To most people, pulling into a highway rest stop is a profoundly mundane experience. But not to neuroscientist Rita Valentino, who has studied how the brain senses, interprets and acts on the bladder's signals. She's fascinated by the brain's ability to take in sensations from the bladder, combine them with signals from outside of the body, like the sights and sounds of the road, then use that information to act—in this scenario, to find a safe, socially appropriate place to pee. "To me, it's really an example of one of the beautiful things that the brain does," she says. from How Do We Know When to Pee? [Smithsonian; ungated]
A rare supercentenarian, he remained remarkably lucid after 11 decades, even maintaining a blog. His brain has been donated for research on what’s known as super-aging.
The taste bud diagram, used in many textbooks over the years, originated in a 1901 study but was actually showing the sensitivity of different areas of the tongue.
People with two copies of the gene variant APOE4 are almost certain to get Alzheimer’s, say researchers, who proposed a framework under which such patients could be diagnosed years before symptoms.
The low water levels that choked cargo traffic were more closely tied to the natural climate cycle than to human-caused warming, a team of scientists has concluded.
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