Though proving to be a daydream tool for many industries, ChatGPT is quickly becoming a nightmare for academia. As of January 2023, four separate research papers have cited the AI chatbot as a co-author in a research project — forcing scientific journals to scramble to update their policies and regulations addressing possible ethical problems. Read More: The Pros and Cons of Artificial Intelligence Ethical Issues The process of adding an author who made little to no contribution to a scientifi ...read more

In the modern world, it’s easy to take for granted some specialists and structures that keep us healthy or safe on the daily: sanitation workers and pharmacists, bridge beams and highway paint, even fungi and maggots (and soon their secretions?) — to name a few. Most of us could add environmental scientists to that list. Whether or not you have met an environmental scientist in the flesh, it’s a solid bet that their work has shaped your life, often for the better. This can apply to daily p ...read more

The cold freshwater in Lake Huron kept the sunken ship Ironton intact for over a century — including all three of its masts and a lifeboat that took five lives — but also brought the ship’s destruction. The Ironton sank in September 1894 after colliding with a steamer ship named the Ohio. The sunken ship had been missing for around 120 years with only rumors of its location. Recently, researchers from the state of Michigan, the Ocean Exploration Trust and NOAA discovered the ship in what ...read more

It’s obvious to many of us — whether we’re an only child or not — that siblings are often different from each other. Judy Dunn, emeritus professor of developmental psychology at Kings College London, and Robert Plomin, professor of behavioral genetics at the same institution, were among the first scholars to start empirically questioning why this happens. Drawing from differences they noticed in Dunn’s children, over the past 30 years, they’ve tested siblings’ variations in charact ...read more

For many years, the Cave of the Malalmuerzo (“bad lunch”) near Granada, Spain, located near rocky farmland, stood open to the public. Local residents stooped under the low ceiling and wound their way through stalactites, and some made the belly-crawl to the deeper reaches of the cave and the early paintings there. They took home “some artifact […] ceramics, bits of bone, etc.,” writes a local businessman. In 1983, the first archaeologists showed up, but the souvenir-hunting continued ...read more

Technically, every single object in the universe with mass or energy emits a gravitational field, and scientists have been able to measure the gravitational field of objects far smaller than a human. General Relativity Einstein revolutionized our understanding of gravity with his magnum opus, the general theory of relativity. The theory transformed our perspective of gravity from a simple property of objects relating to their mass, to a view of the cosmos where space and time can bend, flex and ...read more

For most American workers who commute, the trip to and from the office takes nearly one full hour a day – 26 minutes each way on average, with 7.7% of workers spending two hours or more on the road. Many people think of commuting as a chore and a waste of time. However, during the remote work surge resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, several journalists curiously noted that people were – could it be? – missing their commutes. One woman told The Washington Post that even though she ...read more

Invented in China around 5,500 years ago, silk was the slipperiest, most mysterious material in the ancient world. Fashioned from the twisted threads of the cocoons of the mulberry silkworm, the fabric’s process of production was protected by the state for several thousand years. That said, the secrecy of silk manufacturing didn’t mean that the material remained restricted to China for all of antiquity. In fact, traces of the finished fabric made their way west well before the strategies of ...read more

When people think about evolution and human beings, the assumption is often made that we have stopped evolving. Once upon a time, we had to evade predators, compete with other hominid species and fight off disease. And thanks to modern society, agriculture, medicine, and technology, we've largely alleviated these physical selection pressures on our species.   Are Humans Still Evolving? Perhaps we haven't stopped after all. Broadly speaking, evolution simply means the gradual change in the gene ...read more

NASA recently announced the discovery of a new, Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone of a nearby star called TOI-700. We are two of the astronomers who led the discovery of this planet, called TOI-700 e. TOI-700 e is just over 100 light years from Earth – too far away for humans to visit – but we do know that it is similar in size to the Earth, likely rocky in composition and could potentially support life. You've probably heard about some of the many other exoplanet discoveries� ...read more