The Best of ScienceAlert

Of all the senses we love to indulge, scent is often neglected – but the right smells could be just what your brain needs to keep it whirring in old age.

«Researchers at the University of California, Irvine recently uncovered strong evidence that enriching the air with fragrances improves cognitive performance by strengthening a critical connection between neurological areas involving memory and decision-making.»

A sprinkling of tiny beads recovered off the coast of Papua New Guinea might have come from a rock with a rather interesting history, having crossed light years of space from its origin around a star…

The relentlessness of chronic pain wears you down. Beyond being a physical distraction in and of itself, it disrupts sleep, interferes with work and relationships, and can even alter the way we…

Regular, short snoozes keep our brains young by preserving volume, a quality linked with healthy cognitive functions and a lower risk of dementia and other diseases.

Nature is an unstoppable force, and a beautiful one at that. Everywhere you look, the natural world is laced with stunning patterns that can be described with mathematics. From bees to blood vessels,…

Between 75,000 and 50,000 years ago, humans began to make their way across the megacontinent of Sahul, a landmass that connected what is now Australia, Tasmania, New Guinea, and the Aru Islands.

The humble proton is a lynchpin of the material Universe.

The ghost, at long last, is actually in the machine: For the first time, scientists have created neutrinos in a particle collider.

Scientists have found a new way to harvest psilocybin, the psychedelic compound typically found in mushrooms. They've engineered bacteria to produce psilocybin in their cells and poop it out, in gram…

Quantum entanglement is the binding together of two particles or objects, even though they may be far apart – their respective properties are linked in a way that's not possible under the rules of…

If your eyes have ever been drawn to the arrangement of leaves on a plant stem, the texture of a pineapple, or the scales of a pinecone, then you have unknowingly witnessed brilliant examples of…

The link between autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and the body's 'second brain' is more apparent than ever before.

«With this, we were able to identify a microbial signature that distinguishes autistic from neurotypical individuals across many studies.»

A new kind of black hole analog could tell us a thing or two about an elusive radiation theoretically emitted by the real thing.

One very persistent story about the mid-20th century space race involves the development of the space pen.

Marking the passage of time in a world of ticking clocks and swinging pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between 'then' and 'now'.

Determining the passage of time in our world of ticking clocks and oscillating pendulums is a simple case of counting the seconds between 'then' and 'now'.

The short answer is wind happens because the Sun heats some parts of the planet more than others, and this uneven heating starts a wind going.

In the middle of the night, the world can sometimes feel like a dark place. Under the cover of darkness, negative thoughts have a way of drifting through your mind, and as you lie awake, staring at…

«The study was published in Frontiers in Network Psychology.  View originalExplore similar Using Chrome? You can also save highlights with our extension.»

Scientists have recently identified a unique form of cell messaging occurring in the human brain that's not been seen before.

Time to upgrade your wallpapers, people.

Grab any physics textbook and you'll find formula after formula describing how things wobble, fly, swerve and stop. The formulas describe actions we can observe, but behind each could be sets of…

New year, new you, new diet.