Researchers have long observed that a common family of environmental bacteria, Comamonadacae, grow on plastics littered throughout urban rivers and wastewater systems. But exactly what these Comamonas bacteria are doing has remained a mystery.
Patients with certain mental disorders, including schizophrenia, often hear voices in the absence of sound.
Auditory hallucinations are likely the result of abnormalities in two brain processes: a broken corollary discharge that fails to suppress self-generated sounds, and a noisy efference copy that makes the brain hear these sounds more intensely than it should. That is the conclusion of a study published October 3 in the open-access journal PLOS Biology by Xing Tian, of New York University Shanghai, China, and colleagues.
In the new study, researchers carried out electroencephalogram (EEG) experiments measuring the brain waves of 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations and 20 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia who had never experienced such hallucinations.
For the first time, scientists have taken near-daily measurements of the sun’s global coronal magnetic field, a region of the sun that has only been observed irregularly in the past. The resulting observations are providing valuable insights into the processes that drive the intense solar storms that impact fundamental technologies, and thus lives and livelihoods, here on Earth.
Researchers at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory have revealed new details about Earth’s core-mantle boundary and similar regions found in exoplanets.
One of the great challenges of modern cosmology is to reveal the nature of dark matter. We know it exists (it constitutes more than 85% of the matter in the universe), but we have never seen it directly and still do not know what it is.
As BepiColombo sped past Mercury during its June 2023 flyby, it encountered a variety of features in the tiny planet’s magnetic field. These measurements provide a tantalizing taste of the mysteries that the mission is set to investigate when it arrives in orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet.
A 9.2 km diameter rim, concentric normal faults and an extended damage zone are observed in 3-dimensional seismic reflection data from the Nadir crater offshore Western Africa and provide strong evidence for an impact origin.
If you started watching a movie from the middle without knowing its plot, you’d likely be better at inferring what had happened earlier than predicting what will happen next, according to a new Dartmouth-led study published in Nature Communications.
A new way of diagnosing lung cancer with a blood draw is 10 times faster and 14 times more sensitive than earlier methods, according to University of Michigan researchers.
