According to a new study, humans have higher cognition than other mammals because they possess different types of cells, and not due to having larger cells.

Published in the journal PloS Biology, the study focused on chandelier cells, so-named for their structural resemblance to an old-fashioned candlestick.

Tamas, the lead author of the study, says that the study provides new insights into the organization and function of neocortex, a brain region involved in sensory perceptions, conscious thoughts, and language.

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Created by Fergus Ray Murray images .
Showing us beauty of trigonometry. Every such image consists of set of sine and cosine curves, which makes complex wave frozen in still images...

10. Sweet Dreams
If you were to ask 10 people what dreams are made of, you'd probably get 10 different answers. That's because scientists are still unraveling this mystery. One possibility: Dreaming exercises brain by stimulating the trafficking of synapses between brain cells. Another theory is that people dream about tasks and emotions that they didn't take care of during the day, and that the process can help solidify thoughts and memories. In general, scientists agree that dreaming happens during your deepest sleep, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM).

9. Slumber Sleuth
Fruit flies do it. Tigers do it. And humans can't seem to get enough of it. No, not that. We're talking about shut-eye, so crucial we spend more than a quarter of our lives at it. Yet the underlying reasons for sleep remain as puzzling as a rambling dream. One thing scientists do know: Sleep is crucial for survival in mammals.

Extended sleeplessness can lead to mood swings, hallucination, and in extreme cases, death. There are two states of sleep - non-rapid eye movement (NREM), during which the brain exhibits low metabolic activity, and rapid eye movement (REM), during which the brain is very active. Some scientists think NREM sleep gives your body a break, and in turn conserves energy, similar to hibernation. REM sleep could help to organize memories. However, this idea isn't proven, and dreams during REM sleep don't always correlate with memories.

8. Phantom Feelings
It's estimated that about 80 percent of amputees experience sensations, including warmth, itching, pressure and pain, coming from the missing limb. People who experience this phenomenon, known as "phantom limb," feel sensations as if the missing limb were part of their bodies. One explanation says that the nerves area where the limb severed create new connections to the spinal cord and continue to send signals to the brain as if the missing limb was still there. Another possibility is that the brain is "hard-wired" to operate as if the body were fully intact - meaning the brain holds a blueprint of the body with all parts attached.

7. Mission Control
Residing in the hypothalamus of the brain, the suprachiasmatic nucleus, or biological clock, programs the body to follow a 24-hour rhythm. The most evident effect of circadian rhythm is the sleep-wake cycle, but the biological clock also impacts digestion, body temperature, blood pressure, and hormone production. Researchers have found that light intensity can adjust the clock forward or backward by regulating the hormone melatonin. The latest debate is whether or not melatonin supplements could help prevent jet lag - the drowsy, achy feeling you get when "jetting" across time zones.

6. Memory Lane
Some experiences are hard to forget, like perhaps your first kiss. But how does a person hold onto these personal movies? Using brain-imaging techniques, scientists are unraveling the mechanism responsible for creating and storing memories. They are finding that the hippocampus, within the brain's gray matter, could act as a memory box. But this storage area isn't so discriminatory. It turns out that both true and false memories activate similar brain regions. To pull out the real memory, some researchers ask a subject to recall the memory in context, something that's much more difficult when the event didn't actually occur.

5. Brain Teaser
Laughter is one of the least understood of human behaviors. Scientists have found that during a good laugh three parts of the brain light up: a thinking part that helps you get the joke, a movement area that tells your muscles to move, and an emotional region that elicits the "giddy" feeling. But it remains unknown why one person laughs at your brother's foolish jokes while another chuckles while watching a horror movie. John Morreall, who is a pioneer of humor research at the College of William and Mary, has found that laughter is a playful response to incongruities - stories that disobey conventional expectations. Others in the humor field point to laughter as a way of signaling to another person that this action is meant "in fun." One thing is clear: Laughter makes us feel better.

4. Nature vs Nurture
In the long-running battle of whether our thoughts and personalities are controlled by genes or environment, scientists are building a convincing body of evidence that it could be either or both! The ability to study individual genes points to many human traits that we have little control over, yet in many realms, peer pressure or upbringing has been shown heavily influence who we are and what we do.


3. Mortal Mystery
Living forever is just for Hollywood. But why do humans age? You are born with a robust toolbox full of mechanisms to fight disease and injury, which you might think should arm you against stiff joints and other ailments. But as we age, the body's repair mechanisms get out of shape. In effect, your resilience to physical injury and stress declines. Theories for why people age can be divided into two categories: 1) Like other human characteristics, aging could just be a part of human genetics and is somehow beneficial. 2) In the less optimistic view, aging has no purpose and results from cellular damage that occurs over a person's lifetime. A handful of researchers, however, think science will ultimately delay aging at least long enough to double life spans.

2. Deep Freeze
Living forever may not be a reality. But a pioneering field called cryonics could give some people two lives. Cryonics centers like Alcor Life Extension Foundation, in Arizona, store posthumous bodies in vats filled with liquid nitrogen at bone-chilling temperatures of minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit (78 Kelvin). The idea is that a person who dies from a presently incurable disease could be thawed and revived in the future when a cure has been found.

The body of the late baseball legend Ted Williams is stored in one of Alcor's freezers. Like the other human popsicles, Williams is positioned head down. That way, if there were ever a leak in the tank, the brain would stay submerged in the cold liquid. Not one of the cryopreserved bodies has been revived, because that technology doesn't exist. For one, if the body isn't thawed at exactly the right temperature, the person's cells could turn to ice and blast into pieces.

1. Consciousness
When you wake up in the morning, you might perceive that the Sun is just rising, hear a few birds chirping, and maybe even feel a flash of happiness as the fresh morning air hits your face. In other words, you are conscious. This complex topic has plagued the scientific community since antiquity. Only recently have neuroscientists considered consciousness a realistic research topic. The greatest brainteaser in this field has been to explain how processes in the brain give rise to subjective experiences. So far, scientists have managed to develop a great list of questions.

Source: Live Science

British researchers have unearthed evidence that proves Helen was much more than a chattel.

Women in Ancient Greece were major power brokers in their own right, researchers have discovered, and often played key roles in running affairs of state. Until now it was thought they were treated little better than servants.

The discovery is part of an investigation by Manchester researchers into the founders of Mycenae, Europe's first great city-state and capital of King Agamemnon's domains.

'It was thought that in those days women were rated as little more than chattels in Ancient Greece,' said Professor Terry Brown, of the faculty of life sciences at Manchester University. 'Our work now suggests that notion is wrong.'

Mycenae is one of the most important and evocative archaeological sites in Europe. According to legend, Agamemnon led his armies from Mycenae to Troy to bring back Helen - the wife of his ally, Menelaus - who had run off with the Trojan prince Paris.

The citadel was first excavated in the 1870s by Heinrich Schliemann, who uncovered tombs containing crumbling bones draped with jewels and gold face masks. 'I have discovered the graves of Agamemnon, Eurymedon, and their companions, all slain at a banquet by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthos,' he told the King of Greece.

In fact, the graves have since been dated and shown to be too old for those of Agamemnon. Nevertheless, Mycenae has since proved to be a treasure trove of archaeological riches. Most recently, these have involved scientists using a range of new techniques, including facial reconstruction work carried out by Manchester researchers John Prag and Richard Neave. They recreated the faces of seven individuals whose skeletons had been excavated at a circle of graves inside the citadel.

The images provided scientists with a family picture album for the rulers of Europe's first great city-state. However, genetics experts have now taken this work a stage further by attempting to extract DNA from 22 of the 35 bodies found in the grave circle. 'The facial reconstructions were carried out 10 years ago, but it is only now that scientists have developed sensitive enough techniques to get DNA from skeletons as old as these,' said Brown. 'In each case we had to deal with a single cell's worth of DNA.'

The genetic material isolated by the scientists is known as mitochondrial DNA, which humans inherit exclusively from their mothers. However, of the 22 skeletons that were tested, only four produced enough DNA for full analysis. Nevertheless, findings from these provided a shock for the team from Manchester.

While two of the males had DNA that indicated they were unrelated, the genetic material extracted from the remaining pair, a man and a woman, revealed they were brother and sister. They had been thought to have been man and wife.

'To be precise our DNA evidence suggests the pair were closely related, possibly siblings or possibly cousins. However, the facial reconstruction work of Prag and Neave also shows they were very similar in appearance which indicates they were brother and sister,' said Brown.

The critical point, he said, was that the woman was thought to have been buried in a richly endowed grave because she was the wife of a powerful man. That was in keeping with previous ideas about Ancient Greece - that women had little power and could only exert influence through their husbands.

'But this discovery shows both the man and the woman were of equal status and had equal power,' he said. 'Women in Ancient Greece held positions of power by right of birth, it now appears.

'The problem has been that up until recently our interpretation of life in Ancient Greece has been the work of a previous generations of archaeologists, then a male-oriented profession and who interpreted their findings in a male-oriented way. That is changing now and women in Ancient Greece are being seen in a new light.'

By Robin McKie

Guardian.co.uk