Toggle light / dark theme

Summary: Researchers shed new light on how the human brain evolved to be language-ready. Compared to the brains of chimps, the patterns of connections of language areas in the human brain expanded more than was previously thought.

Source: Radboud University.

Neuroscientists have gained new insight into how our brain evolved into a language-ready brain. Compared to chimpanzee brains, the pattern of connections of language areas in our brain has expanded more than previously thought.

Physicists observed a strange new type of behaviour in a magnetic material when it’s heated up. The magnetic spins ‘freeze’ into a static pattern when the temperature rises, a phenomenon that normally occurs when the temperature decreases. They publish their findings in Nature Physics on July 4th.

The researchers discovered the phenomenon in the material neodymium, an element that they described several years ago as a ‘self-induced spin glass’. Spin glasses are typically alloys where iron atoms for example are randomly mixed into a grid of copper atoms. Each iron atom behaves like a small magnet, or a spin. These randomly placed spins point in all kinds of directions.

Unlike conventional spin glasses, where there is random mixing of magnetic materials, neodymium is an element and without significant amounts of any other material, shows glassy behavior in its crystalline form. The spins form patterns that whirl like a helix, and this whirling is random and constantly changes.

The future is now!


Technology continues to move forward at incredible speeds and it seems like every week we learn about a new breakthrough that changes our minds about what is possible.

Researchers in Toronto used a photonic quantum computer chip to solve a sampling problem that went way beyond the fastest computers and algorithms.

The paper the researchers published says that the Borealis quantum chip took only 36 microseconds to solve a problem that would take supercomputers and algorithms 9,000 years to figure out.

In a trio of studies published on June 27 in the journal Nature Microbiology 0, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have discovered “fingerprints” of mysterious viruses hidden in an ancient group of microbes that may include the ancestors of all complex life on Earth: from fungi to plants to humans.

Ths discovery is significant; it explores the hypothesis that viruses were imperative to the evolution of humans and other complex life forms.

These microbes – known as Asgard archaea after the abode of the gods in Norse mythology – are usually found in the frigid sediments deep in the ocean and in boiling springs, and existed on Earth before the first eukaryotic cells, which carry their DNA inside a nucleus.