Squishy, wrinkled, weighing about as much as a cantaloupe, the brain may not be much to look at from the outside. Yet with a network of roughly 86 billion neurons, it generates more impulses daily than all the smartphones on the planet combined.

Scientists can track all that activity with scans. But what does a well-balanced brain actually look like?

Spoiler alert: New research says there’s no universal signature of mental health—or illness.

The limits of a universal biomarker
“A lot of the work in neuroscience is trying to identify some kind of universal biomarker,” said Northeastern University London researcher Haily Merritt...

Scientists at Columbia University and Imperial College London have found that the largest canyon system in the solar system is still active and shaping Mars today, billions of years after it first formed.

New research presents direct seismic evidence that a marsquake (Mars’s equivalent of an earthquake) detected by NASA’s InSight lander originated beneath the vast Martian canyon system, Valles Marineris, and was caused by rocks slipping along a fault deep within the planet’s crust.

The finding suggests that faults established during the formation and early evolution of Valles Marineris billions of years ago can remain weak enough to rupture under stresses acting on Mars today.

“Valles Marineris is one of the most spectacular geological structures anywh...

Stanford researchers recently revealed how a seemingly physics-defying wireless communication technology works. The new technology, called thermal noise communication, harnesses background static that normally is the bane of radio, cellular and other wireless signals. In their new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team showed how a transmitter could deliver data to a receiver without any actively produced signal by manipulating tiny oscillations in voltage.

The findings describe how the system works at a fundamental level, opening the door to improv...

All neutron stars have intense magnetic fields. The typical magnetic field of a neutron star is about 100,000 times stronger than the strongest magnetic fields we can create on Earth. But about 1% of neutron stars have even stronger magnetic fields. Known as magnetars, their magnetic fields can be 1,000 times stronger than a regular magnetic field. They are a likely cause of powerful transient events such as soft gamma-ray repeaters and fast radio bursts. A new study looks at how magnetars might form. The findings are published on the arXiv preprint server.

The work focuses on the mergers of binary neutron stars...