Life Archives - Attention to the Unseen

What people regret most as death approaches

From elsewhere — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 00:36:06 +0000

Science Norway reports: Few people regret something they did. Many regret what they did not do. When researchers speak with people nearing the end of their lives, the answers they receive are surprisingly similar. The dreams I never pursued. The talents I never got to use. The journeys I never took. The relationships with other people that I let fade away. The decisions I was too afraid to make. When death draws near and people are asked what they regret...

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Neuroscience needs to stop treating the brain as if it is a computer

From elsewhere — Thu, 28 May 2026 00:03:07 +0000

Àlex Gómez-Marín writes: What is a brain? The question might seem obvious, but it is not trivial. Neuroscience has progressed in the past century, with the development of sophisticated techniques to measure and manipulate brain cells, neural circuits and even animal behaviours. Yet how the brain actually works still eludes us. In The Brain, In Theory, neuroscientist Romain Brette deconstructs the predominant model of the brain, which treats the organ like a computer. He concedes that engineering metaphors can be...

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When Attenborough was welcomed by the mountain gorillas

From elsewhere — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:26:39 +0000

David Sillito writes: It is the most memorable moment of Sir David Attenborough’s broadcasting career. A short sequence of his encounter with a group of playful mountain gorillas in a forest clearing in Rwanda. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know,” he tells the camera, as a female gorilla observes him from just a few feet away. The footage for his 1979 Life on Earth series...

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Ed Yong talks about the extraordinary sensory worlds of animals

From elsewhere — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 00:47:46 +0000

Inside Climate News executive editor Vernon Loeb speaks with Ed Yong, Pulitzer-winning science journalist and author of An Immense World, about the extraordinary sensory worlds of animals.

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We’re finally learning what it’s like to die. And it’s not as bad as you think…

From elsewhere — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 01:03:08 +0000

Nate Scharping writes: The last words Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple founder, spoke were simple: “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” Their mystery is enticing – what did Jobs, the digital prophet who brought us the smartphone, see as he neared death? We’ll never know. But stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) tantalise the living, and something unique seems to be happening inside our brains as we sense death approaching. Despite NDE testimonies, the moments surrounding death largely remain a mystery...

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All living things emit a visible light that vanishes at death, surprising study says

From elsewhere — Fri, 09 Jan 2026 02:05:05 +0000

Science Alert reports: Life truly is radiant, according to an experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Calgary and the National Research Council of Canada. An extraordinary experiment on mice and leaves from two different plant species has uncovered direct physical evidence of an eerie ‘biophoton’ phenomenon ceasing on death, suggesting all living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don’t. The findings might seem a little fringe at first glance. It’s hard not...

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Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

From elsewhere — Sun, 31 Aug 2025 01:14:34 +0000

University of Bern: Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the solar system formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulfur. However, in the inner solar system—the part closest to the sun, where the four rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars...

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Here’s how the first proteins might have assembled, sparking life

From elsewhere — Thu, 28 Aug 2025 01:31:51 +0000

Science reports: Life today depends on proteins, cellular workhorses that do everything from flex muscles to ferry oxygen. And proteins, in turn, depend on RNA, which carries the recipes for making them and also helps with their assembly. In modern cells, large protein-based enzymes help connect RNA snippets to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Then, the RNA- and protein-based cellular machine called the ribosome stitches the amino acids together into a protein chain, reading the correct sequence from...

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Life on Earth emerged fast — far quicker than we thought

From elsewhere — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 00:12:13 +0000

Michael Marshall writes: Here’s a story you might have read before in a popular science book or seen in a documentary. It’s the one about early Earth as a lifeless, volcanic hellscape. When our planet was newly formed, the story goes, the surface was a barren wasteland of sharp rocks, strewn with lava flows from erupting volcanoes. The air was an unbreathable fume of gases. There was little or no liquid water. Just as things were starting to settle down,...

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When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?

From elsewhere — Sat, 26 Apr 2025 00:09:27 +0000

Tim Bayne writes: On St Valentine’s Day 1990, NASA’s engineers directed the space-probe Voyager 1 – at the time, 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from home – to take a photograph of Earth. Pale Blue Dot (as the image is known) represents our planet as a barely perceptible dot serendipitously highlighted by a ray of sunlight transecting the inky-black of space – a ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’, as Carl Sagan famously put it. But to find that mote of dust, you need to know...

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