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In their last minutes of life, some people’s brains generate a surge of surprisingly organized-looking electrical activity that may reflect consciousness — although scientists aren’t entirely sure. 

According to new research, published Monday (May 1) in the journal PNAS (opens in new tab) , this surge can sometimes occur after a person’s breathing stops but before the brain stops functioning. The activity pattern is somewhat similar to what is seen when people are awake or in dreamlike states, leading to speculation that perhaps these electrical surges reflect the otherworldly experiences reported by people who’ve had close brushes with death: A sense of looking at the body from the outside; a tunnel and white light; or a sense of reliving important memories. 

However, since all the patients in the new study ultimately died, it’s impossible to know if they had such experiences. 

“If you talk about the dying process, there is very little we know,” said Jimo Borjigin (opens in new tab) , a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan Medical School who led the study. It’s rare for patients to have their brains continuously monitored as they die, Borjigin told Live Science. “This is maybe the first study to really show second-by-second how the brain dies.” 

Related: Is brain death reversible? Near-death experiences 

Some people who are brought back from the brink of death report seeing or hearing unexplained things during resuscitation or when they seem to be unconscious. The reason for these near-death experiences is unknown, and it’s not clear if they’re even specific to death. 

International surveys suggest that only about half of what people call “near-death experiences” actually occur in life-threatening situations, said Daniel Kondziella (opens in new tab) , a neurologist at the University of Copenhagen who was not involved in the new research. The other half occur during meditation or in scary situations that don’t endanger one’s health or impact the brain’s metabolism, Kondiziella told Live Science. 

“The thing is, from the experience itself you cannot say if someone has had a cardiac arrest or syncope [a brief loss of consciousness] or near-miss traffic accident,” Kondiziella said. 

Because the people who survive to report a near-death experience are inherently different from the people who die — their brains don’t permanently lose function, for one thing — it’s hard to determine whether those who actually die also have these subjective experiences. 

In 2013, Borjigin and her colleagues measured electrical activity in the brains of rats (opens in new tab) that they euthanized via cardiac arrest. They found that for about 30 seconds after the heart stopped, the brain showed a surge in what are called gamma waves, which are the highest-frequency electrical oscillations in the brain. Gamma waves are correlated with conscious experience, but don’t necessarily prove that someone is conscious; they’re just one of many indicators that someone might be aware and alert. 

In 2022, a separate group of doctors happened to be monitoring the brain of an 87-year-old man with an electroencephalogram (EEG), which detects electrical activity on the surface of the brain, when the man unexpectedly died. Similar to Borjigin’s rats, the man’s brain showed a surge in gamma activity in the 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped.  ‘Reading’ the dying brain 

In their new paper, Borjigin and her team made a deliberate effort to use EEG to capture what the brain looks like during death. 

The researchers got permission to monitor dying patients in intensive care whose breathing support had been removed after treatment proved futile. The study included four patients total, all of whom were comatose after cardiac arrest. 

In the 30 seconds to two minutes after their ventilators were removed, two of the four patients’ brains showed surges in gamma waves. Interestingly, this gamma activity seemed organized, in that the gamma waves in one portion of the brain were associated with predictable activity patterns in other regions. 

The temporoparietal junction, a brain region where the temporal and parietal lobes meet, toward the back of the brain behind the ear, was particularly active with gamma waves. This region is known to be activated when people have out-of-body experiences or dreams, Borjigin said. 

The new findings echo what was seen in the 87-year-old patient who unexpectedly died, said Raul Vicente (opens in new tab) , a neuroscientist and data scientist at the University of Tartu who co-authored the 2022 study but was not involved in Borjigin’s work. “It’s very nice to see a confirmation,” he told Live Science. 

“The more consistent findings we have, the more evidence it is that this likely is a mechanism happening at the time of death and if we can pinpoint this down to one location, even better,” said Ajmal Zemmar (opens in new tab) , a neurosurgeon at the University of Louisville Health who also co-authored the 2022 study. RELATED STORIES—Dying brains silence themselves in a dark wave of ‘spreading depression’

—Your brain ‘shields’ itself from the existential threat of death

—Can minds persist when they are cut off from the world?

Zemmar and Vicente are optimistic that these signals could be signs of conscious experience at the moment of death. But reflecting the debate in the field, Kondziella is more skeptical. 

“We know when you die a cardiac death as opposed to a brain death, that takes time,” he said. Minutes pass between the heart stopping and brain cells dying, he said. “It shouldn’t be a big surprise during those minutes, you will see aberrant electrophysiological activity in the brain.” 

Some people may experience something like near-death experiences in these moments, Kondziella said, but we may never know for sure. And again, these experiences may not be unique to death — a more likely explanation for near-death experiences that encompasses both life-threatening experiences and non-life-threatening experiences, he said, may be “REM sleep intrusion into wakefulness,” a situation in which the brain blends waking and dreaming states. (REM sleep is marked by dreaming and brain activity patterns that are very similar to waking, including gamma waves and other, lower-frequency waves.) 

Borjigin’s team is still collecting end-of-life data, hoping to add to the evidence that the dying brain may generate predictable gamma-wave patterns. Already, other research groups have attempted to use artificial intelligence to identify objects that people saw in their dreams (opens in new tab) based on their brain activity — similar mind-reading may be possible with unconscious and dying patients, Vicente said. 

“This opens an opportunity at some point, if we gather enough data, to be able to decode what people in different coma states are thinking,” Vicente said. 

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Sports

Latest Rockingham revival just might bring NASCAR back for good

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April 18, 2025

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Latest Rockingham revival just might bring NASCAR back for good

  • Ryan McGeeApr 17, 2025, 11:33 AM ET

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    • Senior writer for ESPN The Magazine and ESPN.com
    • 2-time Sports Emmy winner
    • 2010, 2014 NMPA Writer of the Year

ROCKINGHAM, N.C. — This time around, it feels different. Everyone around Rockingham, North Carolina, says so.

Man, I hope so.

They said it in 2018, when a man nearly no one in Richmond County had heard of bought the dilapidated Rockingham Speedway and promised a resurrection. They said it three years later, when North Carolina government officials set aside $50 million to do much-needed work on the Tar Heel State’s big three racetracks. They said it when $9 million of that cash was used to repave Rockingham. They repeated it one year ago, when NASCAR announced that two of its national series would spend Easter weekend 2025 at The Rock. And this week, the people of Rockingham have gleefully reiterated their hopes that, yes, this time is indeed much, much different, as they have watched the team haulers of the NASCAR Craftsman Truck and Xfinity series roll through their town of 9,000, turn up U.S. Highway 1, and churn northbound through the Carolina Sandhills for a Friday/Saturday doubleheader.

A pair of races held on a 1.017-mile oval that refuses to die, once again emerging from that sand like a mummy wrapped in 200 mph duct tape.

“I was born here, have spent my entire life here, and when the racetrack is empty, something is missing from all of us,” says Bryan Land, a sixth-generation Richmond County native. As a kid, he worked in the kitchen of the Rockingham Speedway infield diner located at the entrance of the garage, feeding scrambled eggs and cheeseburgers to the likes of Dale Earnhardt and Richard Petty. As an adult, he serves as county manager for Richmond County, and has found himself back in that same infield. He has been there every night this week, as he was at 8 o’clock on Tuesday night, offering up whatever needs to be done to ensure the racetrack is at its best this weekend. “The excitement we all feel right now is very real. Because that hole we’ve all had, it’s being filled. And yes, it does feel different this time around.”

Like Land, I too was born in Rockingham, in a hospital straight back down that highway in the middle of town, 12 minutes south of the track. Now, it’s just a clinic. But back in the day, I came screaming into the world about two weeks before Cale Yarborough won the American 500. My dad, who’d been a father for all of 13 days, was in the pits at The Rock as a gas can man for Dave Marcis in his No. 30 Lunda Construction Dodge.

I’ll be buried in Rockingham, too. I know exactly where the plot is, in the family cemetery, located about 15 miles west of the track.

My point is that this race weekend and what it might mean is personal.

It’s been personal before, during Rockingham’s other flirtations with renewed racing life. It felt good then, too, but it didn’t feel as it does now. Different. Solid. Supported. Like it’s destined to work this time.

For those who do not know — and based on this timeline, there are likely many — a history lesson.

The Rockingham Speedway was opened in 1965, then known as the North Carolina Motor Speedway. It was built through the efforts of Bill Land, Bryan Land’s grandfather, and Harold Brasington, the same man who 15 years earlier had famously gone full “Field of Dreams” and bulldozed the Darlington Raceway into a patch of South Carolina peanut fields just a short drive south from Rockingham. His efforts in Richmond County resulted in a smaller but similarly quirky oval, one that raced like a short track/superspeedway hybrid.

Over the next four decades, the track that became known as “The Rock” hosted 78 NASCAR Cup Series races. Most of those seasons featured two events per year, one very early, often following the Daytona 500, and the other so late on the calendar that it became the place where championships were clinched by everyone from Earnhardt and Yarborough to Benny Parsons, based in nearby Ellerbe, and Jeff Gordon, who’d turned his very first stock car laps at Rockingham under the tutelage of NASCAR Hall of Famer Buck Baker.

In 2001, Rockingham hosted the first race following the death of Earnhardt, the tiny Eastern North Carolina town descended upon by media members from around the globe, all there to see Steve Park, in a car owned by Earnhardt, earn one of the most emotional NASCAR wins ever witnessed.

But as NASCAR became chic, it began ripping its roots from the ground to go hunting for more money elsewhere. During the racetrack-building boom of the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rockingham ownership changed frequently and it became a bargaining chip in an antitrust lawsuit between shareholders of Bruton Smith’s Speedway Motorsports Incorporated (SMI) and NASCAR. In 2003, The Rock’s spring date was moved out west to the California Speedway. One year later, Smith moved the fall race to his still-new show palace, the Texas Motor Speedway.

With the exception of lawn mowers and an occasional movie shoot (“Au revoir, Ricky Bobby …”), Rockingham was silent. The sight of the place jailed in chains and padlocks with no chance for parole was so painful that local residents took to using alternate routes up to Southern Pines just to avoid having to look at it.

I know because I was one of them.

Hope retuned in 2008, when grassroots racer Andy Hillenburg, with backing from local officials, purchased the racetrack when Smith unloaded it at auction, saving it from a slew of salvage and scrap metal companies. For five years, Hillenburg ground it out. He opened up the track as a test facility, even building a Martinsville clone behind the big oval’s backstretch. He brought in ARCA and an alphabet soup of late model series, races won by the fresh-faced likes of Joey Logano and Chase Elliott. Ever heard of them?

In 2012, the Trucks came to town. Kasey Kahne won the first event amid an electric, feel-good atmosphere and large crowd, exacting some Rock revenge after losing the track’s final Cup race in ’04 to Matt Kenseth by a scant .010 seconds, Kahne’s second-ever Cup start.

The following year, Kyle Larson won a second Trucks race. But this time, it felt different in a bad sort of way. Something felt, well, off. The crowd wasn’t nearly as big as ’12. The trash cans were overflowing. Many of the toilets didn’t work. My lasting image of that day is of Hillenburg, only hours before the green flag, in a golf cart, frantically rolling through the parking lots and selling tickets out of his pocket.

Hillenburg is a racer’s racer. He is my friend. I will always be thankful for what he did in Rockingham. But naive business decisions, a short track manager’s mentality, and being crippled by turncoats he’d trusted as friends and business partners left him doomed. By 2013, the place was shuttered again. And, honestly, so were the feelings of hope for the future of The Rock, especially as the years clicked by and that harsh geology of Richmond County literally sandblasted every strip of metal, rubber and wood that it could find.

“It just got so quiet, man,” Land said on Wednesday night. “Anything you’d hear, anything, rumors or truth, you’d hope it was for real.”

Land’s emotion echoes that of everyone I have talked to back home in the past several months, especially during January’s two-day session to shake the place down with the machines that will race there this weekend.

Whenever I have written about the Rockingham Speedway in the past few decades, my fellow natives and family members have taken issue when I dive into the reasons for the rawness of our emotions when it comes to the racetrack. But it also is what it is. When the place was built in the 1960s, Richmond County was booming. Textile mills cranked out cloth night and day from every corner of Rockingham. The town of Hamlet, birthplace of John Coltrane and a pack of NFL players, was an East Coast railroad hub. By the 1980s, all of that was gone, having moved overseas or up the coast.

But the Speedway remained. No matter where in the world a Rockingham resident traveled, when someone asked where we were from and you told them, their immediate response was, “that’s the place with the NASCAR track!”

The Rock wasn’t just a part of our identity. It was our identity. So, when that was stripped away, it felt every bit as devastating as the loss of the mills and the railroad. Only, those left in trickles. This happened via a news release, a sheet of fax paper that might as well have been a wrecking ball.

When Dan Lovenheim bought the place in 2018, he openly questioned what he’d done. Every single time he opened a door or unlocked a building or room, all he found was rust and rot.

“It was probably way worse than anyone realizes, even if they had been there and seen it and thought they knew,” he explained when the track’s race dates were announced by NASCAR one year ago.

Lovenheim made his money by transforming a dead zone of nearby Raleigh into a series of nightclub hot spots. That was a lot of work. He thought.

“Oh, that was nothing compared to what we were looking at here at the racetrack,” he said. “But we tried to be patient and take it all one problem at a time.”

When the state earmarked the money to help revive its racetracks three years later, the headliner quickly became North Wilkesboro Speedway, which had been abandoned by NASCAR and Smith in 1996. Thanks to the work of Dale Earnhardt Jr., iRacing and the kinder, gentler resurrection and promotional wizardry of Smith’s son, Marcus, who took over SMI after his father’s death in 2022, the North Wilkesboro comeback to impossibly host the NASCAR All-Star Race was both fast and fascinating. Same for Winston-Salem’s Bowman Gray Stadium, which was upfitted by NASCAR for February’s Clash.

While the auto racing world reveled in what was happening at those two North Carolina bullrings, the folks back home at Rockingham were blowing up my phone, all with the same question: If NASCAR can go back there, why the hell can’t they come back here?!

Now, it is. And it is doing so because Lovenheim is doing what others before him did not. He has hired professionals who specialize in racetrack revivals and race publicity and either done what they tell him to do or simply got out of their way.

Illinois-based Track Enterprises is the outfit that upfit the once-seemingly doomed legendary likes of the Milwaukee Mile and the Nashville Fairgrounds. When I talked to Track Enterprises’ Robert Sargent on Tuesday, he was rolling around The Rock with his checklist, everything from affixing signs to suite doors and the final fastening of $1 million worth of SAFER barriers to the walls, to the trimming of the infield grass and painting every flat surface to be found on the 244-acre grounds. Meanwhile, the state of North Carolina has been plastered with Rock billboards. Last month at Martinsville Speedway, Michael McDowell‘s Cup car carried a livery promoting the Rockingham race weekend.

“This is what we do,” Sargent breathlessly explained, saying he’ll sleep plenty after Easter Sunday, but not much before. “We do it because we love racing, but the best part is seeing what it means to the community. Every time I turn around, there’s a new Rockingham resident standing there, asking what they can do to help. That’s how much they care.”

So, Mr. Sargent, how do you respond?

“I’ll take all the help I can get. But I also tell them the best thing they can do for us is to enjoy the race weekend. Take it all in. That’s why we are here.”

By all indications, there are plenty who are taking him up on that offer. Saturday’s Xfinity race is already being touted as a sellout with more than 26,000 tickets purchased (although they’ll find somewhere for you if you show up, trust me) and the promotional push has shifted to Friday afternoon’s Trucks race.

Now the question many are asking, back home and everywhere else for that matter, is where does that push go from here? If this Rockingham comeback weekend takes the checkered flag without any significant issues, could the Cup Series return? For a Clash? For an All-Star Race? Maybe even for a 79th points-paying event? NASCAR executive vice president Ben Kennedy, great-grandson of NASCAR founder Bill France and the man behind the sanctioning body’s willingness to try so many new and old scheduling ideas in recent seasons, has recently hinted that this weekend might very well be an audition for the old oval on the side of U.S. 1.

It was on April 23, 1965, that Bryan Land’s grandfather and Harold Brasington announced they would host their first NASCAR event later that fall. Almost 60 years to the day, their track will be busy once again.

“It’s hard not to think about the possibilities for the future,” Land said as he was about to head back out once again to check on the track. “But right now I think we all are just excited to see racing at The Rock this weekend. I think everyone is. Because we weren’t sure it was going to happen again. We’ve been here before. But this time …”

It feels different?

“Yes, sir. And that feels good.”

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Sports

Former NASCAR star Stewart, 53, wins in NHRA

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24 mins ago

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April 18, 2025

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Former NASCAR star Stewart, 53, wins in NHRA

  • ESPN News Services

Apr 14, 2025, 12:36 AM ET

LAS VEGAS — Former NASCAR star Tony Stewart won the NHRA 4-Wide Nationals on Sunday for his first career Top Fuel victory.

The 53-year-old Stewart had a winning run of 3.870 seconds at 317.42 mph at The Strip at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. He held off Antron Brown at the finish, and also beat Justin Ashley and Jasmine Salinas in the final.

“You sure as hell appreciate it more when you struggle like we did,” said Stewart, who won the NASCAR Cup Series championships as a driver in both 2002 and 2005.

“All the credit goes to this team. I’m so proud of my guys. There’s so many great partners here and I have a great team standing there. I have a feeling I’m really going to be hurting in the morning, but it sure as hell is going to be worth it.”

Austin Prock topped the Funny Car field and Dallas Glenn won in Pro Stock.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Science

Mars’ Carbonate Mystery and Ancient Atmosphere Deciphered

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24 mins ago

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April 18, 2025

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Mars’ Carbonate Mystery and Ancient Atmosphere Deciphered

The evolution of Mars and its ancient atmosphere has been a prominent research topic for scientists. NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover could potentially be the ultimate solution for the temperature and other details about the planet. As per the assumptions made by the researchers, Mars’s atmosphere was crafted with a thick layer of carbon dioxide whereas the surface comprised liquid water. Likewise, the presence of carbonate minerals on the planet would be the result of a potential reaction between water, carbon dioxide, and Martian rocks, researchers say.

Presence of Siderite Detected

Recently reported in the April paper of Science, the presence of siderite has been discovered within the sulfate-rich rocky layers of Mount Sharp on Mars. The discovery was made at three of Curiosity’s drill sites.

According to the lead author and Associate Professor at the University of Calgary, Canada, Benjamin Tutolo, “The discovery of abundant siderite in Gale Crater represents both a surprising and important breakthrough in our understanding of the geologic and atmospheric evolution of Mars”.

About the Drilling Process

To achieve an understanding of the chemical and mineral makeup at the surface of Mars, Curiosity drills three to four centimeters down into the subsurface. Further, the powdered rock samples are then dropped into the CheMin instrument. This instrument analyses the rocks and soil via X-ray diffraction. The CheMin instrument is driven by NASA’s Ames Research Centre in California’s Silicon Valley.

The data analysis of the discovery was conducted by scientists at the Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science (ARES) Division at NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Potential Findings and Atmosphere at Mars

The discovery of this carbonate mineral could potentially be hiding other minerals beneath the surface, in near-infrared satellite analysis. The possible presence of carbonates in sulfate-rich layers across Mars may result in the amount of carbon dioxide, which will be ideal to support the liquid water and create conditions warm enough to sustain water. Also, the scientists doubt the existence of other carbonates, or maybe they might have vanished from space.

To Conclude

The missions and analyses are still undergoing, and they will continue the research in the future. The findings can be confirmed post-research on the sulfate-rice area on the red planet. As the findings arrive, they will help us understand the transformation of the planet and will offer clarity on the ancient atmosphere.

Note: Curiosity is a part of NASA’s Mars Exploration Program (MEP) portfolio. It was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, managed by Caltech in Pasadena, California. The mission is successfully led by JPL on behalf of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

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