There are 32 new reasons to rethink the appendix. The anatomical structure has long been considered to serve no useful purpose, being little more than a remnant of a structure that our leaf-eating ancestors needed but that predominantly fruit-eating modern apes do not. But a new study suggests the appendix has evolved on at least 32 separate occasions among mammals. Image: greenzowie
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How could an equation ever hope to capture something as complex as the human mind? In a sense we’ve long been describing the brain with numbers – 86 billion neurons, 1200 cubic centimetres, 1400 grams. But you might expect that more ambitious attempts to explain the brain with mathematics would be doomed to failure – some neuroscientists beg to differ. Image: A Health Blog
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Asteroids 2, dinosaurs 0. The infamous space rock that slammed into the Gulf of Mexico and helped wipe it clean of large dinosaurs may have been a binary – two asteroids orbiting each other. The surprise conclusion comes from a re-evaluation of the proportion of asteroid craters on Earth that were formed from binary impacts. Image: Calsidyrose
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There’s more to malnutrition than poor diet. Although it is the leading cause of death among children worldwide, malnutrition remains something of a puzzle. Now, two studies suggest that microbes have an important role to play in both the onset and treatment of one form of malnutrition called kwashiorkor. Image: Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
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