1+ week, 1+ day ago   (1184+ words) Confidence builds a sense of control, and two brain circuits turn that estimate into how much you learn from a win or a loss. When a job application disappears into silence, you have to decide whether the resume was weak…...

2+ day, 10+ hour ago   (1003+ words) Carefully timed sounds can make fluid waves larger in the sleeping brain, giving researchers a new way to study how brain activity and CSF flow are connected. Sleep is often treated as a time when the brain simply shuts down....

3+ day, 5+ hour ago   (1442+ words) A fruit fly can taste food all over its body. New research shows how those signals travel through the brain to control eating. A fruit fly lands on something sweet and its mouthparts unfold toward it. The obvious way to…...

3+ day, 10+ hour ago   (1027+ words) Methane in Arctic glacier rivers on Svalbard came from ancient shale, not microbes, and the yearly total is tiny next to what people emit. A glacier melts from the top, and the water runs off in rivers barely above freezing....

3+ day, 10+ hour ago   (798+ words) Greenland ice reveals a surprising shift in industrial pollution after 1990 that could help explain recent Arctic warming. Buried deep in the Greenland ice sheet is a chemical diary of a century of industrial pollution, and the entries after 1990 don’t add…...

4+ day, 17+ hour ago   (1126+ words) Two groups of brainstem cells build sleep drive in mice, and damping them cut sleep by nearly 70% without the usual damage. Push through a long enough day and the urge to sleep stops being a choice. That pressure builds the…...

5+ day, 15+ hour ago   (1055+ words) Ancient DNA reveals that the American cheetah was actually closer to pumas, ranged into Arctic Yukon, and may have regularly eaten fish. For a long time, the extinct animal known as the American cheetah seemed to have a simple story....

6+ day, 9+ hour ago   (1006+ words) Neanderthal pelvis bones kept an older design, while the modern male pelvis became a shock absorber that returns energy at every step. Walk across a room and your body weight drops onto one hip, then the other, and the joints…...

1+ week, 1+ day ago   (1230+ words) A Neanderthal gene variant carried by many people in South Asia is linked to about 9.5 extra ounces of muscle in adults. How much muscle you develop from exercise depends on training, diet, and the genes you were born with. For…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1131+ words) Personality genetics held up in a test that deflates the genetic signal behind school success, and no single variant does much alone. Ask why one sibling became the anxious one, and people usually point to upbringing. For years, DNA has…...