Imagine an apple. Do you see boxes full of colorful apples on display at a market? Or an orchard full of apples, some strewn around the ground? For some people, it’s easy to come up with these images. But for others with the neurological condition called aphantasia, they simply cannot produce an image of the apple in their mind at all.Aphantasia is a different mechanism and strategy of dealing with everyday tasks, as Joel Pearson, professor of cognitive neuroscience, and founder and director o ...read more

As foods like Avocado toast, acai bowls, cauliflower rice and kombucha become trendy, we see them more and more. We might start to notice them on restaurant menus and then suddenly, we can't escape them in the grocery store. But why do certain foods become trendy and other equally healthy or delicious foods never make the cut?What's the Difference Between a Food Fad and a Food Trend?You may remember the viral video on TikTok of feta pasta a few years back. It was a simple recipe made with cher ...read more

The gas chromatograph, a ubiquitous scientific instrument used to separate and analyze different gasses, could learn a great deal from the cat’s nose, a new study says. As the first detailed study of the feline sniffer, it reveals a dual-channel system in the nose that the instrument could perhaps replicate.“We know so much about vision and hearing, but not so much about the nose. This work could lead to more understanding of the evolutionary pathways behind different nose structures, and th ...read more

Sea turtles are a staple to the ocean ecosystem. They can be found worldwide and play distinct roles in their environment. Sea turtles can live long lives and migrate great distances. They’ve even outlived the dinosaurs. Unfortunately, however, as long as their lives may be, all seven sea turtle species are threatened or endangered. Between predation and human activity, sea turtles often find themselves in distressing situations. Here are why sea turtles are in danger and how you can help the ...read more

Cotard’s syndrome, or Cotard’s delusion as it is often called, is a rare neuropsychiatric disorder in which a person believes they are dead, that they do not even exist, or sometimes that the world itself does not exist.The condition was described in 1880 by Jules Cotard, a French neurologist and psychiatrist. In a presentation to the Société Médico-Psychologique, Cotard reported the case of a 43-year-old patient who believed she had “no brain, nerves, chest or entrails, and was just ...read more

A new paper claims to have solved a long-outstanding mystery in neuroscience – how, exactly, do the cells of people with Huntington’s disease produce damaging amyloid proteins from other proteins in a game of maladaptive Lego?Amyloids accumulate in nerve cells, forming plaques that result in cell death and contribute to the progressive symptoms of Huntington’s. The disease that killed Woody Guthrie causes changes in mental state and problems with moving, speaking and breathing.The new rese ...read more

Yes, Einstein wrote something along the lines of “time is an illusion.” But it’s not altogether clear what Einstein meant — and to understand what he might have been saying, we must dig into the circumstances that caused him to write it.A Stubbornly Persistent IllusionA close friend of Einstein’s, Michele Besso, passed away in 1955. Only a month before his own death, Einstein wrote to Besso’s grieving family.His letter said, “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahe ...read more

Tunicates, strange tube-like creatures in various colors, shapes and sizes, are found on ship hulls, larger seashells, pier pilings, seafloors and the backs of enormous crabs in oceans worldwide. Their basic shape is a short, barrel-like sack with two siphons or openings that filter feed water from one siphon for plankton before shooting it back through the other. About 3,000 species of tunicates worldwide reside in saltwater habitats. Despite this, there were no solid records of them in rock de ...read more

Between 1909 and 1913, a field expedition led by Berlin’s Natural History Museum dug a whopping 230 tons of late-Jurassic fossils out of Tanzania’s Tendaguru formation. While nearly 95 percent of the total fossil haul has been prepared and many specimens are on display in museums today, 46 original transport cases and crates from the expedition remained stowed away and unpacked for decades in museum storage. Now 100 years later, the cases themselves are historical artifacts. To peer inside t ...read more

Every three to four months, Mercury appears to travel backward across the sky and the internet becomes ablaze with worries about the mayhem that a Mercury retrograde has in store for us. Brands have even jumped on the bandwagon, offering Mercury retrograde merch, deals and sales.To astrologists, this planet’s vocation is communication and tech; according to Roman mythology, Mercury was the god of messages. Therefore, a Mercury in retrograde is often associated with a range of misfortunes and m ...read more