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Alain White

Serotonin linked to somatic awareness

Patients with heightened somatic awareness often experience unexplained symptoms -- headaches, sore joints, nausea, constipation or itchy skin -- that cause emotional distress, and are twice as likely to develop chronic pain. The condition is associated with illnesses such as fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis and temporomandibular disorders, and is thought to

Northern lights' 'social networking' reveals true scale of magnetic storms

The researchers, led by Professor Sandra Chapman from the University's Department of Physics, have for the first time characterised the observations from over 100 ground based magnetometers in terms of a time-varying directed network of connections. They monitored the development of geomagnetic substorms using the same mathematics used to study

Fresh look at mysterious Nasca lines in Peru: Using a taxonomic approach, scientists have re-identified the huge birds drawn on the desert plains of Peru as hermits or pelicans

The lines and geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa are located some 400 kilometers south of Lima, Peru and form a World Heritage Site covering an area of about 450 square kilometers..

14 Origins of Phrases You Probably Use Every Day but Had No Idea about

Have you ever walked into a tiny room and thought ‘I couldn’t swing a cat in here?’ Have you ever ‘rubbed someone up the wrong way?’ These are examples of phrases we use all the time, but do you know their origins? I love words. I love metaphors, words

NASA's Cassini reveals New Sculpting in Saturn Rings

Although the mission ended in 2017, science continues to flow from the data collected.

Rare 'superflares' could one day threaten Earth

These events occur when stars, for reasons that scientists still don't understand, eject huge bursts of energy that can be seen from hundreds of light years away.

Sun's history found buried in Moon's crust

When the Sun was just a baby four billion years ago, it went through violent outbursts of intense radiation, spewing scorching, high-energy clouds and particles across the solar system..

Bitcoin causing carbon dioxide emissions comparable to Las Vegas or Hamburg: Hardware and IP addresses analyzed to assess the carbon footprint of the cryptocurrency

Although Bitcoin is a virtual currency, the energy consumption associated with its use is very real.

The brain consumes half of a child's energy -- and that could matter for weight gain: New paper proposes that variation in brain energy expenditure during childhood could be linked to obesity risk

In a new paper published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), "A hypothesis linking the energy demand of the brain to obesity risk," co-authors Christopher Kuzawa of Northwestern University and Clancy Blair of New York University School of Medicine, propose that variation in the energy

Could climate change make Siberia more habitable?

A study team from the Krasnoyarsk Federal Research Center, Russia, and the National Institute of Aerospace, USA, used current and predicted climate scenarios to examine the climate comfort of Asian Russia and work out the potential for human settlement throughout the 21st century. They published their results today in Environmental

CRISPR baby mutation significantly increases mortality: Two copies of mutated CCR5 gene associated with lower survivability

The researchers scanned more than 400,000 genomes and associated health records contained in a British database, UK Biobank, and found that people who had two mutated copies of the gene had a significantly higher death rate between ages 41 and 78 than those with one or no copies. Previous

Ultimate destiny: How undifferentiated cells commit to their biological fate

This complexity, however, belies the fact that each of the trillions of highly specialized cells start out as a single primordial cell.

Table salt compound spotted on Europa: Finding prompts a rethinking of the icy moon's subsurface ocean

The discovery suggests that the salty subsurface ocean of Europa may chemically resemble Earth's oceans more than previously thought, challenging decades of supposition about the composition of those waters and making them potentially a lot more interesting for study. The finding was published in Science Advances on June 12. Flybys

Brain anatomy links cognitive and perceptual symptoms in autism

Mental inflexibility is a hallmark symptom of autism spectrum disorder (ASD).This is best seen in restricted and repetitive behaviors, which are required for an ASD diagnosis..