The schedule 1 illicit drug known as ecstasy has been used by up to 12 million people in the United States  and millions more worldwide.  Past research has suggested that ecstasy users…

Last year I attended a singularity conference and Ray Kurzweil's avatar predicted it was 25 years away.   Well, it's been 25 years away for a long time.  It's a nice, safe number, close…

Mice have a healthy concept of fear and so they fear the scent of a predator.   While it seems obvious that brains quickly figure out with a sniff that a predator, like a cat, is nearby, the…

Measuring 'intelligence' is a much art as science.   Even using the word intelligence sends people down a philosophical rabbit hole, disagreeing about what the word means. So can there be a '…

Can olive oil prevent mental illness? A new study says the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of suffering depression and that olive oil protects against this mental…

Frédéric Chopin, composer of "The Last Waltz" and poet of the piano, suffered from tuberculosis and regularly hallucinated. Even for those in the Romantic Revolution, like Liszt, Schumann and Victor…

The dynamics behind signal transmission in the brain are extremely chaotic.  The brain codes information in the form of electrical pulses, known as spikes. Each of the brain's approximately 100…

Want to know if you can be the king of Donkey Kong?    A group of researchers say they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task like a strategic…

Neurons within the brain's neocortex behave much like people in social networks, with a small population of highly active members who give and receive more information than the majority of other…

In the Silhouette Illusion (video at the bottom), a silhouetted woman is seen spinning on one foot, her leg extended. The appeal of the illusion is in the way the woman is spinning – she can be…