Jason Koebler writes: A group of physicists at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Extreme Light Laboratory announced Monday that they have created the brightest light ever produced on Earth using Diocles, one of the most powerful lasers in the United States….

New submitter akakaak writes: In a new paper published in Cell, researchers Le Chang and Doris Tsao claim to have uncovered “The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain.” They develop a model representing each face as a vector…

One scientific analysis is arguing that the human sense of smell has not only been underestimated over the years, but that it may rival that of dogs and rodents. John McGann, a neuroscientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey and…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In February, after almost two years worth of six-hour workdays, nurses at the Svartedalens elderly care facility in Gothenburg, Sweden went back to eight hour shifts — despite recently published research showing the benefits…

“Predicting magnets is a heck of a job, and their discovery is very rare,” said a mechanical engineering professor at Duke University. But after years of work synthesizing various predictions, material scientists “predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom,…

Stories about the first human head transplant operation, supposedly coming in December 2017, are circulating again. From a report on the Outline: But despite what you might have read or seen, humanity is not much closer to transplanting a human…

At Recode’s conference last year, Elon Musk said he would love to see someone do something about linking human brains with computers. With no other human being volunteering, Mr. Musk — who founded PayPal and OpenAI, thought of Hyperloop, is…

Complex multicellular life began 400 million years earlier than we thought, according to a Phys.org article shared by Slashdot reader William Robinson: Scientists found two kinds of fossils resembling red algae in uniquely well-preserved sedimentary rocks at Chitrakoot in central…

More than 1 in 4 deaths of children under 5 years of age are attributable to unhealthy environments. Every year, environmental risks — such as indoor and outdoor air pollution, second-hand smoke, unsafe water, lack of sanitation, and inadequate hygiene…

Science is facing a “reproducibility crisis” where more than two-thirds of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist’s experiments, research suggests. From a report: This is frustrating clinicians and drug developers who want solid foundations of pre-clinical research…