New technique allows scientists to read the pages of an ancient text without opening the book.
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Transplanted embryonic neurons can properly connect into the developed visual cortex of adult mice and improve the animals’ sensitivities to visual cues over time, scientists reported today (October 26) in Nature. By demonstrating that added neurons can become fully functional in circuits that normally do not rewire in adulthood, the team’s results suggest that the brain may be more plastic than previously thought.
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Closing in on a Giant Ghost Planet
Posted in space
And a shifting speed of light could revise current views about the evolution of the infant universe. Scientists think that a period of inflation caused the newborn cosmos to expand extremely rapidly, creating a universe that is uniform across vast distances. That uniformity is in line with observations: The cosmic microwave background, light that emerged about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, is nearly the same temperature everywhere scientists look. But cosmologist João Magueijo of Imperial College London has a radical alternative to inflation: If light were speedier in the early universe, it could account for the universe’s homogeneity.
“As soon as you raise the speed limit in the early universe,” Magueijo says, “you start being able to work on explanations for why the universe is the way it is.”
A finely tuned universe.
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