An antiaircraft gun from the wreckage of the USS Lexingon, a U.S. Navy carrier that was sunk during the Battle of Coral Sea in World War II. Credit: Navigea Ltd. When the aircraft carrier USS Lexington sank beneath the surface of the Coral Sea, it represented a significant casualty of history’s first clash between carriers during World War II. 76 years later, an expedition led by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen announced that it had rediscovered wreckage from the carr ...read more

Lynne McTaggart is an author and leading alternative health proponent who was the foil for my first ever Neuroskeptic post, nearly 10 years ago. Ever since then I have occasionally been following McTaggart’s output. McTaggart is believer in things like a “Zero Point Field (ZPF), a sea of energy that reconciles mind with matter”, an opponent of vaccines, and someone who thinks that spiritual and psychological change can cure advanced cancer. Since my first post, I haven’ ...read more

Peterson before a centrifuge test. Gallaudet University Archives. In the late 1950s when NASA was a brand new agency, the list of spaceflight unknowns was significantly larger than any list of knowns. And addressing that list called for some real creativity. When it came to dealing with space sickness, NASA turned to 11 deaf men for a baseline, and these men ultimately played a significant role in getting the first astronauts off the ground. [embedded content] This specific run of tests was do ...read more

Blakea attenboroughii (Credit: Darin Penneys) Plants, they’re just like us. We begin our lives as, really, parasites. A baby may bring some joy into the world, but it’s not contributing much beyond that. It takes feeding, cleaning, protecting, teaching and money to polish a human being into something approaching societal worth. After all, David Attenborough wouldn’t have been Sir David Attenborough without Frederick and Mary.Blakea attenboroughi shares at least one thing with ...read more

You don’t need hands to be right- or left-handed. Many kinds of animals have shown a preference for using one side of their body or the other. They include apes, whales, dogs, cats, cows, toads, fish and even honeybees. Now, with data from a rather unsavory source, researchers have found evidence for “tuskedness” in elephants. Although humans aren’t alone in having handedness, we do seem to have the most extreme bias as a species. Other animals seem more evenly ...read more

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11. As for the Hope Diamond’s “curse”? Sorry, it was a made-up marketing ploy. On the topic of making things up, the first recorded attempt at synthesizing diamonds was back in 1880, when Scottish chemist J.B. Hannay heated sealed wrought-iron tubes that had been filled with a mix of oils and lithium. 12. Alas, the tubes were prone to exploding. Think of it as the first diamond boom! that was also a bust. 13. In 1955, however, labs at General Electric built on earlier research ...read more

And humans appear to have adapted those uses to their needs. At Middle Stone Age sites in South Africa, where ochre use was already complex about 100,000 years ago, different types of ochre were rubbed, ground or crumbled depending on the intended application and the individual rock’s hardness, which varies widely. One of the obstacles to resolving how and why the rocks were used is in their very nature. “Ochre use by definition is destructive,” Zipkin says. “Generally wh ...read more

(Credit: Turi et al., eLife, 7:e32399, 2018) You probably see a cylinder when you look at the illusion above. But how our brains translate two intersecting sheets of moving dots into a 3D image reveals telling differences in visual perception that could perhaps help diagnose autism spectrum disorder. It’s been shown that people with autism are better at picking out the details of complex images, at the cost of understanding what all those details mean when put together. This can mea ...read more