You probably have it tucked away in your medicine cabinet. Whether you're taking it to stave off the aches and pains of daily life or reduce your risk of a cardiovascular event, aspirin has been a staple for over a century. But what is it, and how does it work in the body? What is Aspirin?Spiraea (Credit:Diyana Dimitrova/Shutterstock)Aspirin is made from salicylic acid, an organic compound found in a common shrub called Spiraea. The white willow tree's bark also contains the drug's natural elem ...read more

Large language models are a type of artificial intelligence currently taking the world by storm. They include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and various others. All are trained on vast databases of written articles in which they measure the likelihood of a word appearing, given the sequence of words that appear before it. Armed with that knowledge, the AI produces responses to a given prompt by listing the most likely sequence of words that the model suggests. Computer scientists have furth ...read more

Having a son can be a costly experience for orca mothers, also known as killer whales — and it comes at the expense of having additional offspring, researchers have found. In a recent study, researchers report that male offspring from a population known as the southern residents — which are found off the Pacific coast of the U.S. — depend upon their mothers to such an extent that they reproduce less. (Daughters, however, don't appear to impact reproduction.) These adult sons impose “biol ...read more

On an afternoon in May, 1953, author Aldous Huxley drank a glass of dissolved mescaline, the main psychoactive ingredient in the peyote cactus, and found his home rather transformed. At one point, he looked at a flower arrangement he had appreciated that morning in a clear-headed state for its colors.“But that was no longer the point,” Huxley writes. “I was not looking now at an unusual flower arrangement. I was seeing what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation – the miracle, mome ...read more

In the field of economics, the sunk cost fallacy — also called the sunk cost effect — is notorious. It occurs whenever we double down on poor financial decisions based on past investments that can't be recouped.But the phenomenon isn’t relegated only to the realm of business. You may be surprised to learn that it often rears its ugly head in our relationships as well.Sunk Cost Fallacy Examples Christopher Olivola, an associate professor of marketing at Carnegie Mellon University, offers up ...read more

A 2022 attempt at creating a sweeping family tree for the human race, and at least three others, reached back 2 million years, long before Homo sapiens are believed to have originated in Africa 200,000 years ago.The study from Oxford’s Big Data Institute drew on 3,601 human genomes taken from several modern databases, eight ancient individuals and 3,589 more ancient samples derived from 100 other studies. Using specialized algorithms, the researchers fleshed out the tree further, adding limbs ...read more

This article was originally published on November 3, 2022. Ada Byron was on her best behavior when first presented to the British Royal Court — though she found the event and its attendees to be underwhelming. A few weeks later, however, the 17-year-old accompanied her mother to a mathematics lecture. That event captured her imagination and changed her life.Within the next decade, she married and became Ada King, Countess of Lovelace. But historians remember her as Ada Lovelace, a computer sci ...read more

​​Forensic science is supposed to be a scientific process. But for decades, critics have complained evidence isn’t always evaluated in a laboratory setting, and empirical studies don’t back the methods of analysis.The consequences for faulty forensic evidence have been severe. Forty-five percent of wrongful convictions that were later overturned due to DNA evidence were found to be the result of inaccurate evidence. Advocacy groups such as the Innocence Project argue that many forensic t ...read more

Maybe you became a brussels sprouts convert in your late teens. Or perhaps you were addicted to the sweet stuff — specifically, candy — as a kid, only to grow out of it later. It might have taken until adulthood for you to start craving bitter foods and drinks like sautéed kale or a martini with olives.It’s a familiar story, right? Although we all have our own unique preferences, most of us gravitate towards sweeter things and avoid bitter-tasting foods when we’re children, then develop ...read more

The class of psychotropic drugs is a big one, and you may be surprised by some of the substances included in this group. Psychotropic drugs affect your mental state, including your thoughts, perceptions, mood and behavior.When you hear the words ‘psychotropic drugs,’ what comes to mind might be something like LSD or mescaline. Those drugs fall broadly into that category. But so does caffeine. What Are Psychotropic Drugs?For the most part, when we talk about psychotropic drugs, we talk abou ...read more