Science Trends

<---Left and right sides of brain illustration (stock image).<--- The left and right side of the brain are involved in different tasks. This functional lateralization and associated brain asymmetry are well documented in humans, but little is known about brain asymmetry in our closest living relatives, the great apes. Using endocasts (imprints of the brain on cranial bones), scientists now challenge the long-held notion that the human pattern of brain asymmetry is unique. They found the same asymmetry pattern in chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. However, humans were the most variable in this pattern. This suggests that lateralized, uniquely human cognitive abilities, such as language, evolved by adapting a presumably ancestral asymmetry pattern. The left and right side of our brain are specialized for some cognitive abilities. For example, in humans, language is processed predominantly in the left hemisphere, and the right hand is controlled by the motor cortex...

Dinosaur scene illustration (stock image). Earth turned faster at the end of the time of the dinosaurs than it does today, rotating 372 times a year, compared to the current 365, according to a new study of fossil mollusk shells from the late Cretaceous. This means a day lasted only 23 and a half hours, according to the new study in AGU's journal  Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology . The ancient mollusk, from an extinct and wildly diverse group known as rudist clams, grew fast, laying down daily growth rings. The new study used lasers to sample minute slices of shell and count the growth rings more accurately than human researchers with microscopes. The growth rings allowed the researchers to determine the number of days in a year and more accurately calculate the length of a day 70 million years ago. The new measurement informs models of how the Moon formed and how close to Earth it has been over the 4.5-billion-year history of the Earth-Moon gravitational da...

Peas on plate, dieting concept (stock image). How caloric restriction prevents negative effects of aging in cells-   If you want to reduce levels of inflammation throughout your body, delay the onset of age-related diseases, and live longer, eat less food. That's the conclusion of a new study by scientists from the US and China that provides the most detailed report to date of the cellular effects of a calorie-restricted diet in rats. While the benefits of caloric restriction have long been known, the new results show how this restriction can protect against aging in cellular pathways, as detailed in   Cell   on February 27, 2020. "We already knew that calorie restriction increases life span, but now we've shown all the changes that occur at a single-cell level to cause that," says Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, a senior author of the new paper, professor in Salk's Gene Expression Laboratory and holder of the Roger Guillemin Chair. "This gives u...

Ocean panorama (stock image). The Earth of 3.2 billion years ago was a "water world" of submerged continents, geologists say after analyzing oxygen isotope data from ancient ocean crust that's now exposed on land in Australia. And that could have major implications on the origin of life. "An early Earth without emergent continents may have resembled a 'water world,' providing an important environmental constraint on the origin and evolution of life on Earth as well as its possible existence elsewhere," geologists Benjamin Johnson and Boswell Wing wrote in a paper just published online by the journal  Nature Geoscience . Johnson is an assistant professor of geological and atmospheric sciences at Iowa State University and a recent postdoctoral research associate at the University of Colorado Boulder. Wing is an associate professor of geological sciences at Colorado. Grants from the National Science Foundation supported their study and a ...

Subatomic particles abstract illustration (stock image). Scientists at the University of Sussex have measured a property of the neutron -- a fundamental particle in the universe -- more precisely than ever before. Their research is part of an investigation into why there is matter left over in the universe, that is, why all the antimatter created in the Big Bang didn't just cancel out the matter. The team -- which included the Science and Technology Facilities Council's (STFC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in the UK, the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Switzerland, and a number of other institutions -- was looking into whether or not the neutron acts like an "electric compass." Neutrons are believed to be slightly asymmetrical in shape, being slightly positive at one end and slightly negative at the other -- a bit like the electrical equivalent of a bar magnet. This is the so-called "electric dipole moment" (EDM), and is what the team was ...