By Carl Zimmer
June 8, 2021
Dr. Adam Zeman didn’t give much thought to the mind’s eye until he met someone who didn’t have one. In 2005, the British neurologist saw a patient who said that a minor surgical procedure had taken away his ability to conjure images.
Over the 16 years since that first patient, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia,
For example, a scientist who had been a grad student under the famous psychologist Leon Kamin, co-author with Richard Lewontin and Steven Rose of the anti-hereditarian book
By an array of bomb-detecting microphones was instrumental in the accidental finding of an unknown pygmy blue whale population in the Indian Ocean after analyzing their songs.
Scientists Discover Population of Incredibly Rare Whales With the Help of Nuclear Bomb Detectors
On 6/9/21 at 12:15 PM EDT
While blue whales are the biggest marine animals in existence, they re notoriously elusive. But scientists at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Australia believe that that they have discovered a brand new population in the central Indian Ocean.
The new population is comprised of an unknown number of pygmy blue whales. Pygmy blue whales, as their name would suggest, are the smallest subspecies of blue whales. In this context, however, small is a relative term. Their beefier relatives might dwarf them by dozens of inches and pounds, but pygmy blue whales can still reach 24 meters (about 79 feet). That s nearly the length of two standard buses, according to the UNSW Newsroom.