Science Daily

Audio cues can not only help us to recognize objects more quickly but can even alter our visual perception. That is, pair birdsong with a bird and we see a bird — but replace that birdsong with a squirrel’s chatter, and we’re not quite so sure what we’re looking at. “Your brain spends a significant amount of energy to process the sensory information in the world and to give you that feeling of a full and seamless perception,” said lead author Jamal R. Williams (University of California, San Diego) in an interview. “One way that it does this is by making inferences about what sorts of information should be expected.” Although these “informed guesses” can help us to process information Read More ›

A peculiar property of the Earth’s magnetic field could help us to work out how our planet was created 4.5 billion years ago, according to a new scientific assessment. There are several theories about how the Earth and the Moon were formed, most involving a giant impact. They vary from a model where the impacting object strikes the newly formed Earth a glancing blow and then escapes, through to one where the collision is so energetic that both the impactor and the Earth are vaporized. Now scientists at the University of Leeds and the University of Chicago have analysed the dynamics of fluids and electrically conducting fluids and concluded that the Earth must have been magnetized either before the impact Read More ›