Millions of 'Silent Synapses' Could Be The Key to Lifelong Learning

Paleontologist Matt Friedman was surprised to discover a remarkably detailed 319-million-year-old fish brain fossil while testing out micro-CT scans for a broader project. "It had all these features, and I said to myself, 'Is this really a brain that I'm looking at?'" says Friedman from University of Michigan. "So, I...

A gargantuan effort by a huge international team of scientists has just given us the most precise map of the all matter in the Universe obtained to date. By combining data from two major surveys, the international collaboration has revealed where the Universe does and doesn't keep all its junk – not just the normal matter that makes up the planets, stars, dust, black holes, galaxies, but the dark matter, too: the mysterious invisible mass generating more gravity than the normal matter can account for. The resulting map, showing where the matter has congregated over the 13.8-billion-year lifespan of the...

Scientists rattling normal frozen water around in a jar of ultracold steel balls have discovered a previously unknown form of ice, closer to liquid water than any other ice yet. This is amorphous ice, a form not found in nature on Earth. That's because its atoms are arranged not in...

Scientists have a problem when it comes to modeling space events inside laboratories: Earth's gravity tends to get in the way, making it difficult to replicate environments away from our planet. A recently proposed solution takes the form of a tiny glass ball a mere 3 centimeters (just over an...

Weighing in at just 1.2 milligrams, a new robot called FAIRY – that's short for Flying Aero-robots based on Light Responsive Materials Assembly – is the first flying bot we've seen based on soft materials that respond to light. The robot was inspired by dandelion seeds, and ultimately...

Breathing in air pollution could have an impact on the way your brain is wired, with scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Victoria discovering that inhaling car exhaust can change a brain's connectivity within two hours. The findings are based on a randomized, double-blind trial of 25 healthy adults, who were exposed to car pollution in a laboratory setting. At another stage, participants were also exposed to clean filtered air. Brain scans were taken before and after each scenario. After participants were exposed to air pollution, their brains showed reduced connectivity in the default mode network...

The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercury isotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth's Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia.

Little blobs of human brain tissue transplanted into rats have just passed a major milestone in the pathway towards a new way to heal serious brain injuries. The grafted human mini-brains didn't just integrate with the surrounding rat brain tissue – the neurons in the organoids started to respond to visual stimuli: black-and-white images and lights shone into the rats' eyes. And this happened within a three-month time period. "We were not expecting to see this degree of functional integration so early," says physician and neurosurgeon H. Isaac Chen of the University of Pennsylvania. "There have been other studies looking at transplantation of individual...

Bar charts and line graphs are both designed to help us visualize data. They are tools to convert numerical information into pictorial narratives that can be more easily comprehended. They don't change the data; they simply represent it. They do represent it in different ways, however, and even those slight...

The violent fingers of electricity that struck a sand dune in Nebraska have left behind a configuration of crystal rarely found in nature. Inside a piece of fulgurite – or 'fossilized lightning' – created by a powerful bolt of electricity traveling into and fusing sand, scientists have found a quasicrystal, an arrangement of matter once thought to be impossible.

One day, ants might help save lives by acting as inexpensive bio-detectors. Their powerful sense of smell allows them to distinguish subtle molecular differences in biological samples that we would otherwise require expensive equipment to detect. A new proof-of-concept study just demonstrated this skill could be harnessed to detect cancers in urine samples, at least from lab mice. "Ants show the potential to become a fast, efficient, inexpensive and non-invasive tool for detection of human tumors," Sorbonne University ethologist Baptiste Piqueret and colleagues write in their paper. Cancer remains the leading cause of death worldwide, with more than 19 million cases in...

We have a new exoplanet to one day scour for potential signs of life. Just 31 light-years away, astronomers have identified an incredibly rare Earth-sized world orbiting at a distance from its star that should be hospitable to life as we know it. If, that is, the exoplanet itself has the right conditions to be conducive to life's emergence.

We've just found an exoplanet almost exactly the same size as Earth orbiting a tiny star not very far away at all. It's called K2-415b, and its similarities (and differences) to our own home world might shed some light on how Earth-like planets form and evolve in different ways, in systems very different from our own.

For the first time, astronomers have positively identified a binary system that is destined to one day end up as a kilonova – the explosive result of a neutron star collision. And, ironically, the key ingredient to this eventual fate is a pair of failed, fizzled supernovae. This phenomenon...

Editor's note (5 February 2023): The veracity of the study discussed below came into question after its original publication, with a subsequent analysis suggesting the study had likely misinterpreted aspects of the historical evidence available, including oral narratives, and asserting that "Antarctic voyaging by pre-European Polynesians seems most unlikely". Some further discussion of the issue is reported here. ScienceAlert regrets re-publishing the article without drawing attention to this new information and the broader context of debate in this area of research. The original text of our story from June 2021 is presented below: When we think of Antarctic exploration, the narrative...

It's not every day you get to rediscover the words of a world-famous thinker, an influencer of Albert Einstein himself. A nearly 20-minute video interview with the 'father of the Big Bang' was found in the archives of a public-service broadcaster called Vlaamse Radio- en Televisieomroeporganisatie (VRT), located in the Flemish region of Belgium.

There are plenty of reasons to limit the amount of fat in your diet, and a new study suggests there's another entry to add to the list: high-fat diets could be messing with your brain's ability to regulate your calorie intake. In tests on rats, scientists noted that after longer...

Living in an arid region is a precarious business. Harsh conditions make growing tough for plants, meaning every shoot and leaf is all the more precious, even when they're dead and decaying. A new study conducted at Boolcoomatta Station Reserve in outback South Australia has demonstrated the importance of vegetative leftovers in fueling a desert ecosystem – and revealing an unintuitive alliance between termites and dingoes. "A lot of research in arid ecosystems has focused on the green food webs that follow 'boom periods' prompted by large rainfall events," says University of New South Wales (UNSW) conservation biologist Mike Letnic. "These 'boom...

You can now listen to the sounds of the space around one of the Milky Way's most spectacular stars. RS Puppis, a Cepheid variable star around 6,500 light-years away, has gotten the data sonification treatment by the sci-art outreach project SYSTEM Sounds. They took a Hubble image of the star and transcribed the light into sound, assigning pitch to the direction from the center of the image and volume to the brightness of the light.

A new video shared on YouTube is one of the most amazing things we've ever seen in planetary science. The video shows four dots of light moving in partial concentric circles around a black disk at their center. What you're actually looking at is a planetary system. The four dots...