Photo: flickr/phphoto2010 You’ve probably heard of “false confessions,” when pressure from the police and long interrogations can make someone confess to a crime they didn’t actually commit. According to this study, it’s actually not that difficult to give someone a false memory of a serious crime. Here, researchers tried to make undergraduate volunteers believe they had committed a crime when they were younger by conducting interviews in which the researchers use ...read more

For several months, my grandfather—Ralph Bianchi—has been battling stage four kidney cancer. On Monday, that battle ended when he passed peacefully in his sleep. While you can read his obituary in today's Boston Globe, a few hundred words cannot wholly capture his legacy. Ralph Bianchi was an engineer and pioneer who dedicated his career to cleaning up the messes of others.  I wrote the following post in June of 2010, when an explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oi ...read more

Time keeps marching on...backwards, at least when it comes to telling the story of human evolution and migration. The oldest human fossils found outside of Africa suggest our species may have left that continent 200,000 years ago. You may recall that 2017 was the year that the conventional timeline for human evolution and migration finally toppled thanks to overwhelming archaeological and paleogenetic evidence. Our species is much older, and left its ancestral continent of Africa much e ...read more

Last week’s sea rescue of Australian swimmers by an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is just the start of a robotics revolution. On January 18, an Australian lifeguard piloted a drone over the turbulent ocean off the far north coast of New South Wales to rescue two teens in distress. As thrilling as it was to watch a tiny drone drop a flotation device to the two struggling swimmers, the rescue was relatively easy, using proven robotic technology in an ideal, wide-open environment. #RESCUE ...read more

NASA is holding its annual Day of Remembrance today to honor the crew members of Apollo 1 and space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, as well as other NASA employees who have lost their lives while advancing space exploration. This year marks the 15th anniversary of Columbia’s last space shuttle mission, which suffered a catastrophic and fatal end. The unfortunate event shook the science community and the public, but the lessons taken away from the incident overhauled NASA’s approac ...read more

This past holiday season, you may have been one of the millions who either gave or received a home assistant like the Google Home or Amazon Echo. Voice-activated assistants are helpful, increasingly affordable, and make you feel like you’re truly living in the future. But, like, any new technology, there’s some reason to be cautious of our newest roommates. In a recent article exploring the social impact of the technology, Jennifer Yang Hui and Dymples Leong explain that much of the ...read more

By Egle Marija Ramanauskaite, Citizen Science Coordinator at EyesOnALZ December 21st, 2017, just might enter the history books as the first day a citizen science trophy was ever awarded to a school. The trophy, bestowed to 250 students for contributing to Alzheimer’s research, is now proudly displayed next to sports trophies & special achievement awards at a middle school in Boise, ID. But the story really begins back in May, 2017. By a happy coincidence, Erin Davis, a ...read more

What pairs well with chicken wings? Maybe you're thinking buffalo sauce, beer or even celery sticks, but one company wants you to finish your wings with a fun drone flight (or crash, really depends). KFC announced Tuesday that customers can get a limited edition KFO (Kentucky Fried Object), which is a DIY drone, with select orders of Smoky Grilled Wings. Sure, it’s a lovely PR stunt, but exposing people to drone tech nonetheless. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQVgmw ...read more

The world recently welcomed a pair of monkeys that were created using the same method used to clone Dolly the sheep. In a study published Wednesday in Cell, researchers successfully produced two genetically identical, long-tailed crab-eating macaques. Zhong Zhong and Hua Hua were born eight and six weeks ago, respectively, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai. It’s a technical benchmark that could have future applications in clinical research. Specie ...read more

A while back, I wrote a column for Discover analyzing your place in space: astronomers' best look yet at where you fit into the big, crazy, cosmic scheme of things. Any discussion of where you are inevitably brings up the related question of not just where you are, but where you are going. And there's no better time to think about where you are going that at the beginning of the year--right around the time when you realize that, once again, this isn't going to be the year you keep all your Jan ...read more