The Secret History of the Vikings
New DNA-driven research reveals untold stories—and stirs controversy. ...read more
Author: Vishay Singh
No Easy Fix
A 40-year-old woman transforms her life after weight-loss surgery, only to see the pounds return and her life spiral downward. ...read more
Taking a Dim View
Astronomers learned to see beyond the Milky Way's glare into a hidden realm of faint galaxies. ...read more
The Beetle, the Bird and the Tamarisk Tree
Ecologists seek balance as one non-native species eradicates another. ...read more
The American South's Deadly Diet
To test his diet theory, Goldberger supplied what he called “a diet such as that enjoyed by well-to-do people” — meat, milk and vegetables — to two Mississippi orphanages and an asylum. Pellagra rates there plummeted. His next quest: to induce pellagra in healthy subjects. In 1915, with pardons in hand from Mississippi’s progressive governor, Goldberger recruited 12 healthy volunteers at the Rankin State Prison Farm to eat the three Ms diet. Within the six-month tri ...read more
Man’s Chronic Pain Disappears After Vigorous, Cold-Water Swim
Those polar plunge nuts—you know, the people who strip to their skivvies in February and jump into freezing water—might be on to something. According to doctors from the United Kingdom, a 28-year-old man who had been complaining of persistent, post-operative pain was cured after jumping into incredibly cold water for a vigorous 60-second, intense swim. Roughly two months prior to his swim, the man had undergone an endoscopic thoracic sympathectomy procedure to treat his severe facia ...read more
Ford’s Robot Police Car Is No RoboCop
Before the RoboCop future arrives, a robot police car that pulls over speeding vehicles and issues tickets or warnings on its own could someday help ease a shortage of human officers at police departments across the United States. But the vision of a self-driving police vehicle described in a Ford patent also raises many questions about whether such technology is the right tool for law enforcement. The basic Ford patent description makes clear that this self-d ...read more
Huntington’s Disease Reveals a New Weapon to Fight Cancer
Scientists have found a silver lining to Huntington’s disease. The malady causes nerve cells in the brain to break down; there is no cure. But if there’s one redeeming quality to this fatal genetic illness it’s this: Medical data has shown that people with Huntington’s are 80 percent less likely to develop cancer than the general population. But why? Building off of previous experiments and related studies conducted over several years, Marcus Peter and his colleagues at ...read more
Does this giant blob of warm water moving deep within the Pacific Ocean herald the end of La Niña?
La Niña is still with us and influencing drought and other weather patterns in the United States and elsewhere. But check out the animation above. That large mass of warm water coursing through the depths of the Pacific Ocean may signal that by this spring, La Nada will be with us. The warm blob and other signs have prompted the Climate Prediction Center to peg the odds of La Niña fading to neutral conditions at 55 percent during the March through May season. La ...read more
That Time Apollo Astronauts Detonated Explosives on the Moon
Apollo astronauts did a lot when they made it to the moon in the 1960s and 70s. They drove cars, they hit golf balls, they planted flags, they ran experiments and they launched mortars ... wait, what? Yes, those NASA astronaut not only brought mortars and explosives to the Moon, they used them on during Apollo 16 and 17's stays on the lunar surface. However, before you think we were testing military defenses in case of alien (or Russian) incursion, these explosions were all in the name ...read more