CuriousMinds

A river is pushing up Mount Everest’s peak | UCL News - UCL – University College London

Mount Everest is about 15 to 50 metres taller than it would otherwise be because of uplift caused by a nearby eroding river gorge, and continues to grow because of it, finds a new study by UCL researchers.

The study, published in Nature Geoscience, found that erosion from a river network about 75 kilometres from Mount Everest is carving away a substantial gorge. The loss of this landmass is causing the mountain to spring upwards by as much as 2 millimetres a year and has already increased its height by between 15 and 50 metres over the past 89,000 years.

At 8,849 metres high, Mount Everest, also known as Chomolungma in Tibetan or Sagarmāthā in Nepali, is the tallest mountain on Earth, and rises about 250 metres above the next tallest peak in…

How are pronouns processed in the memory-region of our brain?

A new study shows how individual brain cells in the hippocampus respond to pronouns. “This may help us unravel how we remember what we read.”

Read the following sentence: “Donald Trump and Kamala Harris walked into the bar, she sat down at a table.” We all immediately know that it was Kamala who sat at the table, not Donald. Pronouns like “she” help us to understand language, but pronouns can have multiple meanings. Depending on the context, we understand who the pronoun is referring to. But how is it that we are so good at this, and how does our brain link pronouns with their nouns?

To answer this question, an international team of neuroscientists, neurosurgeons, and neurologists joined forces. Doris Dijksterhuis and Matthew Self from Pieter Roelfsema’s group looked together with their colleagues at the brain activity of patients…

This rocky planet around a white dwarf resembles Earth -- 8 billion years from now

Existence of Earth-like planet around dead sun offers hope for our planet's ultimate survival By Robert Sanders | Berkeley News

Astronomers have discovered a distant white dwarf with an Earth-like planet in an orbit just beyond where Mars is in our solar system. Earth could end up in such an orbit circling a white dwarf in about 8 billion years, if, like this exoplanet, it can survive the sun's red giant phase on its way to becoming a white dwarf.

The discovery of an Earth-like planet 4,000 light years away in the Milky Way galaxy provides a preview of one possible fate for our planet billions of years in the future, when the sun has turned into a white dwarf, and a blasted and frozen Earth has migrated beyond the orbit of Mars.

This distant…

Scientists turn to human skeletons to explore origins of horseback riding

As anyone who’s spent time in the saddle knows, riding a horse can be hard on your body. But can it change the way your skeleton looks?

The answer, according to archaeologists from CU Boulder: It’s complicated. In a new study, the team drew on a wide range of evidence—from medical studies of modern equestrians to records of human remains across thousands of years.

A monument to famous racehorses at Arvaikheer, Mongolia. Archaeologist William Taylor has explored the early history of domesticated horses at sites along the Mongolian steppe. (Credit: William Taylor)

The researchers concluded that horseback riding can, in fact, leave a mark on human skeletons, such as by subtly altering the shape of the hip joint. But those sorts of changes on their own can’t definitively reveal whether people have ridden horses during their lives. Many other activities, even…