Raise your hand if you regularly find yourself walking up a flight of stairs. What about carrying heavy bags of groceries? How about picking up your child or grandchild? Most of us would raise our hands to doing at least one of those weekly, or even daily.As people age, it can become more and more difficult to perform some physical tasks, even those that are normal activities of daily living. However, prioritizing physical fitness and health as you get older can help you go through your normal d ...read more

Genetic variants inherited from Neanderthals make modern-day people more likely to suffer pain when poked with a stick, geneticists have found.The Neanderthal variants involve three small changes to the SCN9A gene, which provides instructions for building highly important sodium channels in certain nerve cells. These protein structures permit sodium ions to flow into the cell, readying it to fire and communicate with other nerve cells.In this case, the variants seem to lower the threshold at whi ...read more

As a child in the 1890s, Ruth Benedict lived in a society that made her life challenging. A lack of understanding about hearing loss meant adults accused her of not complying with directions. And limited opportunities for women made it difficult for her widowed mother to earn a living wage.These challenges prompted Benedict to consider how society was structured to benefit people who fit certain traits and disenfranchise those outside the norm. She became one of the most influential anthropolo ...read more

No one is born with the ability to ride a skateboard, surf or even stand on their tiptoes. Unlike other mammals, human beings have no balance at birth – virtually no capacity to walk or even stand. Before that can happen, their vision, hearing, muscles, bones and brain must develop. This takes months, and for some activities, even years.Infants typically begin rolling over when they’re 6 months old. They generally start to crawl by 9 months, and stand around a year old. By 18 months old, mo ...read more

The recent announcement of the discovery of a dog-fox hybrid, the so-called “dogxim,” was strange and adorable and a little otherworldly. But scientists warn that such crossbreeds are generally evidence of nature going awry under pressures created by humans.As agriculture and other forms of human development encroach on natural areas, wild and domesticated animals (not to mention people and their automobiles) are frequently coming into close contact with each other.In the case of dogxim, the ...read more

People have been asking why space is dark despite being filled with stars for so long that this question has a special name – Olbers’ paradox.Astronomers estimate that there are about 200 billion trillion stars in the observable universe. And many of those stars are as bright or even brighter than our sun. So, why isn’t space filled with dazzling light?I am an astronomer who studies stars and planets – including those outside our solar system – and their motion in space. The study ...read more

Not everyone is a morning person. Some of us work better in the late hours than at the crack of dawn. But most jobs in our society are still geared towards the nine-to-five, forcing those who perform better at night into a schedule that doesn’t always catch them at their best.“If you are an early bird, work is perfect for you because the world revolves around your schedule,” says Sina Kianersi, an epidemiologist at Harvard Medical School. But night owls, or those who tend to stay up late a ...read more

Anyone who has a brain can’t help but be interested in the buzzy class of supplements known as nootropics. Already a $10 billion+ industry, nootropic supplements and treatments offer an almost irresistible promise: to enhance brain function and general cognition, including superior focus, sharper thinking, and better memory.For the millions of people suffering from cognitive decay (and the families who have to watch it happen), nootropics offer a kind of Hail Mary pass, a last-ditch effort to ...read more

Animals are a noisy bunch. They babble and they bleat, and they chirp and croak and coo. And it's no wonder why, since sound is one of the main mediums through which animals can communicate.Studies suggest that there are around 10,000 species of birds and around 6,000 species of mammals that possess the ability to produce sounds, not to mention the sound-makers in the reptilian and amphibian taxa, among others. For these animals, sounds are the trick to survival. They allow their makers to find ...read more

Geoscientists have a good idea of how earthquakes happen. The Earth’s crust — which is on average 22 miles deep — is broken into continental and oceanic plates that rub against one another other due to the movement of molten rock in the Earth’s mantle. Over the decades and centuries, pressure builds at the points where the tectonic plates converge, until the plates crack and the pressure is released, sending shockwaves in all directions. On the moon, however, things aren't quite the same ...read more