Imagine you’re a police officer. You spot a car that’s swerving all over the road. You pull the driver over and they’re clearly intoxicated. With slurred speech, they swear that they haven’t had a drop of alcohol all day. Would you believe them?In 2024, a Belgian man was acquitted after he was cited three times for DUI within four years. Though his job at a brewery likely raised suspicions, he insisted that he hadn’t been drinking. Three doctors confirmed that he suffered from a condit ...read more

Scientists recently reconstructed a Neanderthal skull that was both flattened like a pancake and shattered into pieces. The team then also used digital technology to create a 3-D approximation of the 75,000-year-old female Neanderthal’s face. The archeologists suspect the woman’s head had been crushed — possibly by rockfall — after her death. Then layers of sediment deposited over thousands of years compacted it. The skull was about an inch thick when the archeologists found it. Reconstr ...read more

Buzzwords describing the digital dating scene are all over social media. Have you been ghosted? Is someone orbiting you? Are you being breadcrumbed? While these dating patterns may not be new, the words to describe them continue to evolve.As a psychotherapist, I see firsthand the impact these experiences can have on mental health. Given the sheer number of people using dating apps – 53% of American 18-to-29-year-olds and 37% of 30-to-49-year-olds– it’s likely you have some first- or second ...read more

If all goes well late on May 6, 2024, NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will blast off into space on Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. Launching from the Kennedy Space Center, this last crucial test for Starliner will test out the new spacecraft and take the pair to the International Space Station for about a week.Part of NASA’s commercial crew program, this long-delayed mission will represent the vehicle’s first crewed launch. If successful, it will give NASA – and in the fut ...read more

A bit of medical advice: Stay away from medieval squirrels. That’s what a study in Current Biology seems to suggest, anyway, after showing that red squirrels hosted strains of the leprosy bacteria Mycobacterium leprae in England’s Middle Ages.“In the wake of COVID-19, animal hosts are now becoming a focus of attention for understanding disease appearance and persistence,” Inskip said in a statement. “Our research shows that there is a long history of zoonotic diseases, and they have ha ...read more

The average human body expends a rough equivalent to 800 AA batteries of energy per day. But the body’s mechanical efficiency is only estimated at around 15 to 30 percent, meaning most of the energy we gain from food is released as heat.At the same time, humans are increasingly in need of a safe, reliable source of power for the growing arsenal of implantable devices that researchers are developing to improve and save lives. At present, cardiac pacemakers, implantable defibrillators, neurostim ...read more

In the latest wave of popular weight-loss treatments, several types of drugs commonly used to treat type 2 diabetes have been making headlines. Ozempic, Wegovy, Zepbound, and other diabetes medications aim to target different types of glucose receptors in the body, which helps to lower blood sugar in diabetes patients. Yet you may be more familiar with them for a different reason — these drugs can also help curb patients’ appetites by binding to these same receptors.  This discovery has u ...read more

Though they spend the vast majority of their lives in hiding, cicadas will be all the buzz this spring as they prepare to return to the surface in enormous numbers. Over the next several weeks, in the spring of 2024, billions (and possibly more than a trillion) of cicadas will emerge from the ground in what some experts are calling “cicada-geddon.” Yet while John Cooley, a biologist at the University of Connecticut, says he’s noticed apprehension about this historic co-emergence, he says ...read more

The Cascade Range is one of the most accessible spans of active volcanism on Earth. Running from southern British Columbia to northern California, many of the volcanoes are located within a day's drive from major cities like Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and San Francisco. If you've never visited a volcano, it is hard to describe what it is a like to see one in person. They're big. They are imposing. Many times they are covered with snow and ice. Sometimes they are just a big hole in the ground ...read more

For ages, humans have ridden on horses, hunted alongside dogs, and curled up with cats, big and small. Along the way, humans have also managed to make companions out of far more unusual animals — from hissing snakes to wily ferrets to even colorful, ornamental fish.Nowadays, the exotic pet market and trade — both legal and illegal — have exploded into a multi-billion dollar industry. The U.S. alone is a major consumer, with over 11 billion animals imported into the country between the year ...read more