The first living beings on this planet were bacteria. And they haven't gone anywhere. Experts from microbiome labs and all life evolved in the presence of bacteria, and bacteria are still a part of all living things. Or as microbial ecologist María Gloria Domínguez-Bello puts it, "Bacteria are the center of all life." That means that you and I are walking communities of bacteria. We tend to think of bacteria as harmful, and some certainly are, but most are either neutral or beneficial, and man ...read more

For those struggling with alcohol use disorder, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) is often touted as the go-to option for support. With more than 123,000 groups across 180 countries worldwide, the AA model — free and open to the public — has guided people through addiction since it began in 1935. And in recent decades, a growing body of research has shown that it can be incredibly effective.     “I think it is the power of peers,” says John Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical ...read more

Our universe began with a puzzle. For 100 million years after the big bang, it expanded. Then something strange happened — this expansion suddenly accelerated and has continued to accelerate ever since. Today cosmologists think some kind of pressure must have forced this acceleration, all powered by huge amounts of energy from an unknown source. Cosmologists call it dark energy. But why this accelerating expansion occurred, and why it happened at that time, is one of the great unsolved myster ...read more

In general terms, scientists have a clear idea about what snakes eat, according to Bryan Maritz, senior lecturer at the Department of Biodiversity & Conservation Biology at the University of the Western Cape. For example, one rule of thumb is that there are no vegetarian snakes, since no species of snake eat any plant material at all, and every snake on the planet is a predator of other animals. What other animals they’re eating, though, ranges enormously depending on species, geography, t ...read more

In February 2023, the family of actor Bruce Willis made an announcement about his health. The previous year, Willis had been diagnosed with aphasia, a disorder that prevents a person from speaking or understanding speech. As his condition worsened, physicians identified Bruce Willis has frontotemporal dementia. Frontotemporal dementia is one of four main types of dementia. About 50 million people worldwide are living with dementia, and epidemiologists expect that number to triple by 2050. Ab ...read more

Yes, there is a hypothetical particle, called the tachyon, that could travel back in time. One catch: It almost certainly doesn’t exist. Time and Speed of Light Before we start talking about time travel, we first must talk about the speed of light. All objects in our universe are constrained to go no faster than the speed of light. The only particles capable of achieving light speed are massless particles, like light itself. Anything with even a tiny amount of mass will find it impossible to a ...read more

Archaeologists working in a seafront cave in Portugal have discovered the remains of various shellfish, including numerous brown crabs, where Neanderthals lived around 90,000 years ago. The finding suggests that Neanderthals were cooking and eating crab and shellfish meat. More specifically, according to the new study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, the Neanderthals living on the Iberian Peninsula hunted and ate mostly larger adult crabs. This suggests Neanderthals knew larg ...read more

Exploring inside of our planet like we explore the solar system is a frontier that may be reached. The intense pressure and temperature in the Earth makes it nearly impossible to even conceive of how we could explore much of our planet with our own eyes. That doesn't mean we don't know a lot about the inner workings of Earth, but it takes some circumstantial evidence to pull it off. If we were to travel from the surface of the Earth to the very middle, we'd travel nearly 4,000 miles. Although th ...read more

Ancient tools, buried for millions of years in Kenya, may be the oldest example yet of our ancestors’ technological prowess. The tools, recently discvered on the Homa Peninsula in Lake Victoria, are now the earliest known examples of Oldowan technology — stretching its known start date back by as many as 400,000 years. The Oldowan Toolkit “[Oldowan] is a real benchmark of our technology,” says paleontologist Rick Potts, the director of the Human Origins Program at the Smithsonian Nationa ...read more

The internet is awash with information on the best diets to follow — and navigating this maelstrom of tips and tricks can be daunting. One that frequently crops up in this space is the Mediterranean diet. Inspired by the foods of sun-soaked and olive-rich countries such as Spain, Greece and Italy, this traditional diet has a reputation for being both delicious and healthy. What is in the Mediterranean Diet Though the exact approach and recipes may vary, it generally consists of a lot of fruits ...read more