When you set your alarm for 6:00 a.m. this morning, you thought you’d selected an appropriate time. But maybe you stayed up a little too late, or maybe you tossed and turned a little too much. Now it’s 6:09 a.m., and you’re tempted to press the snooze button a second time.Most sleep scientists advise against pressing the snooze button after the alarm sounds on an alarm clock or a smartphone, as the sleep that snoozing provides isn’t particularly beneficial. But a new study in Scientific ...read more

Indonesia has over 100 active volcanoes, including Mount Lewotobi Laki-laki, which is currently highly active. As of May 18, 2025, officials from the Center for Volcanology and Geological Disaster Mitigation (PVMBG) have raised the alert level from 3 (alert) to level 4 (warning) — the highest alert level — as it erupted the night before. Though the eruption was small, experts are still monitoring the situation as the level 4 warning stays in effect. Learn more about what these levels indica ...read more

A team of researchers have conducted a series of experiments showing that living things emit a very weak, but detectable packets of light. The signal is at the photonic level, according to a study published in The Journal of Physical Chemistry Letters. The fact that experiments could measure this tiny amount of electromagnetic energy in both mice and plants — “in all living systems that have been examined,” according to the paper — remains notable. In order to do so, the researchers crea ...read more

Key Takeaways on ALS, or Stephen Hawking's Condition: ALS stands for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and is also known as Lou Gehrig's disease. Stephen Hawking lived with ALS for 55 years and advocated for research and helped bring awareness to the disease. ALS is fatal, and impacts a person's ability to talk, eat, walk, and breath. Progress for treatment includes a genetic treatment, Qalsody, that was approved by the Federal Drug Administration (FDA) in 2023.In 1939, Lou Gehrig, the first baseman ...read more

Bats are the only mammals that can fly (though some can glide). They have excellent hearing, navigate by echolocation, and they can eat their body weight in insects in a single night. But bats’ most impressive superpower is a remarkable tolerance to viral infections. Bats host many viruses, viruses that would sicken and even kill other mammals, without suffering serious consequences themselves (rabies is an exception). And that superpower may be related to the ability to fly, explains Cara Br ...read more

There’s something so satisfying about surprising “aha!” moments — those strange instances of insight that strike when you’re struggling with a problem and arrive at an answer suddenly, seemingly without warning. But is satisfying all that those moments are?Apparently not, as it turns out that the flashes of inspiration you feel when a solution finally bursts into your brain are much more than pleasurable. They’re also an important part of your memory-making process. Tied to surges of ...read more

When CRISPR was first introduced as a gene-editing tool in 2012, the world was in awe of all the possibilities it held — eventually earning its discoverers the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020. Now, after years of refining the technology and running clinical trials, gene-editing has taken a major leap toward personalized medicine.As Kiran Musunuru, professor of Translational Research in Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, put it in a press statement, “The promise of gene therapy that we’ ...read more

The Axial Seamount, an underwater volcano 300 miles off the coast of Oregon, U.S., is stirring and will likely erupt again in 2025. Because Axial Seamount dwells nearly 5,000 feet below the surface, its eruption will likely not impact life above. However, that doesn’t mean that life below the surface won’t be impacted.Often, when we think of volcanic eruptions, we think of the devastation they may cause. They may destroy homes, impede air traffic, change the climate, and harm wildlife. Howe ...read more

Far before modern humans ever walked the Earth, our Homo erectus ancestors made arduous journeys to the present-day islands of Southeast Asia. Fossil remnants of H. erectus have been left all across this region, and now, two newly discovered skull fragments belonging to the species have added a new angle to their story. A study published in the journal Quaternary Environments and Humans reveals that the fossil remains were found after a marine sand extraction project in the Madura Strait, a str ...read more

We consume far too many chemicals in ultra-processed food than is good for our health, according to a review article in Nature Medicine. We are unaware of many of these chemicals because they can get into food not just as ingredients, but through packaging, processing, and transporting it.The data the authors reviewed estimated that about 58 percent of all food consumed in the U.S. is ultra-processed. “That’s a lot of unhealthy food,” says Jane Muncke, a scientist with the Food Packaging F ...read more