Sometime in 2024, I started getting ads in my Instagram feed from a supplement company called Thesis. The ads generally featured good-looking, fashionable people telling neat, 30-second stories about how the supplements had solved their chronic procrastination, indecision, or distractibility. Many of the evangelists were identified as high-achievers in their respective fields — a Ph.D. neuroscientist, a CEO, or a surgeon.I’d be lying if I said that the ads weren’t compelling. As a digital ...read more

Tyrannosaurus rex and Megalodon didn’t live at the same time, and even more, one lived on land and the other in the ocean. But nonetheless, they both ruled their ecosystems at the very top of the food chain. But who was the fiercest of them all?To answer this question, it’s best to break down each mega-hunter. Which one was the biggest, fastest, strongest, and which one survived and thrived the longest before it went extinct?The Worlds of T. rex and MegalodonFirst, let’s look at the worlds ...read more

Park rangers at Carlsbad Caverns National Park recently posted a photo on social media of a Flaming Hot Cheetos bag dropped carelessly by a visitor. The visitor might have thought the lost snack was merely a piece of garbage someone else could have picked up. But the post explained how the food source disrupted the cave’s fragile ecology and sparked mold growth.Humans don’t always recognize how delicate caves are and that they must be approached carefully—or left alone completely. Along wi ...read more

Prehistoric peoples may have created the world’s oldest lunisolar calendar thousands of years ago to mark a calamitous comet strike, according to a new study. That conclusion is based on a new interpretation of carvings on stone pillars at the 12,000-year-old site of Göbekli Tepe in Türkiye.Martin Sweatman, a professor at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, analyzed a series of V-shaped symbols on a pillar at the site. Sweatman believes each of these shapes represents a single day, with ...read more

Hard times can sometimes bring people together. For rhesus macaques, a destructive hurricane made their group an altogether friendlier place and helped increase individual survival year over year.“It’s crazy — things have changed so much since the hurricane,” says Camille Testard, an ethologist at Harvard University. “The monkeys are less aggressive — they form these larger groups and interact with monkeys they’ve never interacted with.”Rhesus macaques are native to Asia. But pri ...read more

Summer 2024 was officially the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest on record. In the United States, fierce heat waves seemed to hit somewhere almost every day.Phoenix reached 100 degrees for more than 100 days straight. The 2024 Olympic Games started in the midst of a long-running heat wave in Europe that included the three hottest days on record globally, July 21-23. August was Earth’s hottest month in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s 175-year record.Overall, the global ave ...read more

The seventh season of Julia Child’s “The French Chef,” the first of the television series to air in color, revealed how color can change the experience of food. While Child had charmed audiences in black and white, seeing “Bouillabaisse à la Marseillaise” in color helped elevate the experience from merely entertaining to mouthwatering.I am a psychologist who studies visual abilities. My work, through a serendipitous research journey into individual differences in food recognition, unc ...read more

The English word “puzzle” is unusual, according to Marcel Danesi, a professor of semiotics at the University of Toronto. Embracing everything from riddles and logical conundrums to mathematical problems and optical illusions, he notes that “it has no equivalent in any other language.”That might seem to make sense — this constellation of brainteasers doesn’t obviously share much in common. But at the most basic level, all puzzles (jigsaws, crosswords, or detective novels) have a quest ...read more

As of today, more than 5600 exoplanets, planets that are gravitationally bound to stars other than our sun, have been discovered. Within that catalog exists a vast array of planetary classes – small rocky worlds like our own, ocean worlds completely covered in liquid water, and gas giants that dwarf even Jupiter, among many others. Planets come in a range of sizes and compositions and are differentiated from stars primarily due to their inability to sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. So ho ...read more

Children with difficult temperaments, including personality tendencies such as irritability and having a hard time being comforted, are only slightly more likely than other children to have insecure attachment relationships with one or both of their parents, according to our research. This finding refutes the long-standing notion held by many psychologists that early attachment behaviors are mainly determined by a child’s temperament.An attachment relationship reflects the child’s expectatio ...read more