Biologists got alarmed when the killer whales (orcas) of Washington State's Puget Sound started disappearing. Using high technology supersensitive microphones, Ken Balcomb has been eavesdropping on the region's resident killer whales. Unlike migratory orcas, these ones spend their whole lives among sounds....
People have been amazed since Antiquity by dolphins' intelligent behavior. 2,000 years ago, the Greek poet Opian said "The dolphins are humans that at the demand of the Dionysus (a Greek god) changed the ground with the sea, taking fish shape". The high intelligence of the dolphins is regarded as a reaction to ...
Pigging out may seem a mental state. But some people really lack a 'lid' to their stomach. This "lid" was found to be leptin, a hormone already involved in regulating appetite. A new research links leptin to food craving, shedding light on the way the brain controls the appetite and, ultimately, the roots o...
Ignorant tourists make many dumb acquisitions and they should prevent that. Buying exotic seashells means more reefs destroyed, an ivory piece another dead elephant, a monkey and a parrot a step towards the species' extinction and tiger bones or rhino horns translate to less tigers or rhinos. But if consciousnes...
The brain may be an elastic organ, but once the skull is opened, it's not longer floating in the protective bath of cerebrospinal fluid, and gravity forces and atmospheric pressures change its shape, but also the location of the tumor(s) to be removed. The preoperative MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is no lon...
This has left the astronomers deeply amazed. The data gathered by the Japanese Space Agency's Hinode spacecraft, launched in September 2006 for investigating sunspots and solar storms revealed surprising images. Saku Tsuneta, Hinode's chief scientist at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan in Toky...
You may know that an illustration is bidimensional, but with a virtual reality mask, a stylus in one hand and a tracking device in the other, now drawing as a process has entered the 3D era. The technology is called "Drawing on Air," and helps artists create images of complicated artistic, scientific, and medical sub...
A toddler may seem a little more than a vegetable. Even more when he/she is sleeping. But while the little baby is slightly snoring, in his/her brain there is a lot of activity, as found by a new research. Other recent investigations had discovered in adult brains the existence of 10 so-called resting-state networks,...
Another space enigma has been solved by a team at the University of Arizona: what causes the powerful bursts from "magnetars", the most magnetic objects in space. These odd neutron stars are so superdense that the Sun's mass can be packed into a body which has the size of the Manhattan Island. Still, their magne...
Bizarre human sexual behaviors are nothing compared to the extremely weird sex life of the African bat bug. These blood suckers are famous among biologists for a particularly horrible and cruel form of mating and now these insects have also revealed an odd secret to the researchers, "what could be the most extreme fo...
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