Sounds reach one of our ears first and then the other. The time delay in between is too short for us to perceive but it is long enough for the brain to process to determine the source of the sound. This deceptively simple feat is denied to frogs, lizards and birds because the distance between…

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will have covered most of the skills and qualities that the present youth devotedly regards as keys to success in the future. The first wave of AI replaced humans in physically repetitive tasks. That shift gave rise to our current “Thinking Economy”. And now… if you expect to have a viable career,…

A fossil tooth could be a buffet of information for researchers at a dig. Teeth grow like trees in a sense. They add layer after layer of enamel and dentine tissues every day. And so they can help us reconstruct the biological events that individuals or even communities have undergone during the early years of…

One bizarre remark on Mona Lisa’s smile is that she doesn’t smile at all; it’s a visual illusion. And wasn’t Leonardo da Vinci a master in optics? Turns out, half of the claim is true — literally! Neurologists Lucia Ricciardi and Matteo Bolognay have interpreted Mona Lisa’s smile as asymmetric and so non-genuine. Happiness is…

Iron replaced bronze as the prime material for tool and weapon production during the transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age. The replacement was gradual — at different times in different regions. There were things made of iron in the Bronze Age, but the iron was different. During the formation of a celestial…

Australia’s Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is just one of those places that sightseers flock to — “to see it before it’s gone”! It is an example of the concept of ‘Last Chance Tourism’. The key words hovering over a site like GBR are “doom”, “dying”, “endangered” and so on. It is like a species nearing…

A study of Nobel-winning economists by Bruce Weinberg and David Galenson identifies two different life cycles of creativity — a surge in the mid-20s or in the mid-50s, depending on distinct attributes of personality. In the study, those who hit the peak in their 20s tended to be “conceptual” innovators. People of this type “think…

Light is at the core of much of what astronomers do — light scattered, absorbed and re-emitted in clouds of gas and dust. And Dr Charlie Jeynes knows that light is also at the core of a diverse range of medical advances, like measuring “blood oxygenation in premature babies, or treating port-wine stains with lasers”….

Tentacled aliens from outer space are familiar to us from science fiction, but the octopus may be as alien an intelligence as we can meet on Earth. “It’s an alternative model for intelligence,” said Dominic Sivitilli. “It gives us an understanding as to the diversity of cognition in the world, and perhaps the universe.” Of…

Horses have both binocular vision and monocular vision. Binocular vision is used when their eyes and ears are focused on something in front of them. And monocular vision is used when they use each eye separately to watch movements — notably those of predators. This means horses have to switch from one vision to the…

People can express emotions, such as happiness or sadness or anger, in two ways — through mere sounds (vocalisation) or through words (language). Does the brain respond to these two modes of emotional expressions with the same speed and equal priority? Do certain emotions get responses faster when vocalised because it makes a larger impact…

Cells divide. Cells divide and replace old or damaged cells. This is why biologists wonder how old are cells in our body, in an organism. One general idea is that nerve cells (neurons) are old, while other cells in the body are relatively young and they regenerate throughout an organism’s lifetime. But, by any chance,…

A condenser turns a substance from its gaseous state to its liquid state — by cooling it. Historically, condensers were always oriented vertically so as to allow water to drain by gravity. But then, about five years ago, Virginia Tech researcher Jonathan Boreyko proposed that shedding water from condensers by using surface tension is more…

What would happen if you strongly believe in something and I shatter your belief? No belief or opinion is an island; it doesn’t live or die alone. And so you go home and realign several of your beliefs that depend on the shattered belief. This is how sociologist Noah E. Friedkin’s opinion dynamics model works….

Agriculture was the spadework (literally so) that not only anticipated but also necessitated the Industrial Revolution. It will be a fatal mistake, or wishful thinking at best, to conjecture that human societies before the Industrial Revolution had little effect on the environment or our planet’s biodiversity — especially if we are dead set about conservation….

Schreckstoff is a chemical cocktail that fish release from their skin after an injury. Fish perceive the risk of a predator nearby when they sense the chemical in water, and they display an alarm behaviour called a “startle” event. We have an update on it from Iain Couzin (University of Konstanz), who was looking for…

Ooh! That is  surprise. We make spontaneous sounds to express everything from elation (Woohoo!) to embarrassment (Oops!). A statistical analysis of responses to more than 2,000 “vocal bursts” (nonverbal exclamations) conveys at least 24 kinds of emotion. An audio map devised by Alan Cowen at UC Berkeley reveals how one can slide one’s cursor across…