Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack! It was the soundtrack to 1981, the backdrop to an entire summer of crazy 'wing-flapping' on the dancefloor, and probably the worst record you ever heard, but the Birdie Song by The Tweets is up for re-release next month. Originally written in the 1950s by Werner Thomas, an accordion player from […]
Many have heard of DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence company Google acquired in 2014. The DeepMind technology made headlines when after only a few hours of exposure to the ancient chinese board game Go, it not only learned to play the game, but became the finest player in the world. However, few can recall DeepMind’s […]
Top Story Categorization, or the recognition that individual objects share similarities and can be grouped together, is fundamental to how we make sense of the world. Previous research has revealed how the brain categorizes images. Now, researchers funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) have discovered that the brain categorizes sounds in much the same […]
Scientists who are intellectually challenged, announced an important step forward today, this being that in 2 decades from now, when the vast majority of us, will be in wooden overcoats, we will be able to back up our brains! This startling announcement, was made by mad, but award winning, scientist Brainpond Hurtwell, who is 62 […]
Top Story Humans use an ability known as theory of mind every time they make inferences about someone else’s mental state — what the other person believes, what they want, or why they are feeling happy, angry or scared. Behavioral studies have suggested that children begin succeeding at a key measure of this ability, known […]
Top Story Researchers have found that high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain can be used to show some of the underlying causes of differences in memory proficiency between older and younger adults. The study involved 20 young adults (ages 18 to 31) and 20 cognitively healthy older adults (ages 64 to 89). […]
Hair today, damaging the climate tomorrowFairfax Media via Getty Say air pollution and we tend to think of car exhausts, large factories and open fires. But in Western cities, the biggest source of air pollution is something else entirely: household items like your deodorant and shampoo. A team including Brian McDonald and Jessica Gilman of […]
Top Story Scientists have transformed skin cells from patients with Huntington’s disease into the type of brain cell affected by the disorder. The resulting mass of neurons serves as a new tool to study the degenerative, and eventually fatal, neurological condition, according to the researchers. The study showed that the patients’ nerve cells — converted […]
Top Story Virtual reality is helping neuroscientists get new insight into how different brain areas assemble memories in context. Researchers used a virtual reality environment to train subjects, then showed that different areas of the hippocampus are activated for different types of memories. It’s well known that one memory can trigger related memories. We remember […]
A Nyangatom woman from East Africa sings in an up and down lilt, her unadorned voice rising and falling like a hilly landscape. If you heard this song, with no geographical or cultural context, would you know it was a lullaby meant to soothe babies to sleep? It turns out you probably would, according to a […]