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.
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Latest Stories
A Deadly Hospital Fungus Hides in Hair Follicles
This superbug isn't hiding from your immune defenses. It's borrowing them. What researchers found changes how we understand why it's nearly impossible to clear from the skin.
Something in the Milky Way Is Outmuscling the World's Biggest Particle Accelerator
It's outperforming the Large Hadron Collider by a factor of 100. Researchers confirmed what it does. They still can't tell you what it is.
The Hiroshima Fireball Left Behind a Metal That Had Never Existed Before
A grain of glass from that August morning contains a substance that doesn't appear in any known materials catalog, natural or man-made. It took eighty years to notice something that formed in less than a second.
A 40-Foot Sea Monster, a 23-Foot Predator and a Flying Reptile Walk Into the Eromanga Sea
A 100-million-year-old specimen from Australia contains proof of two separate encounters, both violent. How the second one played out is still being pieced together.
The Water Inside Blood Falls Isn't Supposed to Have Ocean Life in It
A red waterfall in one of Earth's driest deserts turns out to be venting something far stranger than iron. Scientists say what's living inside didn't come from anywhere nearby.
Pilot Whales Have the Ocean's Top Predator Running Scared
They're the largest dolphins in the sea and they've never made a kill. So why does one sound send killer whales running?
Britain Turned a Scottish Island Into an Anthrax Bomb Range. It Stayed Contaminated for 48 Years.
Cleanup only happened after activists mailed government officials samples of the site's own soil. Until then, the quarantine simply held for decades while locals were kept in the dark.
Some of the Trees Cities Love to Plant Have an Air-Pollution Problem
They make up a small share of Beijing's chemical emissions. On hot days, their role in ozone chemistry becomes anything but small.
Not Extinct. Secret Star. Blair Mountain.
In this episode of the Gotta Be Kidding Me podcast, host Tammy Coron covers four stories about things that were hiding in plain sight the whole time.
Every Living Thing May Trace Back to Something That Wasn't Quite Alive
The ancestor shared by every organism may have had genes and metabolism but still needed metal-rich rocks to finish the job chemically.
The Grand Canyon Has an 800-Million-Year-Old Backstory
Almost all of the landscape vanished. What it may have exposed is still sitting at the bottom of one of Earth's most famous holes.
A Gamma-Ray Signal Looks Like Dark Matter Until the Milky Way Enters the Picture
A remarkably clean spike shows up exactly where physicists hoped to find evidence of missing mass. Its absence somewhere equally promising turns a likely answer into a much better puzzle.
Three Silkworm Cocoons Predate the Silk Road by Nearly 2,000 Years
Long before that famous trade route had a name, someone in Uzbekistan was already raising silkworms two millennia ahead of schedule.
Astronomers Caught the First Light of a Stellar Explosion. Then It Got Stranger.
A rare cosmic death let astronomers see its opening seconds. The violent aftermath that usually follows never showed up.
The Ape Family Tree Had a Blank Spot. Two Jawbones Landed in It.
Early apes cluster in East Africa. Later ones turn up in Eurasia. Between them was a missing stretch of the map. Paleontologists went looking there and found two fossil fragments.
Every Thunderstorm Has Been Scanning the Ground. We Learned to Read the Signal.
The earth shakes a little every time it thunders. Scientists figured out those tremors could map what's hiding beneath the surface, including weak spots where it may be giving way.
The La Brea Tar Pits Have Been Hiding a Toad Since the 1950s
Only two Ice Age amphibians have ever been found in North America. One is a tree frog from Florida. The other turned up in a drawer in Los Angeles.