Tag Archives: Science Advances (Journal)

The northern lights are fleeting and fantastical. But Elise Wright Knutsen, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Oslo, has gotten used to them. “I’m Norwegian, so the aurora is a big thing here,” she said. “You kind of grow up with it happening over your head.” But catching her first glimpse of the aurora on another planet hit differently. …

Humans have visually documented about 1,470 square miles, or a mere 0.001 percent, of the deep seafloor, according to a new study. That’s a little larger than the size of Rhode Island. The report, published Wednesday in the journal Science Advances, arrives as nations debate whether to pursue industrial mining of the seabed for critical minerals. Some scientists argue that …

Women’s brains are superior to men’s in at least in one respect — they age more slowly. And now, a group of researchers reports that they have found a gene in mice that rejuvenates female brains. Humans have the same gene. The discovery suggests a possible way to help both women and men avoid cognitive declines in advanced age. The …

Postpartum depression affects about one in every seven women who give birth, but little is known about what happens in the brains of pregnant women who experience it. A new study begins to shed some light. Researchers scanned the brains of dozens of women in the weeks before and after childbirth and found that two brain areas involved in the …

Imagine you are video chatting with a distant friend who is eating lunch, and your pal’s sandwich looks delicious. What if you could ask your friend to dip a sensor into the meal, and give you a taste? Remote snacking has moved a bit closer to virtual reality. In a paper on Friday in the journal Science Advances, Yizhen Jia, …

The English language is full of wonderful words, from “anemone” and “aurora” to “zenith” and “zodiac.” But these are special occasion words, sprinkled sparingly into writing and conversation. The words in heaviest rotation are short and mundane. And they follow a remarkable statistical rule, which is universal across human languages: The most common word, which in English is “the,” is …