Humans aren’t the only species that dabble in the occasional drink. From fruit flies to elephants, creatures across the animal kingdom have been observed consuming fermented foods. But what happens when our closest relatives show a taste for alcohol?Wild chimpanzees, just about as close to humans as apes get on the genetic family tree, have been captured on film eating and sharing fermented fruit, which naturally contains alcohol. The footage, taken by a research team led by the University of ...read more

Dogs aren’t just our pets. We also see them as our friends and family members. But do we get the same things out of our interactions with our dogs that we get out of our interactions with our human friends and family? Having set out to answer this question in a study in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE) in Hungary has revealed that our relationships with our dogs are a lot like our relationships with our children and our closest friends, albeit w ...read more

One of the world’s greatest mysteries is how life on Earth began. Scientists have long sought to decipher where and how prebiotic molecules — those that preceded life — emerged. A new study suggests that the answers lie somewhere out in space, based on a recreation of the conditions in interstellar clouds that likely gave our planet a biological jumpstart.The study, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicates that asteroid and comet impacts possibly ...read more

Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley have announced the discovery of a color never before seen by the human eye. Through a new study, published in Science Advances, researchers used a pulsing laser on study participants to stimulate a part of the eye. Study participants reported that after their eyes were stimulated, they saw a new shade of blue-green. Outside researchers dispute the claim, saying that more study is needed to prove that this is indeed a new color. However, re ...read more

One small dose of a psychedelic compound could help brains better adapt to changing circumstances, potentially improving treatments for those struggling with depression, PTSD, and neurodegenerative diseases, according to experiments conducted in mice. The results of the study were reported in the journal Psychedelics. "What makes this discovery particularly significant is the sustained duration of cognitive benefits following just one psychedelic dose," Omar J. Ahmed, a psychology researcher at ...read more

There’s a planet 140 light years from Earth that is rapidly disappearing right before astronomers’ eyes. An immense amount of intense heat is to blame.Although the planet is about the size of Mercury, its orbit is about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. Its year passes in about 30.5 of our hours, they report in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.Astronomers suspect the planet’s proximity has raised its temperature to about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and rendered its ...read more

David Kaplan has been working with silk for decades, molding and shaping it into scaffolds, sponges, and films. His lab, the Kaplan Lab, is strewn with the substance, stacked with cases of silk cocoons and wads of silk from around the world, all awaiting their transformation into new forms. Kaplan, a biomedical engineer at Tufts University, has studied silk since the 1990s, uncovering ways to build bodily tissues from its fibers. But centuries before Kaplan was born, healers turned to silk to so ...read more

In March 2024, a plane carrying the UK defense minister had its GPS signal jammed as it travelled close to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on a journey between the UK and Poland. The UK government later said the plane was never in danger but that jamming incidents were not unusual in the region. Indeed, various groups have noted that GPS jamming has become common since the start of the Russian-Ukraine war. For decades, the standard backup for this kind of navigational failure has been inertia ...read more

L-tyrosine, also simply known as tyrosine, is an amino acid and a building block our bodies use to produce protein. Though our bodies make tyrosine from another amino acid called phenylalanine, it has become a popular and trendy dietary supplement due to a wide range of purported health benefits.What are L-tyrosine Supplements?Tyrosine supplements are slated with a wide range of cognitive benefits, particularly in stressful situations, as a memory aid, to help with sleep, lift moods, and boost m ...read more

For years, tales of giant squids roaming the ocean depths lived mostly in folklore and maritime legends — dismissed as mythological creatures without solid scientific backing. These elusive beings were long considered cryptids due to the lack of confirmed evidence.That started to change with mounting clues: squid beaks and body parts discovered in the stomachs of sperm whales, and occasional dead specimens snagged by deep-sea fishing vessels. These rare finds confirmed the creature’s existen ...read more