Biological Sciences

Researchers have known that a lack of quality sleep can increase a person’s risk of diabetes. What has remained a mystery, however, is why.

Now, new findings from a team of sleep scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are closer to an answer. The researchers have uncovered a potential mechanism in humans that explains how and why deep-sleep brain waves at night are able to regulate the body’s sensitivity to insulin, which in turn improves blood sugar control the next day.

“These synchronized brain waves act like a finger that...

From the 20-foot-long jawbones of the filter-feeding blue whale to the short, but bone-crushing, jaws of the hyena and the delicate chin bones of a human, the pair of lower jawbones characteristic of mammals have evolved with amazing variation.

But at first glance, having a single bone on each side of the head — which creates a stiff lower jaw, or mandible — doesn’t appear to give mammals an advantage over other vertebrates, which have at least two and as many as 11 bones comprising each side of the lower jaw.

Crocodiles, for example, have an edge over hyenas when it comes to...

A strange and mysterious plant is on the rampage, causing people to break out in itchy purple blotches!

The premise of a new sci-fi movie or dystopian video game?

No, it’s the theme of a new escape room — an immersive educational adventure that families emerge from only after solving science puzzles to save the world from a prickly end. The...