The results of a study conducted with the use of Wim Hof method suggest that a person can learn to consciously control his immune responses. Wim Hof is a Dutch world record holder who is famous worldwide for his ability to resist cold. For this incredible invulnerability to cold, he was commonly nicknamed “the Iceman”. Scientists led by Matthijs Kox of the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, studied his method, which is somehow similar to the Tibetan Tummo technique (yoga of inner heat) and involves third-eye meditation, breathing exercises and cold exposure, and used it to train…

Chimpanzees and humans may share the same ability to empathise with other individuals by involuntarily matching their pupil size. The mimicry only appears to work between two humans or between two chimpanzees but not between species, suggesting the signalling reinforces social bonds within species. We already know that pupils change shape in response to a new, unfamiliar target: they tend to constrict initially and, after a fraction of a second, readjust and dilate. There's evidence that human pupils dilate more rapidly while adjusting if their owner is interacting with another human whose pupils are also dilating. The dilation-adjustment happens more…

SO MUCH for slowing down as you age. Earth's tectonic plates are moving faster now than at any point in the last 2 billion years, according to the latest study of plate movements. But the result is controversial, since previous work seemed to show the opposite. If true, the result could be explained by another surprising recent discovery: the presence of more water within Earth's mantle than in all of the oceans combined. Plate tectonics is driven by the formation and destruction of oceanic crust. This crust forms where plates move apart, allowing hot, light magma to rise from the…