In February of 1997, a small group of friends and relatives went ice fishing on Moosehead Lake in Maine, not knowing what the day would hold for them. According to an old account by the National Weather Service, the friends set to fishing amid the snow, sleet and rain and heard a sound like “freight train cars banging together.” They later realized this to be thunder and as hail began to fall, piled their gear onto their snowmobiles, to leave.As they worked, they saw “flickers or sparkles� ...read more

The trick to a successful search for fossils is finding the proper place. After all, paleontologists rarely select their sites at random. Instead, they consider an assortment of areas — comparing the age and the accessibility of the rock — prior to picking up their trowels.Most important in their considerations is the type of stone at a prospective search site, which is almost always sedimentary rather than igneous or metamorphic. The question is, why?While the formation of sedimentary rock ...read more

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy is a new psychotherapy method used to treat people’s past trauma — or the painful symptoms caused by distressing experiences. But unlike a regular psychotherapy treatment, the healing process with EMDR is much shorter. Plus, you don’t have to talk extensively about or relive your traumatic experiences.What Is EMDR Therapy and How Does It Work?EMDR therapy is a guided process in which you move your eyes toward the therapist's fing ...read more

If you went back in time and accidentally killed one of your ancestors, what would happen to you?When it comes to hypotheticals about time travel, this is one of the most popular and compelling questions of all, well, time. And it isn’t just a plot device that science fiction writers and filmmakers use to drive a story. The so-called Grandfather Paradox has been weighed by physicists and philosophers alike for nearly a century.What Is the Grandfather Paradox?(Credit: Drawlab19/Shutterstock)Bro ...read more

“Look in a mirror,” begins You Are All Sanpaku, a health book from 1965 written by macrobiotic advocate and anti-war protestor George Ohsawa. There you see the whites of your eyes and, if you have sanpaku, a space between the iris and lower lid. This white crescent indicates “a grave state of physical and spiritual illness […] and an extraordinary susceptibility to disease, accidents and tragic death.”Having stared in their eyes (or pictures) he diagnoses many celebrities of the day, i ...read more

In the early morning hours of Sept. 19, 1910, Mary Hiller awoke inside the Chicago home she shared with her husband and four children. The gas light at the head of their stairway, which she always left running overnight, was out — so she sent her husband to investigate.Upon inspection, Clarence Hiller found an intruder: a recently paroled man named Thomas Jennings. The two struggled briefly before several gunshots rang out, leaving Hiller dead. Prior to this fatal encounter, Jennings had sexua ...read more

I frequently toss and turn at night. If a breeze whispers through the curtains, I’m up; if a car backfires, I’m wide awake. And, apparently, I’m not alone.According to a 2022 survey conducted by Gallup and the mattress retailer Casper, a third of U.S. adults reported their sleep the previous night as either fair or poor — versus good, very good or excellent. This suggests that around 85 million of us, based on 2020 Census data, aren’t getting enough shuteye.Across the internet, noise a ...read more

Everything in the fire station parking lot was bathed in a red glow. Although this is Hawaii, the air felt especially steamy and warm. Nearby, lava fountains up to 150 feet (60 meters) tall were blasting from fissures. The scene was vaguely apocalyptic, beautiful but terrifying. Kīlauea had started to erupt from the lower East Rift Zone for the first time in over 50 years, right in the middle of the Leilani Estates subdivision, pouring lava into people’s backyards. For U.S. Geological Survey ...read more

In the late 1950s, dentist and US Navy Capt. Kirk C. Hoerman, then a young man in his 30s, attempted to answer a bold question: Might the saliva of prostate cancer patients have different characteristics from that of healthy people? Could it contain traces of a disease that’s so far away from the mouth?Without wasting more of their own saliva on elaborate discussion, Hoerman and his colleagues from the department of dental research at the Naval Training Center in Great Lakes, Illinois, got d ...read more