When you enter the gym, which way should you head first? Toward the treadmills and spin studio to get your sweat on with a cardio session? Or toward the free weights and strength-training machines to do some resistance training?The American College of Sports Medicine suggests doing both types of exercise to take advantage of their unique benefits for improving health and daily functioning and reducing chronic disease risk. But what is the optimal sequence to get the best results?The answer to ...read more

Most ecologists agree that the earth is currently experiencing a mass extinction event. All over the world, living organisms are looking down the barrel of climate change, habitat destruction and exploitation. The most conservative estimates place the number of species lost per year at 10 times the “background rate” (which is calculated from when life began to now). Most extinctions go undocumented, but some are caught on the pages of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (I ...read more

The year 2023 proved to be an important one for space missions, with NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission returning a sample from an asteroid and India’s Chandrayaan-3 mission exploring the lunar south pole, and 2024 is shaping up to be another exciting year for space exploration.Several new missions under NASA’s Artemis plan and Commercial Lunar Payload Services initiative will target the Moon.The latter half of the year will feature several exciting launches, with the launch of the Martian M ...read more

In the hit dystopian TV series Severance, employees at biotech corporation Lumon Industries find it easy to separate work and home life. A computer chip is inserted in their brains to act as a “mindwipe”. They leave all thoughts of home behind while at work, and completely forget about their work when at home.While the show explores the pitfalls of such a split in consciousness, there’s no denying it’s a tantalising prospect to be able to “flick the off switch” and forget about work ...read more

One of the more expensive parts of the cameras built-in to smartphones is the lens system. That’s because lenses have to be made in an entirely different way to the electronic components that make up the rest of the phone.In recent years, physicists have hoped to change this with a new type of “metalens” that can be carved onto a flat sheet of silicon dioxide or similar material. Metalenses consists of pillars of silicon that are each about the same size as the wavelength of light. These p ...read more

Talking pets have been the darlings of social media recently. The trend started after Christina Hunger, a speech pathologist, made headlines when she adapted techniques she used with children to teach her dog, Stella, to communicate. Stella, and now hundreds of dogs and cats, use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) to “talk” with the humans in their lives. AAC takes the form of buttons affixed to a soundboard. When the pet presses a button, it plays a recording of a word, such ...read more

Just like people, dogs are susceptible to stress during the holidays. When things are hectic, dogs can be negatively impacted by the changes. Here are some situations that are potentially troubling for dogs during the holidays. But with some basic planning and care, your dog can remain happy and enjoy the holidays, along with the rest of your family.1. What are the Signs of Stress in a Dog?(Credit:Julia Zavalishina/Shutterstock) Dogs will exhibit certain behaviors when they are upset, stressed, ...read more

Whether you’ve watched the beloved animated film or walked past his statue in Central Park, there’s a good chance you’re familiar with Balto the sled dog.Long believed to be a Siberian husky, Balto — perhaps the most famous sled dog of all time — gained superstar status for his role in delivering diphtheria medication to sick children in Nome, Alaska, in 1925. Now, scientists have analyzed his DNA, comparing his genome to the genomes of nearly 700 dogs and wolves to reveal how Balto st ...read more

Often, when archaeologists dig up an artifact that's thousands of years old, it requires some imagination to picture what it might have looked like back then. That certainly wasn't the case for a team of scientists who peered into a gravesite in southern Bavaria.In 2023, archaeologists in Germany unearthed a Bronze Age grave containing a 3,000-year-old sword that’s so extraordinarily well-preserved that it "almost still shines," says Bavaria's State Office for Monument Protection in a stateme ...read more

In 1868, in a small limestone cave outside the French village of Les Eyzies, a geologist named Édouard Lartet found the first set of specimens showing that modern humans had prehistoric roots. He happened upon the discovery due to road construction and later uncovered four adult skeletons and one infant dating back to the upper Pleistocene, about 30,000 years ago.The site showed that these ancient humans were not only occupying Europe at the time but that they were somewhat sophisticated, havi ...read more