Charred earth, shells, bones and human burials found in mounds on a plain in northern Bolivia are offering scientists new clues about the earliest known inhabitants of the southwestern Amazon. The remains, excavated from raised areas known as “forest islands” on the Llanos de Moxos, an extensive savanna, show the area was inhabited between 10,600 and 4,000 years ago, according to new study published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances. “In the late Holocene, about […]

Since the birth of the satellite age, scientists noticed that some spacecraft tend to slow down when the sun’s activity is highest, causing them to fall closer to Earth. If the spacecraft don’t carry enough fuel to boost them back to their intended orbits, they can eventually fall back down to Earth. Researchers quickly connected the slow-downs to the northern and southern lights, or auroras. These drifting patterns of colorful light are caused by charged solar particles striking […]

The “everything in moderation” mantra sounds like great advice for weight management. Enjoy all your favorite junk food, but stick to reasonable portions and don’t indulge too often. For most of us, that’s easier said than done. Now, a new discovery by a team of scientists at the University of North Carolina (UNC) School of Medicine may help explain why so many of us can’t resist polishing off a jumbo bag of chips or a carton of ice cream in one sitting […]

It's one of the most common arguments in basketball: Who hit that ball out of bounds? When two NBA players lunge for a ball end up tipping it out, neither wants to cop to the final touch. Refs are called in to arbitrate while both players deny their culpability, often in heated tones. There's an obvious motive behind wanting to avoid blame, but a new study shows that there might also be a neurological basis behind both players' belief that their opponent touched the ball last. Our brains […]

Throat cancer, stroke and paralysis can rob people’s voices and strip away their ability to speak. Now, researchers have developed a decoder that translates brain activity into a synthetic voice. The new technology is a significant step toward restoring lost speech. “We want to create technologies that can reproduce speech directly from human brain activity,” Edward Chang, a neurosurgeon at the University of California San Francisco, who led the new research, said in a press […]