Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images) The Dunning-Kruger effect is perhaps both one of the the most famous biases in human behavior—and the most predictable. It posits that people who don’t understand a topic also lack sufficient knowledge to recognize that they don’t understand it. Instead, they know just enough to convince themselves they’re […]
Enlarge / The goggles in use. The red cap isn’t part of the system; it holds electrodes that are tracking the participant’s brain activity. (credit: Sahel et. al.) Our nerves’ electrical impulses are created by a class of proteins called ion channels, which let ions flow into and out of cells. But controlling the flow […]
Enlarge (credit: University of Pittsburgh Medical Center) One of the most astonishing examples of the promise of brain implants is shown in a video in which a paralyzed person controls a robotic arm with nothing but her thoughts. The technology alone is impressive, but the joy on the participant’s face as she grabs herself a drink […]
Enlarge / From some perspectives, the forest garden doesn’t stand out from the landscape. (credit: Chelsey Armstrong) In the 1930s, an archeologist from the Smithsonian wrote a short paper remarking on the exquisite vegetation around First Nation villages in Alaska. The surroundings were filled with nuts, stone fruit, berries, and herbs—several non-native to the area […]
Enlarge / Illustration of antibodies (red and blue) responding to an infection with the new coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (purple). (credit: Getty Images) From the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of researchers’ nagging questions involved trying to understand what constitutes immunity to future infections. People who had been infected by the virus produced varying amounts of […]
Enlarge / The stuff we call “laughter” from hyenas? It’s not. (credit: Getty Images) Among humans, laughter can signify a lot of different things, from intimacy to discomfort. Among animals, however, laughter usually signifies something along the lines of “this is playtime—I’m not actually going for your throat.” According to new research from the University […]
Enlarge (credit: David Aubrey) Since its advent in 2005, a technique called optogenetics has made it vastly easier to link neural activity with behavior and to understand how neurons and brain regions are connected to each other. Neuroscientists just pick the (animal) neurons they’re interested in, genetically engineer them to express a light-responsive protein, and […]
Enlarge / An artist’s schematic of the system. (credit: Nature) Elon Musk’s Neuralink has been making waves on the technology side of neural implants, but it hasn’t yet shown how we might actually use implants. For now, demonstrating the promise of implants remains in the hands of the academic community. This week, the academic community […]
The bones of a pygmy mammoth. (credit: National Park Service/Justin Tweet) Humans haven’t always been great to nature. But at least our ancestors may not have killed off island megafauna in the distant past, so that’s something. New research, published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences, suggests that there’s not enough data to […]
Enlarge (credit: Bernd Wolter / EyeEm) It’s now well-established that bats can develop a mental picture of their environment using echolocation. But we’re still figuring out what that means—how bats take the echoes of their own vocalizations and use them to figure out the locations of objects. In a paper released today, researchers provide evidence […]