicting meteorological conditions over the next hour or so, known as ‘nowcasting’. Over at Google-backed artificial intelligence company DeepMind, researchers have now made a major step forward
A comet so huge it was initially mistaken for a dwarf planet is on an inward-bound trajectory from the outer Solar System. There’s no reason to worry – C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), as the comet is called, will approach no closer to the Sun than just outside the orbit of Saturn. But its large size and
Space exploration requires all kinds of interesting solutions to complex problems. There is a branch of NASA designed to support the innovators trying to solve those problems – the Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC). They occasionally hand out grant funding to worthy projects trying to tackle some of these challenges. The results from one of
A cave chamber sealed off by sand for some 40,000 years has been discovered in Vanguard Cave in Gibraltar – a finding that could reveal more about the Neanderthals who lived in the area around that time. “Given that the sand sealing the chamber was [40,000] years old, and that the chamber was therefore older, it must
Younger generations are going to grow up in a very different world to that of their parents – and through no fault of their own. Compared to babies born in 1960, a series of new models suggests children born after 2010 will experience four times as many extreme climate events in their lifetimes on average,
Modern-day imaging technology is able to uncover ancient buildings and structures not visible on the surface, and we just got another excellent example: the discovery of a hidden neighborhood in one of the biggest historical Maya cities. The city in question is Tikal, now in Guatemala. Thought to have been one of the most dominant
It may be dry as desert bones these days, but Mars was once so wet that entire landscapes were shaped by running water. Wild floods thundered across the red ground, gouging chasms in the Martian surface and dumping vast quantities of sediment that changed the shape of the landscape. And, in contrast to such landscape-changing
The Vinland Map, once thought to be one of the earliest depictions of North America after its discovery by Europeans, has gone from being famous to being infamous: It turns out that the map is a complete fake. That’s the verdict of researchers who analyzed the ink on the map and found that it comes
Paleontologists in the UK have found bones at the Isle of Wight that they believe belong to two new species of predatory dinosaur. The bones suggest their owners were both species of spinosaurid – the family of theropods that includes the well-known Spinosaurus genus. Between 2013 and 2017, researchers unearthed a collection of over 50 bones, many
With powerful legs tipped by dagger-like talons, capable of eviscerating you with a single kick, cassowaries are the bird that most lives up to the moniker of a modern dinosaur. But surprisingly, these strikingly unique avians may have been humanity’s ‘chickens’ – long before we kept actual chickens. Eggshell remnants suggest that as far back
A huge seismic event that started in May of 2018 and was felt across the entire globe has officially given birth to a new underwater volcano. Off the eastern coast of the island of Mayotte, a gigantic new feature rises 820 meters (2,690 feet) from the seafloor, a prominence that hadn’t been there prior to
The Great Red Spot visible on Jupiter is a swirling anticyclonic storm, the largest of its kind in the Solar System – large enough to fit our entire planet within. Now, a new analysis has revealed the winds around the edge of the spot are mysteriously speeding up. Using data collected from the Hubble Space
The most energetic light and particles in the Universe represent an enduring mystery: we don’t know where they come from. Sure, we can trace some; but there’s more gamma radiation and neutrinos streaming through the Universe than we can account for. A lot more. And astronomers have just found an explanation for some of them:
On the frozen surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia, nature makes art. There, on the frozen lake, stones can be found balancing atop narrow pedestals of ice in shallow cavities, as though carefully sculpted and placed. These are called ‘Zen stones’, and scientists have finally figured out how these formations occur – by reproducing the
An ecologist’s blunder led to the release of a ‘Russian doll’ set of stomach-bursting parasites onto a remote Finnish island, a new study has revealed. Thirty years ago, when ecologist Ilkka Hanski introduced Glanville fritillary butterflies (Melitaea cinxia) onto the island of Sottunga in the Åland archipelago, he planned to watch how a population of
Astronauts on the International Space Station see remarkable views of Earth every day, but one phenomenon never fails to awe them: the aurora. European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet shared a jaw-dropping photo of the polar lights from his vantage point about 250 miles (402km) above Earth on Friday. It’s among the best images of the aurora ever
If you live at a high latitude, it’s time to break out the camera. Space weather agencies are predicting a solar storm for Monday 27 September: moderate, with a chance of aurora. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the British Met Office have both issued predictions for the storm, which is predicted
DNA evidence has finally ended the debate about where the ancient Etruscans – an ancient civilization whose remains are found in Italy – came from. According to almost 2,000 years worth of genomic data, collected from 12 sites across Italy, these enigmatic people did not emigrate from Anatolia (a region that’s now part of Turkey), but
There are many reports based on scientific research that talk about the long-term impacts of climate change – such as rising levels of greenhouse gases, temperatures and sea levels – by the year 2100. The Paris Agreement, for example, requires us to limit warming to under 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by the end
It’s something that has long been suspected. Now, we have evidence from a new study – once the Autopilot self-driving tech is enabled on Tesla cars, human drivers tend to pay less attention to what’s happening on the road. The study highlights the awkward in-between phase that we’re now in: Self-driving tech has become good
A new telescope system has managed to capture the highest resolution image of the Moon ever taken from Earth using radar technology. The feat took years of work, and the result is spectacularly detailed. The focal point is Tycho Crater, one of the most prominent impressions on the Moon. And even though it was taken
Let’s face it. Sex isn’t always worth the effort. For many animals, the whole mating game is so inconvenient, going it alone and reproducing asexually is the best option. As appealing as it might sound, however, evolution puts a heavy price on a population that gives up sex for too long. Sooner or later, a
Researchers have managed to keep tabs on 1 million different neurons in the brains of mice at one time – taking scientists an impressive step closer towards one day being able to track the very-complex activity of human brains. The key is an innovation that’s being called ‘light beads microscopy’. It improves on current two-photon
They’re incredible. Amazing. Magical. But perhaps the most fantastic thing about lucid dreams – in which the dreamer becomes aware they’re dreaming – is how realistic they seem. Sadly, only about half of us ever experience lucid dreams in our lives, and efforts to trigger the phenomenon have delivered mixed results. But a study published
One of the most spectacular Einstein rings ever seen in space is enabling us to see what’s happening in a galaxy almost at the dawn of time. The smears of light called the Molten Ring, stretched out and warped by gravitational fields, are magnifications and duplications of a galaxy whose light has traveled a whopping
Our planet and everything that lives on it is buckling under the weight of all the plastic waste we’re producing. The volume of these non-biodegradable materials discarded after use is only increasing, so we need new ways to tackle them, and fast. A new study demonstrates the proof-of-concept of an entirely new approach to plastic recycling, inspired
Using data from multiple telescopes, scientists have detected clouds on a gas giant exoplanet some 520 light-years from Earth. So detailed were the observations, they even discerned the altitude of the clouds and the structure of the upper atmosphere, with the greatest precision yet. It’s work that will help us better understand exoplanet atmospheres –
Culturally, this is an era in which people are held in high esteem when they stick with their beliefs and negatively labeled as “flip-floppers” or “wishy-washy” when they change what they think. While the courage of convictions can be a plus in situations where people are fighting for justice, sticking with beliefs in a dynamic
Nobody ever said parenting was easy, but depending on circumstances, some people can find it much harder than others. In recent years researchers have begun to recognize ‘parental burnout‘ – a condition in which exhausted parents become overwhelmed by their role as primary carers, potentially leading to emotional distance from their children, parental ineffectiveness, neglect,
A new discovery offers definitive evidence that humans were in North America far earlier than archaeologists previously thought – a whopping 7,000 years earlier. Fossil footprints found on the shore of an ancient lake bed in New Mexico’s White Sands National Park date as far back as 23,000 years ago, making them the oldest ever
NASA’s Mars InSight lander has detected its three most powerful quakes yet. On 25 August, InSight detected two quakes, at magnitude 4.1 and 4.2. Then, on 18 September – the lander’s 1,000th Mars day of operation – it picked up the rumbles of another magnitude 4.2 quake. These new quakes blow the previous record of
As the polar ice sheets melt, the process is not just raising sea levels – it’s also warping the underlying surface of Earth, a new study reveals, and some of the effects can be seen across thousands of miles. What’s happening is that Earth’s crust is rising and spreading as the weight of the ice
Easter Island’s famous megaliths have relatives on islands thousands of miles to the north and west – and so did the people who created them, a study said Wednesday. Research showed that over a 250-year period separate groups of people set out from tiny islands east of Tahiti to settle Easter Island, the Marquesas and
Microplastics are everywhere. Even what should be untouched wildernesses – the icy plains of Antarctica, the crushing depths of the deepest ocean chasms – has been polluted by our garbage. So it’s no surprise that we ingest plastic, too; it’s been found in our feces, probably as a result of eating from plastic containers. But a
Now, perhaps more than ever, engineers and scientists have been taking inspiration from nature when developing new technologies. This is also true for the smallest flying structure humans have built to date. Inspired by the way trees like maples disperse their seeds using little more than a stiff breeze, researchers developed a range of tiny flying
Cracks are appearing on the International Space Station (ISS), and retired NASA astronaut Bill Shepherd says they’re a “fairly serious issue.” After Russian cosmonauts spotted the cracks on the station’s Zarya module, Vladimir Solovyov, flight director of the Russian segment of the ISS, publicly revealed the discovery in August. The cracks don’t pose a danger to astronauts
The magnificently long, spined tails of ancient dinosaurs are unlike anything that’s alive today. New research suggests that they elegantly swished side-to-side while their owners walked, and enthusiastically wagged when they ran. It took around 80 million years for the bird lineage of dinosaurs to lose such lengthy tails, which they did in line with
Reservoir computing is already one of the most advanced and most powerful types of artificial intelligence that scientists have at their disposal – and now a new study outlines how to make it up to a million times faster on certain tasks. That’s an exciting development when it comes to tackling the most complex computational
It may not appear so to us, but the space between the stars isn’t completely empty. Tenuous and not-so-tenuous clouds of gas and dust drift in the darkness. A region of space some 700 light-years away is a fascinating exception. There, among the constellations of Perseus and Taurus, astronomers have found a large, spherical void
Catchy songs that ‘go viral’ are downloaded in a way that closely resembles the spread of an actual virus, according to new research out of Great Britain. The data was collected before the days of streaming music, but the findings suggest some tunes are downright infectious, jumping from one host to another in a similar
NASA is embarking on a new Moon shot, aiming to one day build a permanent crewed station on the lunar surface. Before it sends any people, though, the agency is launching a golf-cart-sized robot to the Moon‘s freezing, shadowy south pole. The rover, called the Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER), will spend 100 days
About 1,500 years ago, Maya builders crafted a massive pyramid out of rock that had been ejected by a volcano, in an eruption that was so powerful it chilled the planet, scientists recently discovered. Around 539 CE, in what is now San Andrés, El Salvador, the Ilopango caldera erupted in what was the biggest volcanic
The unusually large hole that opened up in the ozone layer over the Arctic last year seems to have been triggered by record-breaking winter temperatures in the North Pacific ocean, according to new analysis. The huge hole, which encompassed nearly the entire ozone layer overhead, closed in early spring, but there’s a chance it could
Modern roads and developments share more similarities with ancient urban centers than we often realize – which is certainly the case with the sprawling Teotihuacan settlement, once located around 40 kilometers (25 miles) northeast of Mexico City. Researchers have used LIDAR (“light” and “radar”) scanning to reveal that the contours of Teotihuacan – much of
The death of a massive star has to be one of the most beautiful endings in the Universe. They eject colossal quantities of material into the space around them, carved out by explosion shockwaves and stellar winds, illuminated by the star’s own light. That’s what’s happening with AG Carinae, a dying massive star 15,000 light-years
A tabletop gravitational wave detector based around a piece of ringing quartz has recorded two mysterious signals in its first 153 days of operation. It’s unclear exactly what these signals are; they could be from a number of phenomena. But one of those phenomena is exactly what the detector is designed to pick up –
Researchers have rewritten Japanese history after uncovering a third, and previously unknown, group of ancestors that migrated to Japan around 2,000 years ago, of modern-day Japanese populations. Ancient Japan can be split into three key time periods: the Jomon period (13,000 BCE to 300 BCE), a time when a small population of hunter-gatherers who were
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