Los Angeles Times

“We are on the trajectory of seeing a mass extinction in two human lifetimes if we just keep doing business as usual,” said Anthony Barnosky, a paleontologist in UC Berkeley’s integrative biology department and one of the authors of the study.

From the earliest Western philosophers to the most technologically-equipped neuroscientists, the apparent connection between creative genius and mental illness has been a source of fascination and study. In the end, it may be geneticists – aided by the people of Iceland – who show that link is real.

Learning new stuff takes sleep. Robbed of the restorative balm of slumber, research demonstrates that the human brain will quickly lose its ability to make and hold on to new memories, and learning takes a dive. A new study, however, finds that sleep is also crucial to unlearning stuff that we may have committed to…

With the launch of its searchable and publicly available “Cell Types Database,” the Allen Institute for Brain Science has taken a first crack at establishing a comprehensive census of cells that neuroscientists might encounter in their explorations.

In forensic science, fingerprints and DNA are beginning to look old-school. To catch perpetrators (or exonerate the innocent), future sleuths may find themselves collecting and comparing entire colonies of microorganisms and the people and places they inhabit.

Deep in hydrothermal vents beneath the Arctic Ocean, scientists have discovered an organism that sheds fresh light on the evolutionary link between simple and complex cellular life.

The adult brain that was awash in alcohol during its formative years looks different and acts differently than an adult brain that skipped the youthful binge drinking, says a new study conducted on rats.

“Women ages 40 to 49 must weigh a very important but infrequent benefit (small reduction in breast cancer deaths) against a group of meaningful and much more common harms,” according to the report. These harms include “overdiagnosis and overtreatment; unnecessary and sometimes invasive followup testing and psychological harms associated with false-positive tests; and false reassurance…

The first scientific paper to include observations from the surface of a speeding comet has been released, marking a new era in cometary science.