Humans

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

As someone who has clocked an unseemly amount of hours on an MMO, I’m no stranger to the guilt that can come from habitual gaming.  But the good news is there’s mounting evidence that the hobby can have a range of beneficial effects on your brain, including improved cognitive control, emotional regulation, spatial resolution of

Japan’s home prices may be rising, but the country still has more than 8 million unoccupied properties, so many that owners have started giving them away for free. In some cases, local governments are even offering subsidies for people willing to tear down homes and build new ones, according to The Japan Times. Though many

One of the best-known fossils in paleontology, a virtually complete skeleton nicknamed “Little Foot”, could actually represent an entirely new species of early human, scientists have announced. The fossil was first discovered more than 20 years ago, and after decades of careful extraction and research, an analysis of the age, skull and limbs has finally

In our never-ending quest to understand what happens to us after we die, humans have long seen the rare phenomenon of near-death experiences as providing some hints. People who’ve had a brush with death often report seeing and experiencing life-altering events on “the other side,” like a bright white light at the end of a

A new discovery has pushed the timeline of the plague in Europe back even earlier than we had previously thought. A new strain of  the Yersinia pestis bacterium has been identified in 4,900-year-old bones in a Neolithic burial site in Sweden. It’s the oldest strain ever identified, and the most basal we’ve seen – that

Every few years, a story goes viral claiming that experts have finally ‘solved’ the Bermuda Triangle mystery. Maybe it’s strange hexagonal clouds acting as “air bombs”, rogue waves, or perhaps some freak whirlpools. But there’s one problem with all of these ‘solutions’ – the Bermuda Triangle doesn’t actually exist, and there is no ‘mystery’ to

Between 2008 and 2017 in Australia, 266 people died from an animal of some sort. At first glance, you won’t find that surprising – after all, Australia is often thought of as a dangerous place. But what might surprise you is the type of animal causing most of these deaths. Is it one of the

A school in Buffalo, New York has filled a vending machine with books to get young students more interested in reading. Locking up a stack of books behind a wall of glass and then demanding payment for them may seem like a counterintuitive way to promote literacy, but in this case it appears to be

Recycling in the United States is piling up at an alarming speed and no one knows where to put it. Up until recently, that was China’s problem. For years, the US offloaded nearly 4,000 shipping containers full of recyclables on China’s shoulders every day. But China is sick of being the world’s recycling bin, and

A meteor that exploded in the air near the Dead Sea 3,700 years ago may have wiped out communities, killed tens of thousands of people, and provided the kernel of truth to an old Bible story. The area is in modern-day Jordan, in a 25 kilometre (15.5 mile) wide circular plain called Middle Ghor. Most

A cursory glance back through human history should be enough to convince anybody that our species is in love with hate. In the opinion of anthropologist R. Brian Ferguson, this doesn’t mean we have good reason to think large scale social conflict is in our genes. War isn’t in our nature, he argues. But that

In the mud of London’s Thames river, a strange skeleton that lay hidden for 500 years has finally seen the light of day. Face-down, one arm upflung, the only remnants of his clothing a pair of half-rotted, thigh-high black leather boots. It’s those boots that have archaeologists abuzz – an incredibly rare find. “It’s extremely

He may (or may not) have brought about the world’s first genetically modified human babies using CRISPR-Cas9, but He Jiankui’s shoes are probably not the most comfortable in the world right now. According to reports from Chinese media, the geneticist’s whereabouts are currently unknown. It’s been reported that he is under house arrest at the

In ancient cave art around the world, a particular motif shows up time and again: the impressions of the hands of the people who visited long ago, printed or stencilled. And yet, in some caves decorated by the Palaeolithic inhabitants of France and Spain, something curious has been observed: A very high number of those

When long-dead human remains are found buried in unusual circumstances, anthropologists are usually able to piece together why. But the bones of a child that lived just a couple of hundred years ago in Poland are proving to be a bit of a head-scratcher. In a shallow grave in Tunel Wielki Cave, located in Sąspowska

It may sound like a scene straight out of a horror movie, but statistically you are not that unlikely to end up on a date with a psychopath. It is estimated that about 1 in 100 people are psychopaths – similar to the number of people who are teachers. And while we may associate psychopaths

East Africa is famously the birthplace of humankind and the location where our ancient hominin ancestors first invented sophisticated stone tools. This technology, dating back to 2.6 million years ago, is then thought to have spread around Africa and the rest of the Old World later on. But new research, published in Science, has uncovered

Much like Egypt’s pharaohs, the emperors of China’s Western Han dynasty had a thing for being buried inside pyramids – although less recognisable than the iconic ones we know from places like Giza. Scattered along the outskirts of Xi’an along the banks of China’s Wei River, the sides of these burial mounds align with the

Why is ‘boobs’ or ‘wriggly’ more likely to get a laugh than, say, ‘taxes’? What makes some words funnier than others? Although you might not have thought about it much before, deducing the humour factor in words is a surprisingly complex process. “Nobody has really done a good job at predicting humour in advance,” University

A scene painted on a cave wall more than 15,000 thousand years ago appears to tell the simple story of a hunter collapsing before a disembowelled beast. Reading between the lines, the images might describe something bigger. Maybe even astronomical. Figures depicted in the famous prehistoric paintings at Lascaux were positioned with purpose, according to

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has been going hard on the archaeological discoveries this year, but are we tired of it? No, no we are not. Especially when they come up with spectacular finds like this one. In a tomb in the El-Assasif necropolis in the ancient city of Thebes, two wooden coffins have been

Most modern humans have a little bit of Neanderthal hiding somewhere in their genes. For years, it was assumed that this tiny dose of DNA came from a brief encounter between our ancestors and their Neanderthal neighbours thousands of years ago. But what started as a one night stand now looks more like a frequent

The deepest dive recorded by the free-diving Bajau Laut people of Southeast Asia was to an impressive 79 metres (259 feet), and the longest time spent underwater by them was just over three minutes. Although the Bajau do not dive to these depths or for this length of time during their day-to-day fishing, they spend

A lot of what we think we know about psychology might be wrong. A major research initiative, the second of its kind, tried to reconstruct 28 famous classic psychology experiments. But of those 28, only 14 of the experiments yielded the same results, according to research published Monday in the journal Advances in Methods and

A wild turkey has been causing havoc in a Rhode Island town for six months, where it has been blocking traffic, chasing people, and stopping them paying taxes. Three wild turkeys arrived in the town of Johnston in May, but one managed to evade permanent capture the entire time by deploying a number of tactics,

What’s the best way to shut down an awkward politics discussion at the Thanksgiving table before it ruins everyone’s appetite? The answer, obviously, is science. So, in preparation for the upcoming family holiday, here’s a handy list of talking points involving amazing science news you can keep ready for when you need to boldly interrupt

An American tourist was killed by arrows shot by members of the Sentinelese tribe, according to Indian police. The tribe lives an isolated existence on North Sentinel Island. It has almost no contact with the interconnected world, speaks its own language, and lives without modern technology. It’s also off limits for visitors. Dependra Pathak, the

Most people have heard of the gender pay gap, but there’s another form of gender inequity that doesn’t get nearly as much attention. Not only are women getting short-changed in the workforce, studies suggest they are also getting the short end of the stick in the bedroom. Even today, in an age where many women

For the first time, brain tissue grown in a lab has spontaneously exhibited electrical activity, and it looks startlingly similar to human brain activity. More specifically, it resembles the brain activity of premature babies. Now, the report of this startling development is yet to be peer-reviewed, but if confirmed, it could be a huge discovery