Wouldn’t it be fascinating to go back 30,000 to 50,000 years and meet the humans and Neanderthals who walked the earth? So many mysteries would be answered about how they lived and what their societies were like. We can’t talk to them, but maybe we can hear some of their music. Archeologists have been studying ancient bone flutes of humans from that era and making reconstructions that can played, at least in the right hands. Jelle Atema will be performing on ancient bone flute replicas during

Dr. Nevena Zubcevik is a brain injury researcher and co-director of the new Dean Center for Tick Borne Illness at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, which focuses on treating the long-term effects of Lyme disease. She is also an instructor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at Harvard Medical School, an attending physician at Spalding and Massachusetts General Hospital. We spoke to her in August 2016 about her work and we are replaying a shorter version of that program below. Our full

A climate science report leaked to the New York Times this past week presents some unsettling warnings, both about our changing weather and our current political climate. That report is part of the fourth National Climate Assessment. These assessments are intended to provide guidance to lawmakers and officials – from federal to local. Jerry Melillo was one of the editors of the last National Climate Assessment in 2014. He is a distinguished scientist and director emeritus of the Ecosystems

More than 60,000 patients in the U.S. receive general anesthesia every day. But despite the fact that anaesthesia drugs, like ether, have been around for more than 150 years, it's really only been in the past decade or so that we've gained a better understanding of how they work. Dr. Emery Brown, director of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology Program, describes general anaesthesia as a combination of five phenomena: unconsciousness, amnesia, loss of pain sensation, immobility, and

Living Lab Radio talks regularly with reporters at the journal Nature to get an update on the stories they've been following. Here's our latest roundup of news with London-based reporter Davide Castelvecchi. · CRISPR gene editing scores a major success in human embryos · How a satellite snafu masked the true extent of sea-level rise · The hint of an exomoon · Jordan pushes its science agenda with the SESAME x-ray factory

Budgetary negotiations in Congress are tedious affairs, but can also be enlightening. We’ve been following the Congressional reporters at E&E News and caught this line in a recent report about the House budget proposal: “The budget also calls for unspecified savings from a Commerce Department reorganization, which would include moving NOAA into the Interior Department.” One of the reporters on the story, Kellie Lunney , explains that the idea of moving the National Oceanic and Atmospheric

When the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord in June, it marked a pause in federal action on clean energy. But individual states have already been taking the lead in this area for some time. The Northeast Clean Energy Council (NECEC) has just put together a wrap-up of legislation that has come out of the 2017 sessions in the six New England States. In Massachusetts, about 100 energy-related bills were filed in the last legislative session. “This magnitude of activity reflects a shared

There’s more evidence that playing football can lead to permanent brain damage. But the problem likely isn’t as prevalent as many media accounts have suggested. Chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) is a progressive neurodegenerative disease associated with repeated head trauma. Symptoms include dementia and mood or behavioral disorders. It was first described in boxers several decades ago, but has been found in NFL players in the past five years. Last week, researchers at Boston University

Death may be inevitable. But what about aging? If we could figure out what biological switches get flipped to start the process of decline, could we reverse it? Even prevent it? Aging, maybe not surprisingly, happens at the molecular level, explained Anne Brunet , a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Laboratories for the Biology of Aging at Stanford University. Brunet recently spoke at the Marine Biological Laboratory's Friday lecture series . “The great challenge of the

It’s no secret that there are deep social and political divides in the U.S. What’s less clear, is what is driving the polarization. Carol Graham has spent the past decade studying quality of life and happiness around the globe. She’s the Leo Pasvolsky Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution and College Park Professor at University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. In the past few years, she’s turned her attention to inequalities in happiness and hope here in the United States. And she