The cicadas emerging this year have waited 17 years to resurface. Their buzzing sounds are part of their life cycle and it's going to get pretty loud. The insects will chorus and buzz as they mate and communicate, reaching up to 106 decibels, or nearly the sound of a motorcycle. The year’s double brood is a once-in-a-lifetime event because two broods of cicadas do not usually emerge at the same time. But those sensitive to sound might find the continuous buzzing uncomfortable or overwhelming. ...read more

In 1869, swindler George Hull pitched a tent in upstate New York and charged people 50 cents to step right up and view the remains of a petrified giant.The Cardiff Giant was supposedly the skeleton of an extinct human species. In reality, Hull had two sculptors carve a 10-foot-tall, realistic giant from stone. He made $56,000 (more than $1 million in today’s money) before his scam was debunked.For decades, Hull boasted he had tricked the public into believing his giant was real. But he actuall ...read more

It’s become common to read that microplastics – little bits of plastic, smaller than a pencil eraser – are turning up everywhere and in everything, including the ocean, farmland, food and human bodies. Now a new term is gaining attention: nanoplastics. These particles are even tinier than microplastics – so small that they’re invisible to the naked eye.Nanoplastics are a type of microplastic, distinguished by their extremely small size. Microplastics are usually less than 5 millimeters ...read more

If you were to draw a simple kitty on a piece of paper, maybe you would include three lines on each side of the cat’s face to signify whiskers. In reality, our feline friends typically have about 12 on each side of the face (except for say, hairless cats, or sphynx cats, who might have short, broken ones, or none at all). Cats can also have shorter whiskers on their eyebrows and the back of their wrists.We all know cats have whiskers, but do you ever wonder why and what they’re used for exac ...read more

The last pandemic was bad, but COVID-19 is only one of many infectious diseases that emerged since the turn of this century.Since 2000, the world has experienced 15 novel Ebola epidemics, the global spread of a 1918-like influenza strain and major outbreaks of three new and unusually deadly coronavirus infections: SARS, MERS and, of course, COVID-19. Every year, researchers discover two or three entirely new pathogens: the viruses, bacteria and microparasites that sicken and kill people.While so ...read more

In the summer of 2022, Luke Carpenter-Bundhoo, a researcher with the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University, wasn’t primarily searching for interesting fish species. Instead, he was investigating the effects of 2019-2020 bushfires in K’gari (formerly Fraser Island), the world’s largest sand island, which is located of Australia’s east coast, about 150 miles north of Brisbane. Although Carpenter-Bundhoo wasn’t fishing for lampreys, he managed quite a catch — an Australian ...read more

Have you ever wondered how your brain creates thoughts or why something randomly popped into your head? It may seem like magic – but actually the brain is like a supercomputer inside your head that helps you think, learn and make decisions.Imagine your brain as a busy city with lots of streets and buildings. Each part of the brain has a specific job to do, just like certain areas of a city or certain buildings serve different purposes. When you have a thought, it’s like a message traveling t ...read more

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity, is usually diagnosed during the early school years. (In order to be diagnosed with ADHD, symptoms must have begun before the age of 12.) But ADHD doesn’t always go away when you open your first 401(k). For many people, symptoms continue throughout life.Though researchers have long known that ADHD is a lifespan disorder, for many years, it was thought that about ...read more

At an auction in England in 2011, one of John Lennon’s teeth sold for just over US$31,000.How much are your teeth worth?Teeth are amazing little miracles. They light up our smiles, we use them to speak and we chew with them more than 600 times at every meal.Yet, in a society where 1 out of 5 Americans ages 75 and up live without their teeth, many people may not realize that teeth are designed to stay with us for a lifetime.I’m a dentist and an assistant professor spanning clinical dentistry ...read more

Partitioning history into multiple ages has helped us comprehend human developments and events throughout time, but what decides when one age transitions to the next? It turns out that the answer isn’t so clear-cut. Civilizations across the ancient world progressed at varying rates, complicating the task of drawing a clean divide between ages.Scholars have relied on overarching themes, though, to explain how human history changed trajectory over time. This is embodied by the three ages of preh ...read more