Science

Does rapid eye movement during sleep reveal where you’re looking at in the scenery of dreams, or are they simply the result of random jerks of our eye muscles? Since the discovery of REM sleep in the early 1950s, the significance of these rapid eye movements has intrigued and fascinated scores of scientists, psychologists and philosophers. REM sleep, as the name implies, is a period of sleep when your eyes move under your closed eyelids. It’s also the period when you experience vivid dreams.

We are researchers who study how the brain processes sensory information during wakefulness and sleep. In our recently published study, we found that the eye movements you make while you sleep may reflect where you’re looking in your dreams.

The months-old James Webb Space Telescope has added another major scientific discovery to its growing list: detecting for the first time signs of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system.

Although the exoplanet would never be able to support life as we know it, the successful discovery of CO2 gives researchers hope that similar observations could be carried out on rocky objects more hospitable to life.

Approximately 66 million years ago, an asteroid collided with Earth and caused a mass extinction known as the Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K-Pg) extinction. This event — which, among other things, wiped out the dinosaurs — is one of the most important in geological history. After all, how often do giant asteroids from outer space slam into our planet?

As it turns out, perhaps more often than you think. Indeed, if the theory posited by a new study in the journal Science Advances is correct, it is entirely possible that a second asteroid collided with Earth at roughly the same time as the one that we already know about. That could have huge implications for explaining the history of the evolution of life on Earth.

Australia's catastrophic "Black Summer" bushfires significantly affected the hole in the Earth's ozone layer, according to a new report published Friday.

The report, which appeared in the Nature journal "Scientific Reports", traced a link from the unprecedented smoke released by the fires to the ozone hole above Antarctica.

The earliest known human ancestor walked on two feet as well as climbing through trees around seven million years ago, scientists said Wednesday after studying three limb bones.

When the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis was discovered in Chad in 2001, it pushed back the age of the oldest known representative species of humanity by a million years.

Bottlenose dolphins’ signature whistles just passed an important test in animal psychology. A new study by my colleagues and me has shown that these animals may use their whistles as namelike concepts.

By presenting urine and the sounds of signature whistles to dolphins, my colleagues Vincent Janik, Sam Walmsey and I recently showed that these whistles act as representations of the individuals who own them, similar to human names. For behavioral biologists like us, this is an incredibly exciting result. It is the first time this type of representational naming has been found in any other animal aside from humans.

“To see a world in a grain of sand”, the opening sentence of the poem by William Blake, is an oft-used phrase that also captures some of what geologists do.

We observe the composition of mineral grains, smaller than the width of a human hair. Then, we extrapolate the chemical processes they suggest to ponder the construction of our planet itself.

A drought in Texas dried up a river flowing through Dinosaur Valley State Park, exposing tracks from giant reptiles that lived some 113 million years ago, an official said Tuesday.

Photos posted on Facebook show three-toed footprints leading down a dry tree-lined riverbed in the southern US state. It is "one of the longest dinosaur trackways in the world," a caption accompanying the images says.