Science

Famous physicist Albert Einstein, assassinated Japanese prime-minister Hisashi Hamaguchi, and English engineer Charles Babbage all have at least one thing in common; pickled brains – all cut out of their skulls and preserved after their deaths so researchers could study their genius.

The brain of 17th century French philosopher René Descartes is now dust, but it hasn't stopped researchers from scanning the inside of his skull to learn more about his grey matter - which it turns out is remarkably normal, except for a slight bulge at the front.

Workplace exposure to electromagentic fields is linked to a higher risk of developing the most common form of motor neurone disease.

Researchers have made a breakthrough that could lead to antiaging drugs, help astronauts survive trips to Mars and just make humans more resilient in general. Oh, is that all?

Scientists from Harvard Medical School and the University of New South Wales in Australia have discovered a critical step in the process that allows the cells in our bodies to repair their damaged DNA.

DEEP IN THE SOLAR SYSTEM—A darkness has spread over the grim, airless field of ice that threatens to swallow us. Night has come to the nightmare glacier. But then we see the shiny spacecraft, with its four gangly legs extending outward to find purchase on the jagged ice. Within, scientific instruments begin to blink on, one by one. Soon, they will start sniffing for any hint of life on this most alien and mysterious of worlds in the Solar System: the Jovian moon Europa.

Math conferences don’t usually feature standing ovations, but Francis Su received one last month in Atlanta. Su, a mathematician at Harvey Mudd College in California and the outgoing president of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), delivered an emotional farewell address at the Joint Mathematics Meetings of the MAA and the American Mathematical Society in which he challenged the mathematical community to be more inclusive.

Pharmaceutical giant CVS announced Thursday that it has partnered with Impax Laboratories to sell a generic epinephrine auto-injector for $109.99 for a two-pack—a dramatic cut from Mylan’s Epipen two-pack prices, which list for more than $600 as a brand name and $300 as a generic.

The lower-cost auto-injector, a generic form of Adrenaclick, is available starting today nationwide in the company’s more than 9,600 pharmacies. Its price resembles that of EpiPen’s before Mylan bought the rights to the life-saving devices back in 2007 and raised the price repeatedly, sparking outcry.

IT PAYS to have false memories. Our brains use them to generalise new information – but lack of sleep gets in the way.

Even for a particle physicist, Janet Conrad thinks small. Early in her career, when her peers were fanning out in search of the top quark, now known to be the heaviest elementary particle, she broke ranks to seek out the neutrino, the lightest.

Google’s artificial intelligence can play the ancient game of Go better than any human. It can identify faces, recognize spoken words, and pull answers to your questions from the web. But the promise is that this same kind of technology will soon handle far more serious work than playing games and feeding smartphone apps. One day, it could help care for the human body.

At the Large Hadron Collider in Geneva, physicists shoot protons around a 17-mile track and smash them together at nearly the speed of light. It’s one of the most finely tuned scientific experiments in the world, but when trying to make sense of the quantum debris, physicists begin with a strikingly simple tool called a Feynman diagram that’s not that different from how a child would depict the situation.