(Credit: Ollyy/Shutterstock) The power of our fleshy brain to control our perceptions is well established, but it’s still hard to really believe, sometimes. It’s tempting to think of ourselves as perfect observers, passively gathering data and information. But however real reality may seem, it’s just whatever our brains our feeding us. We all have various biases that, unknown to us, color how we see and interpret information. Confirmation bias is a particularly prominent ...read more

As Florence swirled toward the Carolinas today, an astronaut took some chilling photos of the hurricane They eye of Hurricane Florence, as seen from the International Space Station on Sept. 12, 2018 (Source: ESA/NASA—Alexander Gerst) “Ever stared down the gaping eye of a category 4 hurricane? It’s chilling, even from space.” So writes Alexander Gerst, a European Space Agency astronaut aboard the International Space Station who shot this stunning photo looking ...read more

A view of Seattle, one of the cities included in the study, taken by satellite. (Credit: Naeblys/Shutterstock) Scientists say they have a new way of measuring obesity — from space. Can those jokes — it doesn’t have anything to do with individuals. Instead, researchers from the University of Washington took satellite maps of various U.S. cities and trained an AI to look for features of the neighborhoods that might be relevant to health. This included things like green spa ...read more

An artist’s illustration of the proposed Mars base. (Credit: Claudio Leonardi/EPFL) The idea of building a base to colonize Mars and become an interplanetary species has seen decades of talk and not a whole lot of action, but now at least there’s plan. On September 10, researchers from the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), a Switzerland university and research center, laid out a step-by-step guide to creating a sustainable research facility on Ma ...read more

Astronaut Ricky Arnold captured this photo of Hurricane Florence from the International Space Station on September 10, 2018. (Credit: NASA) As Hurricane Florence careens toward the Atlantic coast, more than a million Carolina residents are evacuating while millions more are hunkering down with supplies. Hurricane Florence intensified incredibly rapidly this week, morphing from a tropical storm to a Category 4 hurricane in less than 48 hours. How it intensified is understood, but scientists sti ...read more

(Credit: BlurryMe/Shutterstock) In life, timing is everything. Your body’s internal clock – the circadian rhythm – regulates an enormous variety of processes: when you sleep and wake, when you’re hungry, when you’re most productive. Given its palpable effect on so much of our lives, it’s not surprising that it has an enormous impact on our health as well. Researchers have linked circadian health to the risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease and neurodegene ...read more

A pair of whooping cranes look for food at Necedah National Wildlife Refuge in Wisconsin. A new study shows that migrating birds could suffer as climate change shift the onset of spring. (Credit: critterbiz/shutterstock) Thanks to climate change, spring now comes earlier. But how much sooner the season arrives varies across the U.S. That’s according to a new study published Wednesday in the journal PLOS ONE that assessed the first appearance of leaves and flowers in nearly 500 U.S. Natio ...read more

The ochre hashtag drawing found in Blombos Cave. (Credit: Craig Foster) The hashtag is far more ancient than we think. In a South African cave, inscribed on a flake of rock, nine lines of red ochre inscribe a familiar crosshatched pattern. The find, dated to 73,000 years ago, is the oldest abstract drawing discovered to date, and it was made by ancient Homo sapiens in the area, say researchers writing Wednesday in Nature. Blombos Cave, on the country’s southern coast about ...read more