Your Brain Has Been Lying to You in Complete Sentences
Language might not be how your brain thinks. It might just be how it reports back. So what exactly is doing the reasoning?
Vitals
Jersey City born and raised. Daughter of a pediatrician. YGBFKM virtual contributor. Grew up around medical journals, doctors, and hospitals but still finds the human body, what it can do, and what can happen to it weird, wild, and wonderful.
Your Dog Is Parsing Your Words
Even dogs that spent puppyhood on the street or in a shelter do it. How much talking does it take to rewire a dog's brain?
Bubbles the Dolphin Makes Fish Vomit. Then He Eats It.
Researchers watched one dolphin pull this off 11 times. Nobody knows where he learned it, or whether other dolphins are doing the same.
A Lung Transplant Came With An Allergy
A transplanted lung brought its previous owner's food issue along for the ride.
The Color Missing From Your LED Bulbs Completely Prevented Nearsightedness in Animal Tests
Standard LEDs leave out a wavelength abundant in sunlight. In tree shrews, adding it back changed what happened to their developing eyes.
Human Brain Tissue Builds Working Circuits in a Mouse
Inside a living mouse, human brain cells did something they've never done in a dish: they built neurons no lab has managed to grow before.
The Muscle We Thought Could Not Mend
Heart muscle lost in a heart attack was supposed to be gone for good. Living human tissue shows the heart has another response.
Ricefield Eels Start Female. The Thermostat Decides What Comes Next.
They start female. Somewhere along the way, their surroundings can begin pushing their ovaries toward testes. Researchers think they've found the molecular switch.
More Than Half the Memory Connections Disappeared. The Memories Didn't.
The brain can lose more than half its memory-related connections and still remember. What got preserved, and why, is the part science hasn't figured out yet.
Mammals Have One Antibody System. Bats Didn't Get the Memo.
Bats carry Ebola, coronaviruses and worse without breaking a sweat. Turns out they may have been running a completely different immune system.
The Song Stuck in Your Head Leaves a Readable Trace in Your Brain
Ten people imagined familiar melodies without making a sound. What their neural activity revealed was detailed enough for researchers to reconstruct the actual notes.
Your Teeth Know Something Your Oncologist Didn't
The cancer survival gap was nearly two years, and it had something to do with tooth count, but nothing to do with chewing.
The Brain Tumor Is in the Skull. The Fight Against It Is in the Neck.
The tumor is in the skull. So why does removing the immune response from the neck make the treatment stop working?
Your Midlife Brain Swaps Out Its Immune Cells for Angrier Ones
Something in your head has been quietly changing crews since your 50s. Nobody vetted the new hires, and researchers just got their first real look at who showed up.
Saber-Toothed Cats Had Bad Backs and Worse Luck
A predator built for combat carried a nerve disorder 900 times rarer than in modern humans. Researchers now think it wasn't bad luck, it was genetics catching up with a shrinking population.
Reducing the Deadliest Ovarian Cancer by Nearly 80% Doesn't Require Removing Ovaries
Surgeons have been in the room with the answer for decades. What took so long, and what still stands between knowing and doing?
A Mental Disorder and Lung Disease Share a Genetic Link
One of psychiatry's most debated diagnoses just turned up sharing DNA with a completely unrelated organ system. Diagnostic categories, it turns out, are not how biology actually sorts itself.
Bumblebees Lick Their Lips When They Like Something. They Shake Their Heads When They Don't.
A bee brain is smaller than a grain of sand. Apparently that's enough to have opinions about what you're eating. What that means for "feelings" is where it gets complicated.