In February 2023, the family of actor Bruce Willis made an announcement about his health. The previous year, Willis had been diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder that prevents a person from speaking or understanding speech. As his condition worsened, physicians identified Bruce Willis has frontotemporal dementia. Frontotemporal dementia is one of four main types of dementia. About 50 million people worldwide are living with dementia, and epidemiologists expect that number to triple by 2050. Ab ...read more

Yes, there is a hypothetical particle, called the tachyon, that could travel back in time. One catch: It almost certainly doesn’t exist. Time and Speed of Light Before we start talking about time travel, we first must talk about the speed of light. All objects in our universe are constrained to go no faster than the speed of light. The only particles capable of achieving light speed are massless particles, like light itself. Anything with even a tiny amount of mass will find it impossible to a ...read more

Archaeologists working in a seafront cave in Portugal have discovered the remains of various shellfish, including numerous brown crabs, where Neanderthals lived around 90,000 years ago. The finding suggests that Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab and shellfish meat. More specifically, according to the new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, the Neanderthals living on the Iberian Peninsula hunted and ate mostly larger adult crabs. This suggests Neanderthals knew larg ...read more

Exploring inside of our planet like we explore the solar system is a frontier that may be reached. The intense pressure and temperature in the Earth makes it nearly impossible to even conceive of how we could explore much of our planet with our own eyes. That doesn't mean we don't know a lot about the inner workings of Earth, but it takes some circumstantial evidence to pull it off. If we were to travel from the surface of the Earth to the very middle, we'd travel nearly 4,000 miles. Although th ...read more

Ancient tools, buried for millions of years in Kenya, may be the oldest example yet of our ancestors’ technological prowess. The tools, recently discvered on the Homa Peninsula in Lake Victoria, are now the earliest known examples of Oldowan technology — stretching its known start date back by as many as 400,000 years. The Oldowan Toolkit “[Oldowan] is a real benchmark of our technology,” says paleontologist Rick Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Nationa ...read more

The internet is awash with information on the best diets to follow — and navigating this maelstrom of tips and tricks can be daunting. One that frequently crops up in this space is the Mediterranean diet. Inspired by the foods of sun-soaked and olive-rich countries such as Spain, Greece and Italy, this traditional diet has a reputation for being both delicious and healthy. What is in the Mediterranean Diet Though the exact approach and recipes may vary, it generally consists of a lot of fruits ...read more

The record of the Neanderthals is nothing short of spectacular. Countless sites contain the traces of the individuals who were once our closest relatives, allowing archaeologists and anthropologists to recreate and reconstruct their activities throughout the millennia. And if one thing’s for certain from these reconstructions, it’s that the Neanderthals were talented toolmakers. This intriguing species made and manipulated a sophisticated set of ancient tools, including spears, scrapers and ...read more

When love is in the air, what’s happening in the brain? For many years, biologists would answer, “Oxytocin!” This small protein — just nine amino acids long — has sometimes been called “the love hormone” because it has been implicated in pair-bonding, maternal care and other positive, love-like social behaviors. But lately, neuroscientists have been revising their thinking about oxytocin. Experiments with mice and other lab animals suggest that instead of acting as a trigger for ...read more

Most of us won't go through life without the occasional episode of heartburn or acid reflux. And when acid does sting your throat or burn in your chest, you might find yourself wondering just how strong the stuff is. Read More: Stomachache? Your Gut Bacteria Might Be to Blame To find out, let’s turn to the pH scale, which measures how acidic or alkaline (basic) a solution is. The scale ranges from 0 to 14, with anything hovering around a value of 7 — like most drinking water — considered n ...read more

This story was originally published in our Mar/Apr 2023 issue. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one. In 1995, NASA was strapped for cash — and the search for life beyond Earth looked like it could be in trouble. Years of steep cuts had reduced the space agency’s five-year budget plan by just over 30 percent. Interest in exobiology — the study of the origins, evolution, and distribution of life in the universe — had been drying up for decades. After the 1976 Viking ...read more