(Credit: tano_d’ere/Flickr) Calorie-free, artificial sweeteners aren’t metabolized in the body—they go in, and they come out unscathed. With that in mind, take a moment to metabolize the title of a new study: “Sweetened Swimming Pools and Hot Tubs.” Indeed, in a study published Wednesday in Environmental Science & Technology Letters, researchers describe a new test that measures levels of acesulfame-K, a widely consumed artificial swee ...read more

Australian wildlife officials tested small drones as a possible way to drop poisoned cat bait on Christmas Island. Credit: Department of Parks and Wildlife, Western Australia In the land down under, feral cats slaughter an estimated 75 million native animals each day. That threat to biodiversity prompted the Australian government to declare it would kill 2 million feral cats over five years starting in 2015. As part of that campaign, officials plan to enlist a drone air force ca ...read more

A reconstruction of Anchiornus, based on the new data. (Credit: Julius T. Csotonyi) Firing lasers at fossils continues to be a winning strategy for paleontologists. The new technique brings hidden details in fossils to the forefront, including remnants of soft tissue invisible to the naked eye. And a team of researchers from China is using the laser-assisted images to help piece together the evolutionary process that turned dinosaurs into the birds we know today. In a paper published Tues ...read more

Humans have been fighting our internal clocks ever since we invented sitting around a campfire. We have powerful natural rhythms that keep us on a 24-hour cycle; if you’ve ever been steamrollered by jet lag after an intercontinental flight, you know how powerful those rhythms are. But we muffle them with caffeine, alarm clocks, and electric lights. It’s easy to undo the damage, though. One weekend of camping can do the trick—and it’ll even cure y ...read more

Which microbes could be helping this mountain gorilla digest its food? (Image: Jeffrey Marlow) Over the last few years, the range of known organisms living in the human gut – that complex milieu of microbes known as the microbiome – has expanded dramatically. They influence your health, your appearance, and your behavior in largely unknown ways, and yet, despite the thousands of studies that have been published on the subject, the microbiome census may be woefully incomplete. Most ...read more

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Who are you more likely to find striking a sexy pose on the cover of a magazine: Gus or Tanner? Sophia or Bertha? It’s a silly question given all we’re working with is names, but names are powerful social tags that influence how people interact with and perceive each other—for good or for bad. A name reflects race, age, religion and nationality. A name affects the number of callbacks jobseekers receive from employers. A name can influence expectations set by a child&rsquo ...read more

(Credit: pathdoc/Shutterstock) Chased fanatically but realized rarely, a truly viral story seems to happen purely by chance — a fortuitous alignment of trending topic, clever headline, compelling copy and maybe a witty GIF. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania has built a model for “virality” by identifying neural mechanisms at work when people decide to share an article or not. In two studies, of 41 and 39 people each, they used fMRI to monitor ...read more

Many island nations have deep water within an hour’s boat ride from shore; here, a view of Gatokae Island in the Solomon Islands is taken over water that is at least 1000 meters deep and known to be volcanically active. (Image: Alex DeCiccio) Most countries on Earth have no way to access vast portions of their sovereign territory. In a time when you can read street signs half a world a way on Google Earth, this fact may seem surprising, but these unreachable territories all have one thin ...read more

Last week, I wrote about a social psychology paper which was retracted after the data turned out to be fraudulent. The sole author on that paper, William Hart, blamed an unnamed graduate student for the misconduct. Now, more details have emerged about the case. On Tuesday, psychologist Rolf Zwaan blogged about how he was the one who first discovered a problem with Hart’s data, in relation to a different paper. Back in 2015, Zwaan had co-authored a paper reporting a failure to replicate a 2 ...read more