Probiotics might not do as much for our bodies as we assume. (Credit: RomarioIen/shutterstock) Plenty of people sing the praises of probiotics. These cultures of live bacteria can come in an array of products, from foods like yogurts to dietary supplements and even skin creams. Generally, these products tend to claim they’ll boost health by tweaking your microbiome, the collection of bacteria and other microorganisms that live in and on your body. And sometimes, doctors even encourage pe ...read more

Before deciding to dig up human remains, archaeologists must first ask themselves a complicated set of questions. (Credit: Masarik/shutterstock) Banana was code for human bones, on one archaeological dig where I’ve worked. We were excavating a cemetery, several thousand years old, and had permits from the appropriate authorities. However, certain religious groups in the area had a history of protesting any destruction of burials, so we kept our work discrete. We packed excavated skeleton ...read more

This artistically enhanced image shows a Hubble Space Telescope view of the active galaxy Arp 220, which houses a feeding supermassive black hole at its center. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) Black holes are by nature difficult to study directly. Because even light cannot escape these massive objects, astronomers must turn to other methods to spot and study them. While information is lost once it crosses a black hole’s event horizon, outside that boundary, it can still escape. A recent study ...read more

This image shows V838 Mon, which exploded as a “red nova” in January 2002, suddenly becoming 600,000 times brighter than our Sun. A similar explosion was expected to occur in 2022, but the unprecedented prediction recently fell through. (Credit: NASA and The Hubble Heritage Team (AURA/STScI)) It’s time to face a hard truth. Good science is mostly about meticulously testing informed predictions. And, sadly, these predictions often fall flat. This is exactly what just happened ...read more

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A man runs sled dogs in the snow. (Credit: Danny Iacob/shutterstock) This story originally appeared in SAPIENS, an online magazine focused on anthropology. In the Siberian Arctic, the Ob River flows lazily across vast, cold stretches of tundra. In the city of Salekhard, Russia, where it meets with the Polui River, lie the remains of an ancient ritual site. Overlooking the floodplains, it is known as Ust’-Polui. It is thought to date back to 260 B.C. and to have been occupied until A.D. 1 ...read more

Brazil’s National museum burned, destroying priceless historical and scientific artifacts. (Credit: A.PAES/shutterstock) A version of this article originally appeared on The Conversation. We now know what history going up in flames looks like. On Sept. 2, the National Museum of Brazil lit up Rio de Janeiro’s night sky. Perhaps started by an errant paper hot air balloon landing on the roof or a short circuit in a laboratory, the fire gutted the historic 200-year-old building. Likely ...read more