brain
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What Ever Happened to Mad Cow?
One of the most existentially frightening illnesses ever to be discovered was mad cow disease, a fatal prion-spread illness that appeared in animals in the 1980s and killed over 200 people during the height of the outbreak in the late 1990s. You don’t hear much about mad cow today, but the threat still looms. Here’s…
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Can We Measure How Much Energy Our Brains Use?
After a long day of work or study, your brain might feel like it has been drained of energy. But does our brain burn more energy when engaging in mental athletics than it does during other activities, such as watching TV? To answer this question, we have to look at the engine room of our…
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First Complete Map of a Fly Brain Has Uncanny Similarities to AI Neural Networks
To most humans, a fruit fly larva doesn’t look like much: a pale, wriggling, rice grain-shaped maggot, just a few millimetres in length. Yet, in their own way, fly larvae lead rich and interesting lives full of sensory inputs, social behaviours, and learning. If you’ve ever doubted that a lot goes on inside a maggot’s…
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11 Psychology Terms You’re Misusing, According to Psychologists
Psychology-related words and phrases tend to creep into our everyday vocabularies. Unfortunately, many of them have been twisted in our minds, and we now use them to refer to the wrong thing — or, in some cases, science has moved on and we’re talking about something woefully outdated. Here are some of the worst offenders…