Science

As the weather grows cold this winter, you may be one of the many Americans pulling their winter jackets out of the closet. Not only can this extra layer keep you warm on a chilly day, but modern winter jackets are also a testament to centuries-old physics and cutting-edge materials science.

This article was written by Emily Ronay Johnston, an assistant teaching professor of global arts, media and writing studies, at the University of California, Merced, for The Conversation — a nonprofit news organization dedicated to sharing the knowledge of researchers and scientists, under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here. Ordinary and universal, […]

Despite how natural friendship can feel, people rarely stop to analyze it. How do you know when someone will make a good friend? When is it time to move on from a friendship? Oftentimes, people rely on gut intuitions to answer these kinds of questions.

A small trial led by researchers out of China and the U.K. has turned up some promising news for people experiencing anxiety or depression. Half of participants with treatment-resistant severe depression saw clinical improvement after undergoing deep brain stimulation, or DBS, and more than a third experienced an almost total elimination of their symptoms.

Delivering a connection-building protein to star-shaped cells in the brain could reverse changes to neural circuits seen in Down syndrome, according to new research my colleagues and I published in the journal Cell Reports.

Whether it’s from pulling an all-nighter in college or being unable to turn your brain off after a hectic day, we’ve all experienced a night of fitful sleep — and the fogginess that sets in the next morning. After your eyes open and you sit up in bed, you may even find yourself wondering what day it is. But why exactly does restless slumber result in this less-than-pleasant feeling? Thanks to a recent study out of MIT, we now have new scientific insight, which might in turn have you prioritizing shut-eye a little more.

If your best idea of what dinosaurs looked like comes from the Jurassic Park movies, new research out of the University of Chicago is here to provide a clearer picture. Published in Science, the paper describes two duck-billed dinosaur “mummies” discovered in Wyoming that were preserved in such detail they’ve given scientists a newly comprehensive […]

More than 5 million people worldwide are impacted by geographic atrophy due to age-related macular degeneration, the leading cause of irreversible blindness. There’s previously been no treatment for the condition — but in a new landmark trial, scientists restored vision to patients for the first time.

Science’s coolest moments aren’t always visible to the naked eye, but the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s appropriately named Cool Science Image Contest is here to show them to us. Featuring objects and phenomena captured through microscopy, photography, animations, medical imaging, and other methods, the competition highlights the best scientific visuals to come out of research, scholarship, […]

What pushes an acquaintance into friendship territory? While there are plenty of reasons we forge bonds with others — proximity, shared hobbies, similar values — new research from the University of California Los Angeles and Dartmouth College suggests a neurological explanation for kinship as well. Publishing their findings in Nature Human Behavior, the study authors […]

For more than three decades, researchers have been attempting to create gears that are small enough to fit inside the human body, but with the current available tech, they’ve hit a wall at 0.1 millimeters in diameter. Now, however, a team at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg has built gears that are so tiny, they can fit inside a strand of hair, laying the groundwork for the smallest on-chip motors in history — and they’re powered by light.

This article was originally written by Ben Barry for at SWNS — the U.K.’s largest independent news agency, providing globally relevant original, verified, and engaging content to the world’s leading media outlets. Never-before-seen photographs have been released showing NASA astronauts testing the limits of human endurance and the technology needed to get humans to the […]