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Is Exercise Really Good for the Brain? What the Science Says

Matthieu P. Boisgontier and Boris Cheval The Conversation
It is common for scientific studies to produce apparently conflicting results, but the benefits of physical activity on a wide range of physical and mental health outcomes remain undeniable.

Neanderthals Carb Loaded, Helping Grow Their Big Brains

Ann Gibbons Science
Molecular anthropologist Christina Warinner, graduate student James Fellows Yates, and a large international team looked at the oral bacteria stuck to the teeth of Neanderthals and preagriculture modern humans that lived more than 10,000 years ago.

What Little Babies See That You No Longer Can

Susana Martinez-Conde Scientific American
Before developing perceptual constancy, three- to four-month-old babies have a striking ability to see image differences that are invisible to adults. They lose this superior skill around the age of five months

How Humans Evolved Supersize Brains

Ferris Jabr Quanta
Fossils established the Brain Boom as fact. But they tell us next to nothing about how and why the human brain grew so large so quickly. In the last eight years, however, scientists have started to answer the “how” of human brain expansion — that is, the question of how the supersizing happened on a cellular level and how human physiology reconfigured itself to accommodate a dramatically enlarged and energy-guzzling brain.

Brainlike Computers, Learning From Experience

John Markoff New York Times
These computers are not programmed instead, connections between the circuits are “weighted” according to correlations in data that the processor has already “learned.” Those weights are then altered as data flows in to the chip, causing them to change their values. That generates a signal that travels to other components and, in reaction, changes the neural network, programming the next actions much the same way that information alters human thoughts and actions.
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