In the 1990s, a disturbing silence began to settle across the world. From mountain lakes to tropical streams, the music of singing frogs began to disappear.

It took a few years for scientists to figure out what was happening. A species of fungus — Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or Bd for short — was infecting and killing amphibians.

Two decades later, Bd has proved itself an exceptional biological catastrophe. It afflicts amphibians on every continent, and scientists suspect it has driven hundreds of species to extinction since its discovery.

Continue reading “Hope for Frogs in Face of a Deadly Fungus” →

From time to time, athletes get on a streak. Suddenly, the basketball goes through the net every time, or a batter gets a hit in every game. This blissful condition is often known as the hot hand, and players have come to believe it is real — so much so that they have made it a part of their strategy for winning games.

“On offense, if someone else has a hot hand, I constantly lay the ball on him,” wrote the N.B.A. legend Walt Frazier in his 1974 memoir, “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball & Cool.”

Continue reading “That’s So Random: Why We Persist in Seeing Streaks” →

A novelist scrawling away in a notebook in seclusion may not seem to have much in common with an NBA player doing a reverse layup on a basketball court before a screaming crowd. But if you could peer inside their heads, you might see some striking similarities in how their brains were churning.

That’s one of the implications of new research on the neuroscience of creative writing. For the first time, neuroscientists have used fMRI scanners to track the brain activity of both experienced and novice writers as they sat down — or, in this case, lay down — to turn out a piece of fiction.

Continue reading “This Is Your Brain on Writing” →