A new study by neuroscientists at Northwestern University validates the possibility of influencing dreams and offers a crucial step to support the theory that dreams in REM sleep — the rapid eye movement phase of sleep in which lucid dreaming can occur — may be especially conducive to helping individuals come up with creative solutions to a problem.

A new study explains the brain mechanisms behind moments when we first recognize a blurry object, a primal ability that enabled our ancestors to avoid threats.  Based on this understanding, the team built an AI model with a human-like perceptual mechanism that learn new tasks with little training.

New research led by scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison has uncovered chemical signatures in zircons, the planet’s oldest minerals, that are consistent with subduction and extensive continental crust during the Hadean Eon, more than 4 billion years ago. The findings challenge models that have long considered Earth's earliest times as dominated by a rigid, unmoving “stagnant lid” and no continental crust, with potential implications for the timing of the origin of life on the planet.