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The electrical oscillations we call brain waves have intrigued scientists and the public for more than a century. But their function—and even whether they have one, rather than just reflecting brain activity like an engine’s hum—is still debated. Many neuroscientists have assumed that if brain waves do anything, it is by oscillating in synchrony in different locations. Yet a growing body of research suggests many brain waves are actually “traveling waves” that physically move through the brain like waves on the sea....

Forget stickers and popsicles—hospitals may soon begin handing their patients MP3 players to speed their recovery. A study at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge determined that ambient music therapy had a positive effect on postoperative patients’ recovery by improving pain management and decreasing the negative effects of environmental noise. In this study, patients who had undergone surgery for cancer all received standard nursing care. Half of them also got a preprogrammed MP3 player with ambient music—songs without words, played at less than 60 decibels—and were encouraged by nurses to listen for at least half an hour after they took their twice-daily medication....

Editor’s note: The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. Humans have been fascinated by the color-changing abilities of chameleons for a long time. Aristotle himself, the forefather of Western philosophy and also a keen zoologist, mentioned the lizard’s ability in his Historia Animlium, noting that the “change of color takes place over the whole body,” suggesting the chameleon had a “timorous soul”....

That carbon belching from our factories causes global warming is well-known, but beyond that, the science becomes controversy. The details of how much a unit of carbon dioxide raises global temperature is hotly debated in climate change literature. The value most accepted comes from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which finds that temperatures will rise by 1.5 to 4.5 degrees Celsius with a doubling of CO2. And the threshold for “catastrophic” climate change that would terminate lifestyles as we know it is 2 C....

Which came first: fangs or bony armor? For years, paleontologists have thought that the first bones to emerge were teeth, and that the protective armor coverings of early fish, made of similar material, followed. But now, a study reveals that the truth is the other way around. The work focuses on a group of ancient jawless animals known as conodonts, which died out during the late Triassic period, about 200 million years ago....

There are more than 9 million dairy cows in the United States, and the vast majority of them are Holsteins, large bovines with distinctive black-and-white (sometimes red-and-white) markings. The amount of milk they produce is astonishing. So is their lineage. When researchers at the Pennsylvania State University looked closely at the male lines a few years ago, they discovered more than 99 percent of them can be traced back to one of two bulls, both born in the 1960s....

Three weeks after the earthquake and tsunami that crippled Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant workers have made some headway in cooling the facility’s overheated fuel rods. But overall, the situation remains “very serious,” according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Despite the ongoing work to stabilize the plant and fears that radioactive materials had contaminated tap water as far away as Tokyo, 240 kilometers to the south, most of the recommended restrictions on drinking water have been lifted....

One of the most underappreciated forces affecting life in the U.S. is the sex ratio. Generally defined as the number of males per 100 females, it has a profound bearing on several issues, not least of which is the status of women. Before World War I, immigrants, who tended to be predominantly male, kept the ratio high. Restrictive legislation in the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s reduced the influx to a trickle....

Editor’s Note (6/23/22): The Supreme Court has ruled that a New York State law that restricted individuals from carrying concealed guns in public without “proper cause” is unconstitutional on the grounds of the Second Amendment. The decision comes amid a debate over gun control on the heels of multiple mass shootings in the country. After I pulled the trigger and recovered from the recoil, I slowly refocused my eyes on the target....

Most people in the U.S. will experience at least one misdiagnosis or delayed diagnosis in their lifetimes, according to a new report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM). Such mistakes—called diagnostic errors by physicians—could be as simple as failing to forward the results of a medical test showing that a patient recovered from a recent illness. Other errors can have devastating consequences: Perhaps a lung scan that reveals potentially cancerous tissue never makes it to a doctor’s desk where it could receive further scrutiny....

It seems the moon is not Earth’s only cosmic companion. The newly discovered asteroid 2016 HO3 orbits the sun in such a way that the space rock never strays too far from Earth, making it a “quasi-satellite” of our planet, scientists say. “One other asteroid — 2003 YN107 — followed a similar orbital pattern for a while over 10 years ago, but it has since departed our vicinity,” Paul Chodas, manager of NASA’s Center for Near-Earth Object Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement Wednesday (June 15)....

“Elections have consequences,” said President Barack Obama in 2009, as he started to press for policies such as affordable health care against Republican opposition. Recently Republican leaders themselves have begun to echo his phrase as red state legislatures ban abortion, prevent the country from taking actions to combat the climate crisis, permit easier access to firearms, and oppose a vigorous public health response to the pandemic. All of that makes the consequences of this fall’s vote exceptionally profound....

Do you like nerdy web comics and climate change real talk? Of course you do. Randall Munroe, creator of the tri-weekly web comic xkcd, has combined the two into an epic timeline of earth’s climate. It shows just how radical the recent changes are and puts to bed the trope “the climate has changed before.” The two hottest months the world has ever recorded just happened back-to-back. And we’re about to have back-to-back-to-back hottest years....

Pluto is an uncanny-valley world, with landscapes and vistas that seem strikingly similar to those of Earth—until you take a closer look. NASA’s New Horizons mission, which flew by the dwarf planet in July 2015, found that Pluto has towering mountains, but of water ice rather than rock; vast plains of frozen nitrogen and other exotic materials; and blue skies provided by a wispy atmosphere that contains no appreciable oxygen. And now, a new study reveals another alien parallel: Pluto has an extensive dune system, but the grains that make up the wind-blown mounds are certainly not sand....

Wadi Lawayni is a remote desert valley in the interior Al-Hajar Mountains of Oman, east of Saudi Arabia. A visitor gets there by following a lonely dirt road that dwindles to tire tracks running through a gravelly wash. Groundwater in this region occasionally surfaces in small pools that have a bluish tint—saturated with alkaline salts and sometimes so full of hydrogen gas that the liquid fizzes like champagne when it’s raised out of a well....

The election of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect of the United States has been celebrated as a win for the scientific community. In his acceptance speech, Biden expressed that the American people have called on him and Harris as leaders, “to marshal the forces of science and the forces of hope in the great battles of our time.” Climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic have featured heavily in this presidential campaign and are without question two of the great battles we are currently facing that require scientific expertise....

When you want to learn something new, you practice. Once you get the hang of it, you can hopefully do what you learned—whether it’s parallel parking or standing backflips—on the next day, and the next. If not, you fall back to stage one and practice some more. But your brain may have a shortcut that helps you lock in learning. Instead of practicing until you’re decent at something and then taking a siesta, practicing just a little longer could be the fast track to solidifying a skill....

ON MAY 22, 2001, radio talk show personality Laura Schlessinger, better known as Dr. Laura, received a call from a woman who was distressed by her sister’s decision to exclude their nephew from an upcoming family wedding. When the caller mentioned that the boy suffered from Tourette’s disorder (also sometimes called Tourette syndrome), Dr. Laura berated her for even thinking that it might be appropriate to invite a child who would “scream out vulgarities in the middle of the wedding....

Something was wrong with Brayson Thibodeaux. At 15 months old, he still was not walking; his parents and grandparents were certain that his development was slower than normal. After pushing doctors for answers they finally got him to a neurologist who recommended a genetic test. Brayson had fragile X syndrome, the leading heritable cause of intellectual disability and of autism. The discovery sent ripples through the extended family, who live outside New Orleans....

FINALIST YEAR: 1956 HIS FINALIST PROJECT: Geologic mapping of rock layers in Wyoming WHAT LED TO THE PROJECT: Though Leroy Hood grew up in Shelby, Mont.—where the local high school didn’t offer calculus—his father’s position as an electrical engineer with the Mountain States Telephone Company gave Hood a chance to take the company’s circuit engineering course. Hood’s grandfather was also active in Montana’s scientific community. He managed the Beartooth Geologic Research Camp, where students and professors from various colleges would come for the summer....