The human brain is constantly adapting as neural networks rewire themselves in response to new experiences, such as learning different skills or even recovering from trauma such as a stroke. For example, stroke patients who lose their ability to speak can often regain the skill with intensive training, which reestablishes new networks in the healthy parts of their brains.

Learn more about the brain’s plasticity and experience it first-hand through interactive games that enhance hand-eye coordination by visiting Brain: The Inside Story, open now through Sunday, August 14.

In the video below, Curator Rob DeSalle discusses how brains change throughout a lifetime.

Nairobi, Kenya, July 19, 2011

So we’re finally back in Nairobi, having packed up camp and driven back the 300-odd miles from Rusinga to the nation’s capital. It was a terrific field season, in many ways the best we’ve had. We had a really fun and motivated field crew and found a lot of wonderful fossils. What more could one ask?

Now begins the hard work of sorting out everything we found. In our case this means working in the National Museums of Kenya’s exquisite paleontology collections in Nairobi. Any fossils found in the country are reposited here, making it an ideal place to conduct comparative work. We’ve been here about a week, and it is still an overwhelming task. I’m not complaining though. It’s a fine position to be in; I’d rather we had too many than too few fossils.

Planets orbiting stars other than the Sun—called exoplanets—were first discovered in 1995. Since then, astronomers have pushed the limits of technology to produce images of exoplanets. In this podcast, Emily Rice, a research scientist in the Museum’s Department of Astrophysics, leads a tour of hundreds of extrasolar planets.

Dr. Rice’s talk was recorded at the Hayden Planetarium Space Theater on April 26, 2011.

Podcast: Download | RSS | iTunes ( 1 hour, 5 mins, 79 MB)

More than 100 years after joining the Museum’s archaeological collection, a remarkable set of 11th-century pottery excavated in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon is at the center of a delicious discovery.

Found at Pueblo Bonito, one of the great ceremonial complexes of the Ancestral Pueblo peoples, the rare ceramics were collected for the Museum by George Pepper at the turn of last century. Only recently, however, have researchers looked to the set to search for chemical traces of the vessels’ long-lost contents. The results were electrifying: tests revealed the presence of theobromine, the biomarker for cacao, confirming the earliest known use of chocolate north of the Mexican border.

In the last few weeks, 13-year-old Aidan — a 2011 Young Naturalist Award winner whose scientific project, described in his essay The Secret of the Fibonacci Sequence in Trees, garnered much attention for examining whether patterns of tree leaf distribution were linked to more efficient sunlight collection—received another important lesson in his young scientific career.