There’s a planet 140 light years from Earth that is rapidly disappearing right before astronomers’ eyes. An immense amount of intense heat is to blame.Although the planet is about the size of Mercury, its orbit is about 20 times closer to its star than Mercury is to our sun. Its year passes in about 30.5 of our hours, they report in the The Astrophysical Journal Letters.Astronomers suspect the planet’s proximity has raised its temperature to about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and rendered its ...read more

David Kaplan has been working with silk for decades, molding and shaping it into scaffolds, sponges, and films. His lab, the Kaplan Lab, is strewn with the substance, stacked with cases of silk cocoons and wads of silk from around the world, all awaiting their transformation into new forms. Kaplan, a biomedical engineer at Tufts University, has studied silk since the 1990s, uncovering ways to build bodily tissues from its fibers. But centuries before Kaplan was born, healers turned to silk to so ...read more

In March 2024, a plane carrying the UK defense minister had its GPS signal jammed as it travelled close to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad on a journey between the UK and Poland. The UK government later said the plane was never in danger but that jamming incidents were not unusual in the region. Indeed, various groups have noted that GPS jamming has become common since the start of the Russian-Ukraine war. For decades, the standard backup for this kind of navigational failure has been inertia ...read more

L-tyrosine, also simply known as tyrosine, is an amino acid and a building block our bodies use to produce protein. Though our bodies make tyrosine from another amino acid called phenylalanine, it has become a popular and trendy dietary supplement due to a wide range of purported health benefits.What are L-tyrosine Supplements?Tyrosine supplements are slated with a wide range of cognitive benefits, particularly in stressful situations, as a memory aid, to help with sleep, lift moods, and boost m ...read more

For years, tales of giant squids roaming the ocean depths lived mostly in folklore and maritime legends — dismissed as mythological creatures without solid scientific backing. These elusive beings were long considered cryptids due to the lack of confirmed evidence.That started to change with mounting clues: squid beaks and body parts discovered in the stomachs of sperm whales, and occasional dead specimens snagged by deep-sea fishing vessels. These rare finds confirmed the creature’s existen ...read more

When you meet a stranger for the first time, how do you judge your potential to be friends? Is it their personality? Their style? Their smile? According to a new study in Scientific Reports, scent might have something to do with it, as smell preferences can predict whether people see each other as potential friends. “People take a lot in when they’re meeting face to face. But scent — which people are registering at some level, though probably not consciously — forecasts whether you end u ...read more

Mental health for U.S. children has declined before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic — a substantial break in a trend that has long shown this age group generally reports feelings of happiness and well-being, according to a report in the journal JAMA Pediatrics.Children under 18 years reported a slow, steady climb in anxiety and depression from 2016 to 2022. In contrast, incidents of physical health problems, such as asthma, severe headache or migraine, and heart conditions declined or ...read more

Denver, Colorado became the first U.S. city to decriminalize psilocybin — a chemical found in “magic mushrooms” — in May of 2019. Since then, usage across the U.S. has bloomed significantly. Often known for a hallucinogenic effect, many people have started using psilocybin as a mental health and pain treatment. A new study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine examines the increase in psilocybin consumption along with the benefits and risks of taking it. “We found that since 20 ...read more

Scientists have gradually shifted their stance on lucid dreams (LD) — the ability to know that you are dreaming and even controlling your fate within that dream state.Many were initially skeptical when, in the 1970s, Stanford psychophysiologist Stephen LaBerge proposed the concept. Psychologists slowly came around, conducting research and tapping into patients’ lucid dreaming capacity for therapeutic purposes.Now, a team of neuroscientists has collected and analyzed the largest known set of ...read more

In February 2025, police found actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, dead in their California home. Authorities now believe that Arakawa died from an infection. Hackman, who had dementia, appeared to have died a week later from an inability to care for himself. Hackman was one of many Americans living with memory loss. Currently, almost 7 million Americans ages 65 and older are living with dementia. The number is predicted to almost double by 2060 while the amount of available caregiv ...read more