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Teachers taught spoken Spanish and failed. On the school bus, 400 deaf kids were building their own grammar.

The prehistoric Coso artifact turned out to be a 1920s spark plug in a concretion. Most OOPArts end that way.

Pulsing one hemisphere to mimic deep-sleep rhythm let sleep-deprived mice match well-rested ones on memory.

Mirror life -- synthetic organisms built from molecules with reversed chirality, the opposite handedness of every natural protein and DNA strand on Earth -- would be essentially invisible to the immune systems of humans, animals, and plants,

A newly described spider in North Queensland rainforest hunts exactly one prey species -- the green tree ant, an insect so aggressive most predators avoid it -- by building a silk trap that flings the ant into its web. Macquarie University ...

A synthetic cell built from scratch -- no living components, just liposomes, DNA, and 36 commercial enzymes standing in for protein synthesis -- grew, copied its own DNA, and split into two, according to Quanta's report on this synthetic-cell ...

Somatoparaphrenia is a rare delusion in which a person denies that one of their limbs, or an entire side of their body, belongs to them -- even when shown direct proof. Patients don't just forget the limb is theirs; they invent an explanation for ...

The journal Nature has posted a simplified but surprisingly entertaining and informative Mars terraforming simulation. For each of the five steps in the process: heat the planet, make a water plan, clean the dirt, start to farm, and make an ...

In a mouse model of autism, a single injection of a designer drug re-grew a shrunken part of the neuron and, within an hour, the mice went from antisocial and compulsive to behaving like healthy controls. That's the finding of a new study in Cell ...

Water is weird. Unlike any simple liquid, it becomes easier to compress as it cools, and it reaches its maximum density at 4°C--not at its freezing point. This anomaly is why ice floats and lakes freeze from the top down. For decades, scientists ...