When the way that you make sense of the world around you begins to falter, it can be confusing and frustrating, to say the least. Dementia can affect the most fundamental parts of human cognition — including memory, language, and even the ability to make simple decisions like what you want for breakfast.Today, there is still no cure for the condition, but a handful of prescription medications can lessen symptoms. Another, more controversial, treatment is aromatherapy. Some research has found t ...read more

Silk is a fabric like no other. Historically, its unmatched beauty, durability, and comfort was prized by the ranks of nobility — Roman and Arabian aristocrats in particular. The rarity of the fabric made it all the more precious.For more than a thousand years, how silk was produced remained a well-guarded secret kept by ancient China, reluctant to let its monopoly go. The fabric was one of the most valued commodities that traveled westward along the vast network known as the Silk Road. In tha ...read more

As colder months roll in, energy costs typically go up. The days are shorter and may require more electricity to light homes; it's also colder and energy is needed to keep homes warm. However, according to energy.gov, there are a few tricks on how to save energy this winter, all while staying comfortable.1. Prevent a Draft(Credit:Lost_in_the_Midwest/Shutterstock)Strong winter winds can lead to teeth-chattering drafts inside the home from leaky windows. Windows with broken seals and cracked frame ...read more

The seed for Eben Bayer’s big idea — an idea that would eventually put him on the Forbes “30 Under 30 list” — was planted when he was just a kid growing up on a small farm in South Royalton, Vermont.Every spring, he would shovel wood chips onto the conveyor belt of a 20-foot evaporator that turned sap into maple syrup. But sometimes large, white, damp clumps would turn up in the wood chips and jam up the operation. The clumps were mycelium, the root-like threads of fungi that grow unde ...read more

Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women.The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too.A common argument is that a sexual division of la ...read more

NASA’s recently launched asteroid hunter, Psyche, is designed to give us a look at a body that could resemble depths far within the Earth, where we can never go. But one instrument tagging along for a ride is exciting scientists who specialize in a completely different field — that of space communications. Since the dawn of the Space Age, they have depended on radio waves, just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum. But scientists hope to soon expand into another part of the spectrum. Th ...read more

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has been sending images of the Red Planet home since 2006. In that time, it sent back spectacular photos of various rovers crawling across the surface, the Mars Phoenix lander parachuting towards the surface and numerous images of curious surface features that planetary geologists are keen to explain.The spacecraft’s main camera, the High-Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE), is capable of producing images with a resolution of 30 centimeters per pixel. ...read more

It’s been nearly three decades since Bill Nye the Science Guy first aired on PBS in September of 1993. In the years that followed, Nye, a former mechanical engineer and the show’s titular host, would become America’s most well-loved science teacher, educating millions of children (and plenty of adults) about basic scientific principles like biodiversity and the forces of gravity.In a recent interview with Discover, Nye reflects on more than just the series that made him famous, sharing tho ...read more

This story was originally published in our Sept/Oct 2023 issue as "Sherlock of Sleep." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.The elderly man woke up one night to find himself in a bed soaked with blood. His wife, lying next to him, was dead, stabbed with a letter opener.The man was charged with murder, though he claimed to have no memory of what had happened. The defense attorney was stumped, because there was no plausible motive for his client to have killed his wife.The ...read more

In the Pacific Ocean, between Hawaii and California, at least 79,000 metric tons of plastic has coalesced to create the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The patch, kept together by ocean currents and spanning an area of roughly 1.6 million square kilometers — about twice the size of Texas — is one of the most incriminating examples of human pollution on the planet. It’s also a huge hazard for marine life, killing up to 1 million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year via ingestion ...read more