Some jokes are like a fine wine and age well with time; others get rather lost in translation as the centuries pass. One joke, etched in the ancient cuneiform writing of the Sumerian people, stands as the oldest recorded bar joke and dates back roughly 4,000 years. It reads: “A dog walks in a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.” Surely, this joke was hilarious in its time, but today, this nonsensical one-liner has sparked much debate and theories about why exactly it ...read more
Dementia is one of the most devastating illnesses you’re likely to get. How likely? According to the World Health Organization, 55 million people worldwide currently have some form of dementia. In the United States, perhaps as many as one in ten have dementia, while another 22 percent suffer from mild cognitive impairment. Risk increases as you age. Among those over 90 years old, the rate is 35 percent.Unfortunately, there’s no cure for dementia, and despite some encouraging news in the last ...read more
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
