If you can sense changes in the weather based on aches and pains in your body, you aren’t alone. Many people, especially older individuals with arthritis, claim that they can feel the weather based on the pain in their joints. While research hasn’t nailed down these weather-related pain claims, anecdotal evidence persists. How the Weather Impacts Your JointsIt’s probably why so many people want to retire where it’s warm, says Aly Cohen, a rheumatologist in Princeton, New Jersey. Cold we ...read more

What makes us human? Many answers would suffice, but in particular, our names offer an overlooked perspective on our humanity. Perhaps this is because names fall on somewhat of a nebulous side of our identity. Names aren’t etched onto our DNA, and technically, they can be abandoned or customized at the whim of their owners. But for most, a name clings until the end of life and exists beyond death. To understand how we distinguish one another with names, you would need to sift through unfathoma ...read more

Time outside with your dog in the spring, summer and fall can be lovely. Visiting your favorite downtown café on a cool spring morning, going to a favorite dog park on a clear summer evening or going on walks along a river when the leaves are changing color are all wonderful when the weather is favorable. But in much of the country, when winter rolls around, previously hospitable conditions can quickly turn chilly and dangerous for people and pups alike.Winter brings some unique challenges fo ...read more

It was 1910, or maybe 1911 or 1912, when Wilfrid Voynich, a Polish-born antiquarian, purchased a strange, medieval manuscript.Similar in size to an average paperback, at around 6 inches by 9 inches, the book burst at the seams, brimming with words and pictures of peculiar plants, strange stars, and bathing female figures. At around 232 pages, the book bore no indication of its authors and lacked the luster — and the metal leaf — seen in many manuscripts from the “illuminated” age. Increa ...read more

When high-quality images produced by generative AI first began to appear in 2022, they had an undeniable wow factor. The creative process involved little more than entering a text description and waiting for the AI system to produce a relevant image. At that time, an obvious question was when AI-generated video would catch up. Indeed, various groups have since unveiled AI systems that automatically generate video, but always with important limits to their length, the type of realistic motion the ...read more

The relationship between humans and Neanderthals has consistently been shrouded in mystery, but a collection of new studies has now solved a major piece of the puzzle. Based on analysis of ancient bone fragments, researchers shed light on early humans’ presence in northern Europe alongside Neanderthals, answering questions that have long engulfed the science community. Researchers set their sights on Ilsenhöhle, an archaeological site at the base of a castle in Ranis, Germany. An internation ...read more

Living in a city is different from our how our ancestors lived, who were in a more nature-filled environment. Only 3 percent of the world’s population lived in cities back in 1800, compared to over 50 percent today. As researchers of a 2019 study published in the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine state, our attention system was “designed for interacting with nature.”There’s no doubt there are pros and cons to city living. You step outside, and you’re closer to shops and entertainmen ...read more

The continent-spanning nature of the United States means that we have a lot of different geologic conditions. The eastern half of the country is in the (mostly) stable part of the North American plate while the western half (including Alaska) is in the much more dynamic part of the plate. However, that doesn't mean that the earthquake hazards that our cities face is only a worry for someone living in California.The latest model of potential earthquake shaking hazard for the country was recently ...read more

For newborns in the ocean, we know that baby corals billow beneath the waves before attaching to something solid; baby comb jellies burst into being in the open ocean; and baby turtles wriggle their way through the sandy shores. But there’s one ocean creature whose birthplace is strangely secretive, and that’s the great white shark.For decades, scientists struggled to determine where great white sharks gave birth. But in July 2023, two shark specialists — a filmmaker and a biologist search ...read more

Scientists hypothesize from genetic studies that, more than 65 million years ago, humans came from squirrel-like, nocturnal animals that lived in trees and weighed less than 200 grams. Up until recently, scientists also suggested that this primate ancestor was a primitive and solitary mammal that lived in the shadow of the dinosaurs. A new study published in the journal PNAS, however, sheds new light on the social organization of this prehistoric creature: namely, that most primate ancestors wer ...read more