It was promising to be an uncharacteristically warm winter day in Boston. The temperature on 15 January 1919, had soared to 40 degrees Fahrenheit from 2 degrees (4 degrees Celsius from -16) earlier in the week, prompting many downtown workers to head outdoors. Shortly after noon in the city’s bustling North End, as Model T

Here’s a funny one: genetically modified food. Okay, so maybe it’s not all that funny. But people’s reactions to it certainly are. Despite numerous and huge scientific studies validating the safety and benefits of genetically modified foods (aka GM or GMO foods), people just refuse to be convinced. Should we be surprised? Perhaps not: Americans

The acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson will be forever remembered as one of the ‘fathers of DNA’. But also as something much worse. In a resurfaced controversy that further dims the shine of one of the 20th century’s most esteemed scientists, Watson – awarded the Nobel in 1962 for his role in the discovery

Dogs are said to be a human’s best friend – but they also provide an environmental conundrum to some of us. Altogether, the eating habits of our pets account for about 20 percent of the world’s meat and fish consumption, and this has an effect on a whole bunch of environmental issues, including the use

The year 2020 will be bringing us a new decade, an American presidential election, and a cruise for people who believe Earth is flat. Although details are currently thin on the ground, the cruise is being organised by the Flat Earth International Conference, and promises to be “the biggest, boldest, best adventure yet”. Well, we

We rarely portray Neanderthals, our close relatives, as telegenic. Museum exhibits give them wild tangles of hair, and Hollywood reduces them to grunting unsophisticates. Their skulls suggest broad faces, tiny chins and jutting brows. But to mock Neanderthals is to mock ourselves: Homo sapiens had lots of sex with Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthal genes supply between

I teach people how to teach math, and I’ve been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I’ve met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics. When people share their stories with me, there are common

If you need to remember something, you might do well to… draw it. According to a new study, drawing can be a more effective memory aid than writing and rewriting, simply looking at information, or using various other visualisation techniques. Older adults who take up drawing could even enhance their memory, the researchers say, providing

You may have heard of the Mona Lisa effect, or even felt her famous, haunting gaze yourself. If you’re not familiar, the idea is that the eyes in the iconic painting follow you around the room wherever you stand. A new study has found that the effect can be backed up by science – but

A tiny fragment of lapis lazuli pigment, discovered in the fossilised teeth of a medieval woman, is now challenging some of our most basic assumptions about the history of book production. Before the dawn of the 15th century, scribes and artists in Europe who wrote and illustrated religious manuscripts were often too modest to seal

We’ve barely entered the third week of the partial government shutdown in the US, and yet already, some national parks, such as iconic Joshua Tree National Park, are being forced to close due to growing trash problems. Anyone questioning the necessity of the country’s National Park Service (NPS) need only look at what’s happening at Joshua

The way infants are fed and nurtured in the first year of life could have something bizarre to do with being left- or right-handed, a new study suggests. The meta-analysis, which look at over 60,000 mother-child relationships, has now shown that left-handedness is lower among breastfed infants compared to bottle-fed infants. To be very clear,

They say death and taxes are the only two sure things in life. But before we get to the former, just what is paying the latter actually doing for you? According to political scientist Patrick Flavin, the science on how government spending affects things like public well-being and happiness is something of a mixed bag,

An archaeological dig in Suffolk, England has yielded up a Roman-era cemetery treasure: 52 beautifully preserved skeletons dating back to the 4th century. And of those skeletons, many had been decapitated, their disembodied heads placed neatly at their sides or feet for burial, or buried without bodies altogether. Only 17 skeletons had been buried normally.

Jeanne Calment died in 1997 in the southern French town in which she was born, and her death drew a flurry of attention. At 122, an age that had been certified by the Guinness World Records as well as public health researchers, she was the oldest documented person to have lived. But a Russian mathematician

Five teenage girls have died at a Polish escape room, where a fire broke out while they were celebrating a birthday. The 15-year-old girls were participating in an escape room game in Koszalin, northern Poland when a fire broke out around 5 pm local time according to the BBC. Police spokesperson Monika Kosiec said the

They were called camps, but in truth they were not camps. Most of the people who arrived at them only had a few hours left to live. Thousands did not even survive the trip, dying en route in the cramped, airless boxcars. This was Operation Reinhard: the deadliest saga of the Holocaust, in which Hitler

Police in Australia sent multiple officers to an emergency call about a man shouting death threats, but it turned out he was just trying to kill a spider. Officers visited the home on Wednesday after a passerby walking outside a house in suburban Perth heard a toddler screaming and a man shouting “Why don’t you

It’s not uncommon for New Year’s celebrations to get a little out of hand, but this year, in the Netherlands, the party got especially lit. Just as 2018 was coming to a close, an unruly bonfire in the seaside resort of Scheveningen began to spew an assembly line of firenadoes. Vuurtornado ziet er zo uit

After Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the scientific community by announcing last month that he had edited the genes of human babies, he mysteriously vanished. And now he’s been found.  The New York Times reports that guards are holding He in a guesthouse at his university, the Southern University of Science and Technology. It’s unclear whether the guards work for the Chinese government, the university,

There’s something beautiful in deciding how one’s final moments should be confined to the memory of our loved ones. Advances in technology and changing mindsets seem to have people wondering why a coffin in the ground should have to be the only option of final resting place. Residents in Washington state have a brand new

Adam and Eve might have managed it in the Bible, but scientifically speaking, would two people be enough to repopulate our world from scratch, despite the inevitable health issues associated with inbreeding and a limited gene pool?  First of all, let’s deal with the obvious problems. The first ‘new’ generation would obviously all be brothers and

The fall from grace wasn’t exactly swift, but it was stunning. Among stem cell researchers, Piero Anversa’s work trying to regrow the human heart in the 1990s and 2000s was legendary. That was then. In October, his former institutions, Harvard Medical School and its affiliate Brigham and Women’s Hospital, asked journals to retract 31 of

Start a bullet journal? Finally quit smoking? Be nicer to others? Whatever you’ve decided to achieve next year, you know all too well that you’re probably going to fail, and that list of beautiful, aspirational goals is staying unfulfilled. Sorry. For this very reason some people forgo making any resolutions altogether, so we’re here to

Each year the London-based data science company Altmetric releases a ranking of the 100 most popular research articles of the past 12 months – based on their analysis of “online activity around scholarly literature”. Instead of just looking at the number of academic citations and other stuff that researchers deem important within their own circles,

American explorer Colin O’Brady became the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unaided on December 26, when he reached the Ross Ice Shelf. The 33-year-old skied 932 miles (1,500 kilometres) across the southern continent in 54 days without getting resupplied – which required him to carry everything he’d need throughout the journey on a

Everybody loves a good optical illusion - and this recently discovered perception trick has us questioning how we see the world around us. Take a look at those lines in the image above (or you can see the full picture below if you scroll down a bit). What kind of lines do you see? Are they

1. In Australia, birds of prey deliberately start forest fires – wielding flaming sticks to do so. Indigenous people have known of these ‘firehawk raptors’ for quite some time, but now we also have scientific research describing this stunning phenomenon. 2. Here’s an update on what you learned in high school biology – this year

In 1877, a German art historian named Friedrich Klopfleisch uncovered the remains of a figure buried in a tomb of opulence around 1940 BCE. Little is known about the life and identity of this affluent Bronze Age ‘prince’. A fresh examination of the bones has now revealed at least one new piece of information –

Scientists will tell you we still don’t understand enough about loneliness, and what this emotional state might do to people. But what we do know isn’t good. Mounting evidence suggests loneliness isn’t just bad for your health, it’s potentially far worse. While scientists are still figuring out the causes and connections, a new study reveals

For many, the fantasy of Saint Nicholas gliding across the sky behind eight tiny reindeer represents the magic of childhood. To others, this jolly foreman of an Arctic elf sweatshop represents the crushing realisation that parents are jerks who perpetuated a lie – and according to early results from a new survey, parents are taking

The way that people walk in public is a source of seemingly infinite frustration. Walking too slow, stepping on someone’s heels, shouldering past without so much as a sorry; it feels like there’s always somebody out there who has zero conception of personal space or even the most basic social courtesies. But for all our complaining,

A former NASA engineer made an explosive glitter bomb meant to ward off parcel thieves after a parcel was stolen from his porch earlier this year. Mark Rober, who worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory for nine years, said in a Monday YouTube video that he spent six months building a “glitter-bomb revenge package” after

Scientists have discovered a new genetic regulator that plays a big role in determining whether a baby is born male or female, as well as whether or not their reproductive system is likely to develop differently after birth. In the standard course of events, an embryo with two X chromosomes becomes a girl, while an

Let’s say you’ve been watching a lot of trendy baking videos on YouTube, and decide to make some unicorn cupcakes for the next workplace potluck. You rush down to the cake store, grab some ‘non-toxic’ glitter, and add it liberally into the icing, without realising that what you’re buying is no more edible than pieces

A newly discovered, well-preserved tomb in Egypt has been determined to be the final resting place of a royal priest who, according to one excavation official, really loved his mom. “He mentions the name of his mother almost everywhere here,” said Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, pointing to the dozens

How many times have you sat down to watch TV or a movie, only to immediately shift your attention to your smartphone or tablet? Known as “media multitasking”, this phenomenon is so common that an estimated 178m US adults regularly use another device while watching TV. While some might assume that frequently shifting your attention

Two fire technicians have died after a generator incident occurred at one of the largest stations in Antarctica. According to the National Science Foundation (NSF), on 12 December, the two technicians were performing routine maintenance on a generator building’s fire suppression system. The generator powers a radio transmitter nearby the station. Unfortunately, the maintenance did not

Scattered among your genes like old recipes in an heirloom cookbook are DNA sequences that once helped Neanderthals survive. The codes that contributed to the construction of our extinct cousin’s ever-so-slightly elongated skulls could still be at work in some modern humans, affecting neurological development and pushing their craniums into a slightly different shape. Neanderthals

We are living on the planet of the chickens. The broiler (meat) chicken now outweighs all wild birds put together by three to one. It is the most numerous vertebrate (not just bird) species on land, with 23 billion alive at any one time. Across the world, chicken is the most commonly eaten meat. This

There’s no other way to say it: human hair is strange. Compared to most other mammals, human beings are decidedly naked, and the little fuzz that we do have is oddly patchy and quite diverse. The most obvious of our bizarre bald regions are perhaps the soles of our feet and the palms of our hands.

Last year, uptake of home DNA tests sailed into the stratosphere, giving millions of people around the world a whole new level of insight into the ways their genes work, and helping predict their genetic risk for disease. But knowledge is a dangerous thing. New research suggests this kind of genetic knowledge isn’t just informative,

On January 2, 2018, Kirstin Blaise Lobato, who was charged and convicted of murder, walked free from a Nevada prison due entirely to forensic entomology. Forensic entomologists study the insects colonizing a dead body to estimate how long they have been active on the body and infer time of death. What was so unusual in

It’s an aching feeling of deep affection that many of us can barely control. When we see an adorable creature, we must fight an overwhelming urge to squeeze that cuteness with everything we’ve got. And pinch it, and cuddle it, and maybe even bite it. This is a perfectly normal psychological tick – an oxymoron

When Karl Martin of Derbyshire, England picked up a pair of pots for £4 (US$5) at a car boot sale, all he wanted was a nice jar to put his toothbrush in. And for five years, that’s precisely what he had. Imagine his surprise when that toothbrush jar, decorated with a painted antelope, turned out

A retired professor from the UK says he might have pinpointed the location of Camelot, the legendary castle where stories claim that King Arthur held court some 1,400 years ago – if he actually existed. According to Arthurian literature expert Peter Field, Camelot used to stand at the site of an ancient Roman fort called Camulodunum in

Some of the world’s most important science is conducted in one of its most inhospitable, hostile places. But not without a cost, new research reveals. A new long-term analysis of researchers stationed in Antarctica sheds new light on a psychological phenomenon very few of us ever have to experience: a unique coping mechanism, triggered when

When you know a particular topic really well, you might say you know it like the back of your hand. But how well do you really know that hand? Or the rest of your body, for that matter? People have a tendency to share misinformation that, over time, can be misconstrued as fact. The human body