The brain is the most complex organ in the human body. It produces our every thought, action, memory, feeling and experience of the world. This jelly-like mass of tissue, weighing in at around 1.4 kilograms, contains a staggering one hundred billion nerve cells, or neurons. The complexity of the connectivity between these cells is mind-boggling. Each neuron can make contact with thousands or even tens of thousands of others, via tiny structures called synapses. Our brains form a million new connections for every second of our lives. The pattern and strength of the connections is constantly changing and no two…

Seventy five lab workers may have been exposed to anthrax at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, the leading US lab for tracking infectious disease. The incident has not yet made anyone ill, and poses negligible risk for the public, but it raises concerns about work with deadly pathogens. According to the CDC, culture dishes of anthrax bacteria kept in a level 3 high-containment lab, were subjected to a treatment that should have killed them, then sent to a level 2 lower containment lab in the same building on 6 June, to help develop detectors…

Growing doubts about evidence for ancient gravitational waves don't undermine cosmic inflation, says the theory's co-founder Andrei Linde – and don't let feelings obscure science Would the detection of gravitational waves from just after the big bang finally prove your theory of cosmic inflation? If primordial gravitational waves were indeed detected by the BICEP2 telescope, they almost certainly would have been generated just after the big bang. But the media hyped this as the first evidence for inflation. That just isn't true: there has been a lot of independent support. I don't like the way gravitational waves are being treated…

Pain brings us together – we see it in others and try to salve it (Image: Michael Zumstein/Agence VU/camerapress) Joanna Bourke's The Story of Pain may not be able to tell us how to suffer better, but consoles with the notion that pain can be pleasure PAIN binds us together. We witness other people's pain, imagine it, try to salve it. We use it as a measure by which to gauge our own capacity for kindness. It renders us incoherent, yet at the same time, it prompts us to communicate with each other. But when all's said and done, you…

Long ago, in a palace by the Red River, there lived a great mandarin and his daughter, Mi Nuong. Like other young ladies of her position, Mi Nuong was kept indoors, away from the eyes of admiring men. She spent most of her time in her room at the top of a tower. There she would sit on a bench by a moon-shaped window, reading or embroidering, chatting with her maid, and gazing out often at the garden and the river. One day as she sat there, a song floated to her from the distance, in a voice deep and…

Being cold can burn calories but no one wants to freeze just to sculpt their muffin-top. Soon we may not have to. Researchers have identified immune molecules triggered by cold temperatures that make obese mice lose weight – without the need for the mercury to drop. Humans and other mammals respond to cold in two ways. On the surface, we shiver to burn energy and produce a quick burst of heat. On a deeper level, as Ajay Chawla at the University of California, San Francisco, and his colleagues recently discovered, cold temperatures send signals to immune molecules called macrophages. They,…

Feel too old or too stupid to learn a second language? It may be worth persevering. A study that tracked hundreds of Scottish people for decades is the strongest evidence yet that speaking an extra language slows the mental decline that accompanies ageing. The benefits hold regardless of your IQ and even if you learn your second tongue as an adult. Previous studies have shown that people with Alzheimer's disease who are fluent in two languages exhibit symptoms of the condition four or five years later than people who are monolingual, and that people who are bilingual perform better in…