Following a train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, just over a month ago, authorities carried out a controlled release of the toxic vinyl chloride gas into the atmosphere to prevent a massive explosion. There are now concerns about air, soil and water pollution because of the derailment.The Environmental Protection Agency said that about 20 rail cars carried hazardous materials when the train came off its tracks. While many officials have said the area is safe, residents remain wary of possib ...read more

Whether it’s a whimper when they need to pee or those classic puppy eyes when they want food, dogs have many tactics for communicating with their owners.What we may not realize, however, is the intentionality behind some of these actions.Researchers have probed this world of dog communication — which has evolved over thousands of years in domestication with humans — and are beginning to interpret their barks and ploys for attention.The Basis of a Dog BarkingWhile dog barks may seem simple ...read more

We need sleep to strengthen our memory banks, keep our moods on an even keel, flush out toxins and balance hormones in our bodies. Without it, we eventually become an agitated, delirious mess.Take the case of an espresso-drinking 18-year-old who skipped sleep during a class trip to Italy and eventually had to be hospitalized:“At some point, I tried to speak exclusively in rhyme. On another day, I renounced speech altogether. I remember telling people that circles were divine and instituting a ...read more

On October 2, 2022, four days after Hurricane Ian hit Florida, a search-and-rescue Rottweiler named Ares was walking the ravaged streets of Fort Myers when the moment came that he had been training for. Ares picked up a scent within a smashed home and raced upstairs, with his handler trailing behind, picking his way gingerly through the debris.They found a man who had been trapped inside his bathroom for two days after the ceiling caved in. Some 152 people died in Ian, one of Florida’s worst h ...read more

For years, researchers who visited the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) passed over a collection of encoded letters. Someone had misdated the letters as originating from the 1520s and mistakenly cataloged the content as pertaining to Italy.The letters, however, were encrypted in a complex code. No one actually knew what was in the letters and who wrote or received them.Then, an interdisciplinary research team studying Mary, Queen of Scots, suspected the queen wrote the letters during he ...read more

For more than two centuries, hundreds of human bones have rested (in peace) under the London home of Benjamin Franklin — one of the founding fathers of the U.S. But the secret of these bones isn’t quite as horrific as you might suspect.As it turns out, the son-in-law of Franklin’s landlady taught anatomy privately in the house, at a time when the new field of science was just taking off in England. But that doesn’t mean the bones were completely innocent: The practice of dissection wasnâ ...read more

Most know Musk as the founder of Tesla, cofounder of PayPal, and the CEO of SpaceX. And while he's done quite a bit in his lifetime in the field of science, some may ask the question if he is truly a scientist by trade? Where Did Elon Musk Go to College?Musk has a physics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and he enrolled in a graduate program in physics at Stanford University before dropping out early on. He was a coder in the early days of the internet and made vast amounts of money ...read more

What is Tulum known for? Well, anyone who’s ever heard of the place knows it as a buzzy resort, the trendier alternative to Cancun (80 miles to the north), and for the past few decades an increasingly popular (and crowded) destination for foodies, influencers and tourists in general.But the ancient Maya people were at Tulum long before it was cool. In fact, skeletal remains found in nearby cenotes and underwater cave systems indicate that the area was populated by Indigenous people 10,000 or m ...read more

Several years ago, Christian Rutz started to wonder whether he was giving his crows enough credit. Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his team were capturing wild New Caledonian crows and challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again. In one test, birds faced a log drilled with holes that contained hidden food, and could get the food out by bending a plant stem into a hook. If a bird didn’t try within 90 minutes, the res ...read more

Before area codes were introduced to the public in 1951, there were 10 million possible ways for the seven digits of a phone number to be arranged. This would have become a problem for telephone owners eventually; New York City alone had a population of almost 7.9 million that same year.Yet with the rollout of three additional digits at the front of every phone number, suddenly the total number of possible combinations jumped from 10 million to a whopping 10 billion. Crisis averted, right?Maybe ...read more