It’s hardly surprising that modern languages and their respective words change over time. History and literature have demonstrated this repeatedly.Something that is less clear, however, is the degree to which a given language changes and shapes its human speakers. (It’s an important question, considering there are roughly 7,000 languages currently active on Earth.)To put it more specifically: Might native French speakers, for example, tend to think a particular way because of the language th ...read more

As the world's oceans have spiked a record-setting fever in recent weeks, scientists are trying to work out the precise causes. You can see the dramatic rise in global sea surface temperature in this unsettling graph: Since early March, the global average sea surface temperature has increased to a record high, jumping above those seen during the strong El Niño year of 2016. Also shown in this graph are SSTs from the warm El Niño years of 2002/2003, 2009/2019 and 2015, along with 2022, a relati ...read more

Researchers have dosed microscopic hydra with cannabinoids to observe their feeding habits, and in 2000, a study at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh injected THC into the spinal fluid of rats and set them loose on some chocolate cake batter. The conclusion? The active ingredient in marijuana had effectively given munchies to the THC-injected rats, which ate more greedily.Now a new study has extended the investigation to one of the best-studied organisms on the planet, Caenorhabditis elegans, ...read more

Human evolution is tightly connected to the environment and landscape of Africa, where our ancestors first emerged.According to the traditional scientific narrative, Africa was once a verdant idyll of vast forests stretching from coast to coast. In these lush habitats, around 21 million years ago, the earliest ancestors of apes and humans first evolved traits – including upright posture – that distinguished them from their monkey cousins.But then, the story went, global climates cooled and ...read more

Anyone who has tossed a log on a campfire has witnessed energy changing forms, from dead organic matter to heat.Ironically, whether you’re using a beam of light through a magnifying glass, tree branches or a splash of gasoline, your campfire’s fuel technically originated with the sun.The key difference, however, is that all these energy sources came to be through vastly different geological paths, which attaches different consequences to their use.What Are Fossil Fuels?In the case of a fossi ...read more

Researching intelligence is an extremely difficult task, even in animals alive today. In part that’s because much of the scientific jury is still out on what intelligence even is. So, estimating the smarts of any creature that is now extinct is an especially tall order. In the case of dinosaurs, combine the fact that they have been gone for tens of millions of years, and this task requires … even more brains, and speculation.Nevertheless, scholars have pursued several different methods to t ...read more

One of the most active volcanoes on Earth is Russia's Sheveluch. Over the past few decades, it has produced dozens of explosive eruptions while also building a new lava dome in the vacated remains of an even larger eruption and collapse. However, when it comes to volcano's like Sheveluch, all that work to create the dome can be ruined in a moment. A massive blast earlier in April looks to have eviscerated the Shiveluch's lava dome.The dome (see above and below) had been growing off and on since ...read more

Finland has been rated the happiest country in the world for six years straight. And many other Northern European countries like Sweden, Iceland, Denmark and Norway are also highly ranked. But the Finnish people wouldn't necessarily claim they were happy; they would say they were content — more satisfied with their lot in life.Contentment is less common in the U.S., where striving for the American dream makes us one of the most ambitious countries on Earth. So is all this striving impacting ou ...read more

The Milky Way dominates the night sky. It appears as a hazy band of light that stretches from one horizon to the other. But this side-on view hides the galaxy’s structure and prevents astronomers deciphering the shape of our home galaxy.Nevertheless, astronomers currently believe that the Milky Way is a spiral galaxy consisting of a central bulge or bar with four main spiral arms and several others branching away. Now Ye Xu at the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China, and colleagues, ...read more

It’s likely you’ve heard of malaria, HIV-AIDs and tuberculosis. These three diseases continue to have a massive impact on human health across the globe. You may not be familiar, however, with schistosomiasis, Chagas disease, leishmaniasis or trachoma, which fall under the umbrella of “neglected tropical diseases” (or NTDs for short).What Are Neglected Tropical Diseases?NTDs comprise a range of illnesses mostly caused by viruses, fungi, bacteria and parasites. Together, these include at l ...read more