New Scientist tries to rouse the secrets of anesthesia – and what being put under can teach us about consciousness itself:

A team led by Andreas Engel at the University Medical Center in Hamburg, Germany, have been investigating this process in still more detail by watching the transition to unconsciousness in slow motion. Normally it takes about 10 [...]

Past Horizons may have revealed the secret origins of man’s best friend – among the domesticated wolves of Southeast Asia:

Data on genetics, morphology and behaviour show clearly that dogs are descended from wolves, but there’s never been scientific consensus on where in the world the domestication process began. “Our analysis of Y-chromosomal DNA now confirms that wolves were [...]

Then, Australia’s ABC Science tells us, they gradually moved inside our mouths:

The study, published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, supports what is known as the “outside-in” hypothesis of tooth evolution.

“The first smile would probably have been a prickly one, with many tiny teeth that looked like pointy cheek scales, and other small tooth-like scales wrapping around [...]

Click to embiggen

From the NOAA Photo Library, Historic Fisheries Collection, in the somewhat questionably titled ” Natural History of Useful Aquatic Animals” section.

Are manatees useful? I mean, I’m glad they exist. And I’m sure they do things and have manatee agendas with manatee priorities and manatee action items. But I’m not sure they’re all that useful. What [...]

When he’s not playing electric guitar with a bow, the Led Zeppelin virtuoso makes stranger noises:

The one that bears his name:

That’s where electronic music began.

SONG: “Shining Stone (Calcite Double Refraction).” (To download: double right-click & “Save As”)

ARTIST: grant.

SOURCE: Based on “Magical Viking stone may be real”, The Telegraph, 2 Nov 2011, as used in the post “How Vikings found the sun”.

ABSTRACT: Viking navigators. I wanted to make a song that sounded like a saga. Like an ancestral [...]

Researchers at the University of Notre Dame have found a strange link between forgetting things and walking through doorways:

New research from University of Notre Dame Psychology Professor Gabriel Radvansky suggests that passing through doorways is the cause of these memory lapses.

“Entering or exiting through a doorway serves as an ‘event boundary’ in the mind, which separates episodes [...]

PhysOrg sets our sights on a big, wet, lively looking lake on Jupiter’s moon Europa:

The water could represent a potential habitat for life, and many more such lakes might exist throughout the shallow regions of Europa’s shell, lead author Britney Schmidt, a postdoctoral fellow at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics, writes in the journal [...]