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Science / Mind & Body

A recipe for an eyesalve from ‘Bald’s Leechbook’

Medieval Medical Books Could Hold the Recipe for New Antibiotics

A team of medievalists and scientists look back to history—including a 1,000-year-old eyesalve recipe—for clues

Why I Take Fake Pills

Surprising new research shows that placebos still work even when you know they’re not real

View of the exhibition Body Worlds Pulse Gunther von Hagens that counts the history of human body in the 21st century at Discovery Times Square in New York in the United States.

Why Are We So Obsessed With Dead Bodies?

Body Worlds taps into a long, fraught history of humans displaying the deceased for “science”

Are orangutans aware that others have different minds than their own?

New Research

Monkeys May Recognize False Beliefs—Knocking Over Yet Another Pillar of Human Cognition

Apes may be aware of the minds of others—yet another remarkable finding about the cognitive abilities of non-human animals

The challenges of finding fruit may have driven the evolution of bigger brains in our primate ancestors

New Research

What Really Made Primate Brains So Big?

A new study suggests that fruit, not social relationships, could be the main driver of larger brains

Tools of diabetes treatment almost always include improved diet and regular exercise.

MIT Mathematician Develops an Algorithm to Help Treat Diabetes

The key to managing the disease, which afflicts 29 million people in the U.S., might be in big data

Nearly blind, Typhlomys cinereus thrives in the high forests of southeastern China and Vietnam—with a little help from another sense.

New Research

This Echolocating Dormouse Could Reveal the Origins of One of Nature’s Coolest Superpowers

Mice, moths and even humans use clicks and echoes to “see” the world around them

Could the Tiny Zebrafish Teach Us to Cure Blindness?

By learning how zebrafish regenerate their retinas, researchers could figure out how to help humans do the same

New research strengthens the theory that different climates influenced the shape of the human nose.

New Research

How Climate Helped Shape Your Nose

New research shows how the width of our nasal passages is literally shaped by the air we breathe

Ada Lovelace, “The world’s first computer programmer.” In the mid 1800s, she predicted that machines would compose music and forward scientific progress, based on her experiences programming Charles Babbage’s “Analytical Engine,” to calculate Bernoulli numbers.

Art Meets Science

These Bold Illustrations Celebrate the Incredible Contributions of Women in Science

A designer’s touch brings the achievements and faces of female pioneers to a wider audience

Researchers scanned the brains of memorizers as they practiced tried-and-true memory techniques to see how their brains changed in response to their training.

New Research

Neuroscientists Unlock the Secrets of Memory Champions

Boosting your ability to remember lists, from facts to faces, is a matter of retraining your brain

Itchy and scratchy: When they see their peers scratching away, mice get the urge to itch.

New Research

Why Is Itching So Contagious?

Scientists figure out how compulsive scratching spreads in mice, and maybe humans

Neanderthals went extinct 30,000 years ago, taking their precious genetic material with them. But their DNA lives on in their hybrid ancestors: modern-day humans.

New Research

How Ancient Neanderthal DNA Still Influences Our Genes Today

Far from being silent remnants, Neanderthal genes play a profound role in how modern human genes are expressed

The last natural case of smallpox was recorded in Somalia in 1977.

A Child From 17th-Century Europe Might Have Rewritten the History of Smallpox

The deadly scourge goes back for centuries, but how many?

When it comes to reversible ways to prevent pregnancy, men have limited options—for now.

New Research

Contraceptive Gel Called the “IUD For Men” Makes It Through Monkey Trials

Vasalgel aims to make contraception for men as easy and effective as IUDs have for women

Victorian mores influenced ideas not just about men and women but animals too.

How Victorian Gender Norms Shaped the Way We Think About Animal Sex

No, females aren’t always choosy and males don’t always get around

This is a pyramidal neuron, so named for the pyramid-shaped body at the center of this drawing, from the cerebral cortex of a human. This outermost layer of the brain integrates information from sensory organs, commands movements and is the hub for higher brain functions, such as consciousness. In his drawing, Cajal gives the branches or dendrites different weights to show how the neuron extends in three-dimensional space. It’s likely that this represents a sort of idealized portrait of a pyramidal neuron, a synthesis of many observations.

Art Meets Science

Revel in These Wondrous Drawings by the Father of Neuroscience

A new book and exhibition pay homage to Santiago Ramón y Cajal’s impressive powers of observation

Two thylacines at the Smithsonian National Zoo around 1905. A thylacine brain from the Smithsonian Institution was scanned as part of a study to learn more about the extinct marsupial, but it is unclear whether that brain belonged to one of the animals pictured.

New Research

How Scientists Reconstructed the Brain of a Long-Extinct Beast

This dog-like marsupial went extinct 80 years ago, but its preserved brains help us glean how its mind worked

Have Scientists Found a Way to Actually Reduce the Effects of Aging?

Researchers at the Salk Institute in California have successfully induced cells to behave like younger cells

Macaques and humans seem to share the strength of knowing the limits of what they know.

New Research

A Wise Monkey Knows How Little He Knows

Japanese scientists find that macaque monkeys, like humans, know the limits of their own memory

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