Optical illusion reveals key brain rule that governs consciousness
A study of mice starts to unravel how the brain gets tricked by this kind of optical illusion, and it gives clues about how visual perception works.
By Richard Pallardy published
Arabica coffee plant appears to have evolved between 600,000 and 1 million years ago after two other coffee species crossbred in the forests of what is now Ethiopia.
By Sascha Pare published
Scientists have yet to reach the bottom of the Taam Ja' Blue Hole in Mexico's Chetumal Bay, which new measurements hint could be connected to a labyrinth of submarine caves and tunnels.
By Emily Cooke published
Doctors say it's very unusual to develop a visual impairment as the first symptom of lung cancer.
By Laura Geggel last updated
Until the end of the last ice age, American cheetahs, enormous armadillolike creatures and giant sloths called North America home. But it's long puzzled scientists why these animals went extinct about 10,000 years ago.
By Angely Mercado published
The causes range from innocuous media exposure to severe mental illness.
By Adam Mann last updated
Reference Quantum mechanics, or quantum physics, is the body of scientific laws that describe the wacky behavior of photons, electrons and the other subatomic particles that make up the universe.
By Andrey Feldman published
Physicists have proposed modifications to the infamous Schrödinger's cat paradox that could help explain why quantum particles can exist in more than one state simultaneously, while large objects (like the universe) seemingly cannot.
By Ben Turner published
By precisely measuring the mass of neutrinos — ghostly particles that stream through your body by the billions each second — physicists could find some glaring holes in the Standard Model of particle physics. A new experiment has taken them one step closer.
By Laurel Hamers published
What's the science behind starting a fire with flint and steel?
By Victoria Atkinson published
Goldene is the latest 2D material to be made since graphene was first created in 2004.
By Sam Lemonick published
More than two decades ago, scientists predicted that at ultra-low temperatures, many atoms could undergo 'quantum superchemistry' and chemically react as one. They've finally shown it's real.
By Keumars Afifi-Sabet published
Scientists in Japan have transferred data at 100 gigabits per second in high-frequency wavelength bands over a distance of 330 feet for the first time.
By Keumars Afifi-Sabet published
Scientists have designed a physical qubit that behaves as an error-correcting "logical qubit," and now they think they can scale it up to make a useful quantum computer using a few hundred.
By Keumars Afifi-Sabet published
Mercedes-Benz has sold at least one of its new vehicles fitted with its Drive Pilot autonomous driving software, which lets you take your hands off the steering wheel and your eyes off the road.