“I started waking up in the middle of night with pain in my hand,” says Moon-Moon Majumdar, a medical doctor in the U.K. who has suffered from carpal tunnel for the past four years. “It’s a kind of tingling and burning sensation.”Majumdar sought medical advice and was told to wear a wrist brace at night to prevent her arm and hand from getting into positions that could aggravate the problem.Even though we haven’t seen carpal tunnel appear in the news as much lately, somewhere between ...read more

The Jezero crater has captivated scientists since its discovery in 2005. Some studies suggested that the crater was home to an ancient lake with flowing rivers that dried out between 3.5 billion years and 3.8 billion years ago. In a new study, more evidence gathered by the Perseverance Rover’s ground penetrating radar confirmed the presence of lake sediments. The find has reignited anticipation for when rock samples from Mars return to Earth in the early to mid-2030s.“From orbit we can see a ...read more

The sad eyes. The whimpering. The trouble with the water dish. Sometimes, the surgical collar prescribed for a post-op pet can seem worse than the actual wound.Researchers and clinicians call it an “Elizabethan collar” or E-collar because it resembles the fashionable fabric ruffle in Elizabethan times. Pet parents, however, know it as the “cone of shame” for how humiliated and unhappy it makes their pet.In recent years, animal behaviorists have researched the impact of E-collars on anima ...read more

Many people are wired to seek and respond to rewards. Your brain interprets food as rewarding when you are hungry and water as rewarding when you are thirsty. But addictive substances like alcohol and drugs of abuse can overwhelm the natural reward pathways in your brain, resulting in intolerable cravings and reduced impulse control.A popular misconception is that addiction is a result of low willpower. But an explosion of knowledge and technology in the field of molecular genetics has chan ...read more

An ocean away from their kindred in Africa, a group of invasive hippos roaming the Colombian wild has garnered quite the controversial reputation. The river-dwelling mammals don’t exactly belong in this environment, yet an estimated 91 of them currently inhabit the Magdalena River basin in Colombia. As the hippo’s numbers burgeon, the scramble to curtail population growth has reached a boiling point. The consequences that have arisen from the hippos’ presence, scientists warn, will only am ...read more

We live in a world full of distractions and are more stimulated than ever. As a result, attention is divided and scattered. It’s difficult to know what to pay attention to and we can easily get distracted from tasks at hand. Our culture is driven by productivity and success as determinants of happiness — a culture of "more." But sometimes, when we are chasing more, we end up having less. Because of this, a new, viral trend called ‘monk mode’ helps delegate our internal resources more eff ...read more

Lions certainly deserve their prestige as emperors of the African savanna, but they’ve recently been humbled by a tiny, pesky troublemaker: ants. A team of researchers noticed that the invasive big-headed ant species has been putting a damper on lions’ predation patterns by inadvertently assisting their main prey, zebras. Researchers led by University of Wyoming Ph.D. student Douglas Kamaru spotted this occurrence at Kenya’s Ol Pejeta Conservancy. The results, published in Science, show a ...read more

You might think that the more a robot or virtual person resembles a real human, the more comfortable we would be with them. But oddly, that’s not entirely true. As robots and virtual people get closer to being lifelike, we do tend to like them more — up to a point. A cute robot with big, round eyes and a happy smile is far more endearing than one that looks like a microwave oven on wheels.However, somewhere along the road to realism, things start to change. As robots get very close to being ...read more

Modern-day birds like the northern mockingbird and the greater roadrunner use their feathers to forage for food. When the birds flash their wings, it scares their prey into revealing their hiding spots, and once they move, the bird snatches up the snack. A team of researchers suspect that smaller dinosaurs similarly used their feathers to hunt for prey in a new study published in Scientific Reports.For decades, scientists have speculated what the feathers found on the forearms (proto-wings) of ...read more

While a lack of sleep is known in humans to decrease health, mood, and, well, libido, it might just be an essential ingredient in some animals’ sex lives. In a new paper published in Current Biology, a team uncovered the unorthodox sexual strategies of a plucky, furry creature called the antechinus.What Is an Antechinus?For the uninitiated, antechinus are a grouping of mice-like marsupials, which carry 15 equally cute species in their ranks. Like all marsupials, and unlike us placentals, their ...read more