Lifeboat Foundation

Earth’s magnetic field flipped 42000 years ago, study shows.

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This is why physicists are so excited at the moment.

Find any two people with a diagnosis of depression, and there’s more than a fair chance one of them will also experience an anxiety disorder at some point in their life.

While the triggers for each condition are undoubtedly complex, it’s clear the genes we inherit can play a strong part in setting us up for a lifetime of bad mental health.

A new study led by researchers from the QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute in Australia has now identified 509 genes shared by both psychiatric disorders.

A small, flying reptile glides beneath the canopy of an ancient forest, scouring the trees for tasty bugs. She spots a cicada buzzing in the boughs of a ginkgo tree, then swoops down to snatch it up in her beak. The bug flees; the reptile follows, grasping swiftly along the branches with her sharp claws until – snatch! – she grabs the bug with her opposable thumbs.

It’s not your typical picture of a pterosaur – those iconic, winged reptiles that lived through most of the Mesozoic era (from about 252 million to 66 million years ago).

But according to a new study published April 12 in the journal Current Biology, a newly-described Jurassic pterosaur appears to have lived its life among the trees, hunting, and climbing with the help of its two opposable thumbs – one on each of its three-fingered hands.

A decade ago, the artificial-intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton transformed the field with a major breakthrough. Now he’s chasing the next big advance—with an “imaginary system” named GLOM, outlined in a recent paper titled, “How to represent part-whole hierarchies in a neural network.”