Why our brains think fake hands are part of our bodies
In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between. WE’VE ALL WONDERED how it might feel to inhabit a body that is not our...
View ArticleJapan’s government is (finally) done with floppy disks
Until 2019, the computer system that controlled the USA’s nuclear arsenal famously relied on eight-inch floppy disks, a format you probably have to be in your fifties to have ever laid eyes on. One...
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For sale: government supercomputer, heavily used
If you’ve ever wanted to own your very own supercomputer, then rejoice: the US General Services Administration is auctioning off Cheyenne, a supercomputer belonging to the National Center for...
View ArticleIs there such a thing as a smell illusion?
In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between. OUR SENSES ARE FALLIBLE. Our eyes can be fooled by everything from mirages...
View ArticleWhy what we see influences what we hear
In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between. MANY ILLUSIONS are products of mismatched sensory inputs, evoked when one...
View ArticleNeural network trained on ‘Friends’ can recognize sarcasm
Back in 2019, when AI was safely in the realm of science fiction and GPT-2 was still several months from release, a group of researchers submitted a paper to that summer’s annual meeting of the...
View ArticleYes, the moon has an atmosphere—and it’s metal as hell
When you learn about the moon in school, you’re generally taught that its gravity is insufficient to capture and retain any significant atmosphere. The moon is nonetheless surrounded by a thin,...
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Better images of black holes are coming—maybe even movies
Most of the world became aware of the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) project in 2019 with the publication of the first-ever image of a black hole: M87*, the supermassive black hole at the center of the...
View ArticleWhy do clock hands seem to slow down?
In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between. SURE, TIME FLIES flies when you’re having fun. Time also seems to stretch...
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Belugas may be jiggling their melons to communicate
Animals have evolved all sorts of weird and wonderful methods of communication—everything from mantis shrimp bouncing pulses of polarized light to one another to birds-of-paradise gallivanting around...
View ArticleScotland suddenly has a lot of mosquitoes
As the global temperature rises, so too does the range of tropical concerns. One of the most prominent examples of this is the increasing presence in temperate zones of vector-borne diseases once...
View ArticleJWST discovers earliest galaxy ever observed
With every passing day, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) peers further into the depths of space—and further back in time. Its latest discovery is a galaxy designated JADES-GS-z14-10. Dating to...
View ArticleNASA’s VIPER rover won’t be going to the moon after all
Back in November 2019, NASA announced plans to send a new rover to the moon. After nearly 5 years and multiple delays, however, it seems Volatiles Investigating Polar Exploration Rover (VIPER) won’t...
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NASA data suggests there’s liquid water deep beneath Mars’ surface
One of the prerequisites for life as we know it is liquid water—and there’s direct evidence of it having once existed on Mars. However, that was billions of years ago, and today the planet’s...
View ArticleDrinking alcohol on airplanes is bad for your body
One of the few consolations of long-haul international flights is the free alcohol, right? Nope—not according to a study conducted by a group of researchers at the German Aerospace Center’s Institute...
View ArticleNew species of flying dinosaur found in Australia
Australia is famously well-served for most varieties of terrifying fauna, but at least one variety of prehistoric predator is under-represented in its fossil record: the flying carnivorous dinosaurs...
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Wave erosion may have shaped Titan’s coastlines
One of the most distinctive features of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is its geography–its surface is decorated with rivers, lakes, and seas. It’s the only other celestial body apart from Earth of...
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Mars was icy and wet billions of years ago, new study suggests
Today, Mars is cold and dry. Billions of years ago, however, there was liquid water on its surface—and scientists have long been fascinated by what the planet could have been like at that time. A new...
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How ants acts for the common good of the colony
The emergent complexity of ant societies is one of the most fascinating phenomena in the natural world: how do these tiny creatures form such intricate social networks? These networks are so nuanced...
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Newly discovered exoplanet’s orbit is like a ‘cucumber’
The gas giants in our solar system—Jupiter and Saturn, along with their ice giant cousins Uranus and Neptune—orbit far from the sun. However, that’s not the case for some of the giant planets we’ve...
View ArticleThe moon was once covered in an ocean of magma: new data supports theory
Around 4.5 billion years ago, a Mars-sized protoplanet referred to as Theia had a very bad day. Its orbit set it on a collision course with another, larger protoplanet, and the two came together with...
View ArticleScientists reexamine dopamine’s role in the placebo effect
The placebo effect can have a significant influence on treatment outcomes. While we still have a lot to learn about how and why a patient’s expectations can influence the effectiveness of medication...
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JWST detects a new exoplanet six times larger than Jupiter
In a new study published July 24 in Nature, a 19-member team of scientists from around the world report the discovery of a new supergiant exoplanet orbiting the star Eps Ind A. The planet—named Eps...
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Scientists mapped every neuron of an adult animal’s brain for the first time
Brains are bewilderingly complicated systems of connections between neurons. Mapping those connections is an important step in understanding how brains work. Scientists have recently completed the...
View ArticleThe ‘voices’ that people with schizophrenia hear could be echoes of their own...
Popular depictions of schizophrenia often focus on visual hallucinations, but auditory hallucinations are far more common. At least 70% of people with schizophrenia experience hallucinations like...
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First-of-its-kind implant detects and treats opioid overdoses
Since 1999, the opioid epidemic has killed around 645,000 people in America—a number that would no doubt be even higher were it not for naloxone, an opioid antagonist that can effectively reverse the...
View ArticleSpicy foods: The unlikely new frontier in placebo research
Our expectations can greatly influence the way we experience the world. The best-known examples of this are placebo and nocebo effects–where we expect that a treatment will or won’t work,...
View ArticleGene therapy breakthrough allows toddler born deaf to hear
A British toddler born with a genetic condition resulting in deafness can now hear in one ear thanks to a pioneering new gene therapy treatment. The case was reported at the American Society of Gene...
View ArticleBuilding blocks of life on Earth originate from a relatively small amount of...
One of the key components for the evolution of life as we know it is the presence of “volatiles”: elements and compounds that can be vaporized easily at relatively low temperatures. This means that...
View ArticleCould Ozempic and similar drugs be used to treat substance use disorders?
One of the most prominent medical developments in recent years has been the emergence of a class of drugs called glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists (GLP-1 RAs). The best known of these drugs is...
View Article‘Electro-agriculture’ may help plants grow in the dark
Plants use photosynthesis to convert carbon dioxide (CO2) into molecules that they can metabolize. However, this isn’t the only process that can generate these molecules—and a new paper, published...
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How does the visual rabbit illusion fool us so reliably?
In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between. Imagine this. You’re sitting… somewhere. You have no idea where, because...
View ArticleResearchers start to unravel the secrets of tardigrade radiation resilience
Apart from their disconcerting cuteness, tardigrades are famed for the fact that they’re nigh on indestructible. These tiny creatures are extremophiles, adapted for life in environments that would...
View ArticleVolcanoes may have existed on the moon far more recently than we thought
Today it’s dusty, crater-ridden and largely inert, but our moon has a fascinating geological history. The generally accepted theory is that it formed from a catastrophic impact between a protoplanet...
View ArticleThe good news about ‘giant viruses’ found in the Arctic Circle
“Giant viruses” sound like some sort of terrifying science fiction creation. But while some of the world’s largest viruses can certainly cause problems if they make their way into humans, others...
View ArticleUltrasonic tools could one day track wind speeds on Mars
What’s the weather like on Mars? Beyond the obvious—it’s pretty cold, mostly—this has proven a difficult question to answer. Developing a detailed understanding of Mars’ atmospheric dynamics requires...
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The mystery of cats and their love of imaginary boxes
In Head Trip, PopSci explores the relationship between our brains, our senses, and the strange things that happen in between. Any cat owner knows how much our feline friends seem to bask in the...
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Meet the ham radio enthusiasts who help keep the New York Marathon running...
By any metric, the New York Marathon is an immense production. The 50,000+ runners who are starting the race on Sunday November 3 make this the world’s largest marathon. Their route will take them...
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The perplexing puzzle of a ‘Horned Serpent’ cave painting
Somewhere in the Koesberg Mountains of South Africa, located deep in the arid Karoo region north-east of Cape Town, there’s an exquisite cave painting of a curious creature. The creature, known as the...
View Article‘Swiss army knife’ of the brain: How star-shaped cells reshape our...
How does the brain store—and access—our memories? While our understanding of the brain has (thankfully) developed greatly from the days of removing cerebral tissue to see what would happen, a precise...
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