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New findings in neurology always seem to come with the caveat that there are subtleties that need to be explained. It is therefore refreshing to consider a big, fat unsubtlety: the size of our brains. At first glance, a big brain’s function seems simple: to think big thoughts. And indeed, brain size does loosely correlate with intelligence, between species and, as recent MRI studies confirm, within our own. Yet some people who are missing brain parts remain just fine with what little they’ve got....

Scientists in Cambridge, UK, have developed a reactor that can make oxygen from Moon rock – a vital technology if plans to create a lunar base are to take off.Whether tapping the Moon’s resources or using the satellite as a jump-off point to explore the deeper reaches of space, occupants of any future lunar base will need oxygen to survive. Ferrying huge amounts of it to the Moon would be extremely expensive – perhaps costing as much as US$100 million per tonne according to some estimates – so researchers are examining potentially cheaper ways to produce oxygen on the Moon itself....

Saying you are fond of someone might make you actually like that person, according to a study in the October 2011 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes. Psychologists showed 39 students a series of photographs of people who had been previously judged as neither pleasant nor unpleasant and instructed them to say the word “likable” or “unlikable” while viewing each one. Later, the students saw the pictures again in a random order and expressed how they felt about every person....

Hillary Clinton lost the election in November, and a major reason was probably because of one of humankind’s most flawed creations: e-mail. She was dogged, of course, by her use of a private server during her tenure as secretary of state. But her campaign was also weakened by a steady stream of hacked e-mails, not always flattering, especially those of the Democratic National Committee and of her campaign chair, John Podesta....

Whether or not Neandertals could speak has been studied for more than five decades—and the question is still being researched because no definitive answer has been given. It is clear that our human relatives were capable of enormously complex cultural achievements. So how was all of that possible without the powerful communication capabilities afforded by speech? To be sure, Neandertals were equipped with a well-known language gene. But some studies cast doubt on whether Neandertals’ anatomy was suitable for producing the sounds of speech: their larynx was shaped differently than that of modern humans....

In the race to create a quantum computer that can outperform a classical one, a method using particles of light (photons) has taken a promising step forward. Jian-Wei Pan and Chao-Yang Lu, both at the University of Science and Technology of China, and their colleagues improved a quantum computing technique called boson sampling to achieve a record 14 detected photons in its final results. Previous experiments were capped at only five detected photons....

When I first met Tina, a woman in her late 20s, she had been seeing mental health professionals for virtually her entire life. “One day I’m energetic and creative,” she told me during one of our therapy sessions, “the next I am aimless, or I cry and feel worthless.” Tina had been diagnosed with depression, borderline personality disorder and even schizophrenia. Doctors prescribed antidepressants and later antipsychotics—but the meds only seemed to make her worse....

The US government’s proposed overhaul of regulations that govern research with human subjects is flawed and should be withdrawn, an independent advisory panel said today. The regulations, which are known collectively as the ‘Common Rule’, address ethical issues such as informed consent and storage of study participants’ biological specimens. In its report on June 29, the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said that the government’s proposed changes are “marred by omissions and a lack of clarity”, and would slow research while doing little to improve protections for patients enrolled in studies....

Hugh Everett III was a brilliant mathematician, an iconoclastic quantum theorist and, later, a successful defense contractor with access to the nation’s most sensitive military secrets. He introduced a new conception of reality to physics and influenced the course of world history at a time when nuclear Armageddon loomed large. To science-fiction aficionados, he remains a folk hero: the man who invented a quantum theory of multiple universes. To his children, he was someone else again: an emotionally unavailable father; “a lump of furniture sitting at the dining room table,” cigarette in hand....

By Kevin Murphy KANSAS CITY Mo. (Reuters) - A tornado seriously damaged homes and toppled trees in a small town just east of Kansas City, Missouri, on Saturday, but a law enforcement dispatcher said there were no initial reports of injuries. Officials said the twister touched down in Orrick, Missouri, and local television news footage showed it tore through several homes, leaving only the shells standing. It flattened some other buildings, felled large trees and flipped over cars and campers....

President Trump picked Brett Kavanaugh, a federal appeals judge with a history of challenging environmental protections, to fill the Supreme Court seat held by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the court’s longtime swing vote, who will retire at the end of the month. The nomination of Kavanaugh sets up a fierce confirmation fight in the Senate and positions Trump to lock the nation’s top court into a dominantly conservative posture on dozens of issues, including climate change, for decades to come....

In 2007, Caroline Sturdy Colls—then a 21-year-old University of Birmingham graduate student—made her first visit to the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, Poland. As a prospective forensic-archaeology scholar, Sturdy Colls was learning the science of uncovering remains and trace physical evidence to outline the true facts of a crime. As she gazed out across the camp site, studded with pine trees the Nazis had planted to hide evidence of their deeds, Sturdy Colls asked herself a nagging question: What secrets did the forested earth around her hold?...

The COVID-19 pandemic is at the core of a triple crisis facing the U.S. population. The economic impact, both as a direct consequence of the pandemic and from the cost of accompanying mitigation measures, is the second element of the crisis; it has manifested in lingering high levels of unemployment, with some 26.8 million workers, almost 16 percent of the entire U.S. workforce, either unemployed, otherwise prevented from working by COVID-19, or employed but on reduced pay....

“Dear House Call Doctor, Would you do a podcast about ringing in the ears in the future?” W.S. What a great suggestion, W.S. Thank you. Ringing in the ears, referred to as “tinnitus” in doctor-lingo, is quite common. In fact, approximately 50 million people in the U.S. suffer from this annoying medical condition. Let’s learn what tinnitus really is, what can cause it, and how you can treat it. What Is Tinnitis?...

The Federal Emergency Management Agency has wasted more than $3 billion and misused thousands of its employees by responding to hundreds of undersized floods, storms and other events that states could have handled on their own, an investigation by E&E News shows. FEMA has chronically overestimated the damage to U.S. states from small disasters and underestimated the capacity of states to respond to them. Those errors triggered at least 325 unnecessary deployments of money and personnel since 1998....

When the draft of the human genome was published in 2000, researchers thought that they had obtained the secret decoder ring for the human body. Armed with the code of 3 billion basepairs of As, Ts, Cs and Gs and the 21,000 protein-coding genes, they hoped to be able to find the genetic scaffolds of life—both in sickness and in health. But in the 12 years since then, very few diseases—almost all of them very rare—have been linked definitively to changes in the genes themselves....

Fragments of RNA that cells eject in fatty droplets may point the way to a new era of cancer diagnosis, potentially reducing the need for invasive tests. Cancer tumor cells shed so-called exosomes, fatty droplets that contain proteins and RNA fragments, into cerebral spinal fluid, blood and urine. Within these exosomes is genetic information that scientists can analyze to determine the cancer’s molecular composition and state of progression. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered in 2008 that exosomes preserve the genetic information of their parent cells....

Nearly 100 years ago Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe is expanding: almost all galaxies are speeding away from our own Milky Way, and faraway galaxies are receding faster. That discovery was profound, but it was followed, in 1998, by an even more startling realization: the expansion is accelerating. For most of the 20th century, scientists had expected that over time gravity would pull galaxies toward one another, slowing the expansion....

Picture a person having a heart attack—what do you see? Mostly likely a man, looking sweaty and short of breath, clutching his arm or chest in pain. This canonical image has been so deeply impressed into our minds that it may be hard to believe heart attacks could look like anything else. But when women have heart attacks, their symptoms can be quite different, presenting as deep fatigue, nausea and vomiting, and more widespread bodily discomfort instead of localized pain....

“Since 1958 direct measurements of the outer reaches of the earth’s field by means of artificial satellites and rocket probes have convinced many geophysicists that the simple picture of that magnetic field must be drastically revised. Far from being free of external influences, the geomagnetic field is continuously buffeted by a ‘wind’ of electrically charged particles emanating from the sun, distorted by electric currents circulating in the radiation belts that girdle the earth....