After a heart attack, the heart “talks” to the brain. And that conversation may make recovery worse. Shutting down nerve cells that send messages from injured heart cells to the brain boosted the heart’s ability to pump and decreased scarring, experiments in mice show. Targeting inflammation in a part of the nervous system where those…
January 27, 2026 2 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm A foraging teenager was mauled by a bear 27,000 years ago, skeleton shows The remains of a teenage boy who lived around 27,000 years ago suggest he was attacked by a cave bear—some of the first direct evidence of a predator attacking an ancient…
What separates a good idea from a bad one? It isn’t always easy to tell. Take the invention of vaccination, for example. Drawing pus from a woman infected with cowpox and injecting it into an 8-year-old boy seems utterly reckless, but in doing so, 18th-century physician Edward Jenner found a way to fight the deadly…
Spiders’ ability to spin webs may be one consequence of a really big genetic mistake. A close look at the genetics and development of spinnerets — spiders’ silk-making organs — reveals that an early arachnid doubled all of its DNA hundreds of millions of years ago. The findings, published January 14 in Science Advances, suggest…
January 27, 2026 3 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm Menopause linked to changes in brain’s gray matter, new study shows Brain changes during menopause could help explain why some people experience neurological symptoms such as anxiety, depression and memory problems By Jackie Flynn Mogensen edited by Claire Cameron aquaArts studio via Getty Images…
We can usually agree what objects look like, but why? Martin Bond / Alamy Our world seems to be fundamentally fuzzy at the quantum level, yet we do not experience it that way. Researchers have now developed a recipe for measuring how quickly the objective reality that we do experience emerges from this fuzziness, strengthening…
The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. It’s a mistake you hopefully only make once. In your morning rush to get ready, you brush your teeth before you head to the kitchen and down a big glass of orange juice. Yuck! What makes your clean,…
Regular sauna sessions can have physical benefits, but what does heat therapy to your brain? gpointstudio/Getty Images I’m already a devoted cold-water swimmer, and last year I wrote about its benefits for the brain. But I’ve started seeing more and more written about heat therapy and its neurological perks. And while the evidence is only…
January 25, 2026 4 min read Add Us On GoogleAdd SciAm JWST unveils most intricate map yet of cosmic dark matter Astronomers puzzled out minuscule distortions in images of faraway galaxies taken by JWST in order to chart the invisible By Joseph Howlett edited by Lee Billings Containing nearly 800,000 galaxies, this image from NASA’s…
Ryan Wills for New Scientist/Adobe Stock Rushing to get to work in the morning, we grab our coat, bag and keys and – invariably – steal a glance at the clock to check that we are running on time. The passing of time is so integral to our day-to-day lives that we can’t afford to…
