Data Analysis Reveals Surprisingly High Number of Wordle Cheaters

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In 2021, the web-based word game, Wordle, took the world by storm. Developed by a Welsh software engineer for his family and friends, the game asks players to find a five-letter word in six guesses using color-coded clues to indicate correct letters in previous guess. The game had around ninety players in November 2021, then 300,000 by the end of the year and over two million by the second week of January 2022. By the end of that month, the game was bought by the New York Times which has continu ...read more

A Scientist Helped to Launch Ancient Human Fossils Into Space, and His Colleagues Aren’t Happy

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Two ancient human fossils belonging to Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi made a recent trip to suborbital space in a gesture that has roiled the scientific community.On Sept. 8, 2023, an A. sediba shoulder bone and a H. naledi finger bone soared into the heavens aboard a Virgin Galactic private spacecraft, alongside three commercial passengers, the third such crew in Virgin’s history. The fossils spent about 5 minutes in space while stowed inside a cigar-shaped, carbon fiber container in ...read more

Florida Malaria Cases: Why an Outbreak Returned to the U.S. This Summer

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In May 2023, a person caught malaria from a bug bite in Sarasota County, Florida. In response, the Florida Department of Public Health went to war with Anopheles, better known as the marsh mosquito.Ground teams poured insecticide into standing water. Airplanes sprayed down remote wetlands with larvae-killer. Finally, after two months, marsh mosquitoes — and new malaria cases — became scarce again.“It was a full-on assault on these mosquitoes,” says Florida Department of Public Health Pre ...read more

How Do Our Dreams Evolve As We Age?

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I still remember the nightmares I had as a kid — sometimes with vivid clarity. In one recurring dream, for example, my parent’s German Shepherd transformed into a monstrous beast with glistening fangs and glowing eyes. Yet the older I got, the more mundane my dreams became, mostly populated by normal social interactions with friends and acquaintances.It's no secret that dreams vary wildly in tone and content. What’s more, scientists have found that the different types of dream states — f ...read more

Reconsidering the Origins of Water Found on the Moon

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Here on Earth, we take from the moon countless myths, legends and mysteries. We give it, in return, a bunch of high-energy electrons from our magnetosphere’s plasma sheet. But this is not such a piddling gift, according to a new paper, which proposes that these electrons react with the moon’s surface to create water.Scientists have long presumed that the solar wind – an outpouring of particles from the sun – creates water on the moon. In doing so, it has joined impacts from icy comets an ...read more

Brain Scans Reveal That Loneliness Changes the Way We View the World

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Humans are meant to be around one another. It’s been that way for millennia. We needed each other to hunt, construct homes, procreate, care for our offspring and protect one another against the saber-toothed tigers and dire wolves that meant to harm us. We also need each other to be happy and to take up the burdens that sometimes weigh us down. All told, being a human is exceedingly difficult when life is lived alone.Research shows that socialization is so engrained in our survival that when ...read more

With a Strong El Niño Now Very Likely, What Should We Expect?

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If you've been hoping for a reprieve from extreme weather, I've got disappointing news: While there are no guarantees of what it will bring, El Niño is growing and the odds that it will peak as a strong event are stronger now than scientists believed just one month ago.According to the latest forecast, the climate phenomenon almost certainly will stick around through March of 2024. And there's now a greater than 70 percent chance that it will peak this winter as a strong episode. That's up from ...read more

From Ruins to Ancient Farming, Lidar Technology Helps Reveal Ancient Societies

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In 2022, Richard D. Hansen led a team in Guatemala’s Mirador-Calakmul Karst Basin and found Mayan structures consistently spread over a 650-square-mile area (slightly larger than modern London). They identified 964 previously unknown sites aged 1000 B.C. to A.D. 150 and 110 miles of raised causeways connecting them. While it was already known that Mayan civilization was spread throughout Central America, many assumed tropical forest settlements were an obstacle to creating complex societies. ...read more

How to Grow a Phantom Finger

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Did you know it's possible for scientists to trick your brain into thinking you have an additional appendage? A participant might stand in front of a mirror placing their left hand in such a way that the thumb doesn’t show. A researcher then strokes the non-thumb side of the left hand at the same time as stroking the side with the thumb. In the space of a few moments, the participant begins to feel as though they have a second thumb on the wrong side of their hand — even though they can clea ...read more

Who or What Made These Mysterious Stone Balls Found at Ancient Sites?

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In Stone Age sites all over the world, archaeologists have found rounded stone “spheroids” that fit in the palms of their hands. A bit too heavy for tossing around, the balls have cropped up in Africa, Asia, Europe and the Levant, the countries gathered near the eastern shore of the Mediterranean. No one knows what purpose the balls served, be it practical, personal, aesthetic or something yet unimagined.Scientists have also disagreed on whether early humans made the objects intentionally ...read more

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