You have to wonder how people originally figured out how to eat some foods that are beloved today. The cassava plant is toxic if not carefully processed through multiple steps. Yogurt is basically old milk that’s been around for a while and contaminated with bacteria. And who discovered that popcorn could be a toasty, tasty treat?These kinds of food mysteries are pretty hard to solve. Archaeology depends on solid remains to figure out what happened in the past, especially for people who didn� ...read more

Medical professionals often see patients exhibiting symptoms of more than one mental condition at a time, which are called comorbidities. However, the causes of these comorbidities involve delving into the complexity of the human brain and the myriad reasons why mental health conditions arise in the first place. “Comorbidities are, unfortunately, common and a serious problem,” says Kristin Scaplen, an assistant neuroscience professor at Bryant University. “Research shows that the presence ...read more

The Bronze Age saw the creation of complex societies and complex warfare, and served as the setting of some of the world’s most famous myths. In fact, the Aegean Bronze Age was the time of Achilles and Odysseus — of the legendary Trojan Horse and Trojan War — memorialized in the works of Homer. Not so mythical were the cultures that arose around the Aegean throughout the Greek Bronze Age, between 3000 B.C.E. and 1000 B.C.E., including the Minoan civilization on Crete and the Mycenaean civi ...read more

(Credit: James St. John/Flickr, CC BY) The reconstructed skeleton of Lucy, found in Hadar, Ethiopia, in 1974, and Grace Latimer, then age 4, daughter of a research team memberIn 1974, on a survey in Hadar in the remote badlands of Ethiopia, U.S. paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson and graduate student Tom Gray found a piece of an elbow joint jutting from the dirt in a gully. It proved to be the first of 47 bones of a single individual – an early human ancestor whom Johanson nicknamed “Lucy. ...read more

The morning of January 12, 1888 was surprisingly warm in The Great Plains. The mercury rose above the freezing mark, melted ice dripped from roofs, and children left their heavy coats at home on their way to school. Across the region, people used the warm day to run errands or work outside.Thousands of people were caught unaware when a fierce blizzard suddenly transpired. Temperatures plummeted as low as negative 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and intense snow blinded those stranded outside. Hundreds of ...read more

For about 15 minutes on July 21, 1961, American astronaut Gus Grissom felt at the top of the world – and indeed he was.Grissom crewed the Liberty Bell 7 mission, a ballistic test flight that launched him through the atmosphere from a rocket. During the test, he sat inside a small capsule and reached a peak of over 100 miles up before splashing down in the Atlantic Ocean.A Navy ship, the USS Randolph, watched the successful end of the mission from a safe distance. Everything had gone according ...read more

In the urgent quest for a more sustainable global food system, livestock are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, by converting fibrous plants that people can’t eat into protein-rich meat and milk, grazing animals like cows and sheep are an important source of human food. And for many of the world’s poorest, raising a cow or two — or a few sheep or goats — can be a key source of wealth.But those benefits come with an immense environmental cost. A study in 2013 showed that globally, livesto ...read more

The language of science continually changes. Throughout the last ten years, a wide range of words and phrases have emerged from obscurity into common usage in science. These include zika, Ebola, ChatGPT and so on, words that reflect the ebb and flow of scientific research and broader events and fashions within science and society. These changes show up in the papers, reviews and articles that scientists are constantly producing. Indeed, various researchers have attempted to map the evolution of ...read more

Pilot whales have always been joined at the hip. In fact, the tendency for a group of pilot whales to follow the direction of a group leader is exactly what earned them their name. Now, these nomadic oceanic dolphins are finding themselves navigating into shallow waters, leaving them stranded on various beaches in masses. A Sudden Increase in Pilot Whale StrandingAlthough stranding of pilot whales has been occurring for millions of years, there has been an alarming increase of global mass strand ...read more

It goes by many different names: rumination, repetitive negative thinking, negative thought syndrome, spiraling thoughts. But whatever you call it, it can have damaging consequences for your mental health. The experience — let’s call it rumination — can include dwelling on past mistakes or worrying about future events or decisions you’ll have to make. While reviewing and learning from the past and preparing for the future are healthy (even necessary) mental processes, rumination is some ...read more