It seems simple right, leave your keys in the key bowl on the kitchen counter and you won’t lose them? Simple? Yes. Do we keep to this routine daily? On occasion. Keys these days seem to grow a pair of legs and find themselves their own “safe spot”, and on a regular basis. According to the "Lost & Found Survey" by Pixie, 28 percent of Americans lose their key at least once a week. That’s a substantial amount of time that could be spent actually getting to work or sch ...read more

“Rockets can’t fly in space! There’s no air for the engine to burn in space! And there’s no air for the rocket to push against in space! WE’VE NEVER LEFT EARTH!” So goes the cry of people who don’t believe we landed on the Moon — at least, this is one of their claims. But it’s wrong. In spite of what they think, rockets can and do fly in a vacuum. Fuel and oxidizer mix and ignite in a combustion chamber causing a controlled explosion that is ...read more

The global footprint of fishing is even bigger than expected. But a novel monitoring tool could help put it on a more sustainable path. To satisfy our hunger, we humans catch something on the order of one trillion fish ever year — a yield that amounts to more than 90 million tons of animal flesh. We're clearly the top predator of the seas. But just how much of the oceans are being fished at an industrial scale, what are the patterns, and how are they changi ...read more

A new Lancet paper about antidepressants caused quite a stir this week. Headlines proclaimed that "It's official - antidepressants work", "Study proves anti-depressants are effective", and "Antidepressants work. Period." Wew. The truth is that while the Lancet paper is a nice piece of work, it tells us very little that we didn't already know, and it has a number of limitations. The media reaction to the paper is frankly bananas, as we'll see below. Here's why the new study doesn't t ...read more

It should have been their big break. By all rights, the crown was theirs, won with years of blood, sweat and slime. Maybe, in some far-distant astral plane where justice matters, they're the rightful victors. But the history books are closed now. Palaina attenboroughi, the second snail to be named after David Attenborough in 2017, was a murmur that never became a shout. The fame, the media frenzy, the glamour shots — the spoils of victory are all too obvious. And Attenboro ...read more

Walk the remote shores of the Great Lakes, far outside the city, and you’ll find miles of sandy beaches and quiet tranquility. You’ll also find plastic straws. Pink ones, white ones, clear ones. They’re everywhere. In fact, visit any coastline around the world and you’re likely to find plastic straws. Conservation groups highlight them as one of the items most frequently collected during beach clean ups. The reason isn’t hard to grasp. Whether you order an iced co ...read more

Chemistry, Walter White once said, is the study of change. Apply the right combination of materials and heat, electricity, or light — some kind of energy — and the results can literally be explosive. In their quest to manipulate matter, scientists have explored different ways of poking molecules to see how they react. According to a paper that appeared in the journal Nature this week, they’ve found a new one, and possibly the most cartoonish one yet: using tiny anvils to liter ...read more

We're no better than monkeys when it comes to advertising. Or, perhaps it's better said that they're no better than us. In a clever study, researchers showed rhesus macaques brand logos (which were just random images to them) paired with a picture of either a high-status male monkey, a low-status male monkey, or female monkey genitals to see if they could elicit preferences in them. In short, they were trying out one of the oldest tricks in the advertising world — selling p ...read more

On January 24, University of British Columbia geneticist Dave Ng tweeted, "It's always interesting to me how kids react when they find out I'm a scientist who also does artistic things (like they can't co-exist or something). Would love to start a thread where other scientists share their artistic tendencies. #scienceartmix." Ng posted some of his own visual art and writing, and invited others to chime in. Musicians, painters, dancers and more eagerly joined the da ...read more

Given all the money spent on advertising, it’s no wonder there are stereotypes about iPhone and Android users. But are these real? Is there anything you can predict about me just from knowing whether I use an iPhone or Android (and vice versa – can you predict my phone choice from my personality)? Well, according to these researchers, there really are population differences between iPhone and Android users: if I told them I used an iPhone, they would guess that I’m younger, fem ...read more