When you think of psychedelic drugs like psilocybin or lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), you might imagine an array of mind-boggling visuals. Yet psychoactive substances can be good for more than just a tremendous trip. For thousands of years, they’ve been used to treat psychological disorders and promote well-being. In fact, when taken in small doses, experts say they can even produce comparable effects to antidepressants. Called microdosing, this idea is nothing new, but it’s taken off i ...read more

An EF-4 tornado carved a path of destruction through Greenfield, Iowa, on May 21, 2024. With peak winds of 185 miles per hour, the twister's rampage through the little town is visible in this image captured by the Sentinel 2 satellite on May 25. (Credit: Modified Copernicus Sentinel data processed by Tom Yulsman)It has been quite a spring for twisters in the United States. So far this year, the preliminary tally from the Storm Prediction Center has reached 1,035 tornadoes, with 872 of them occur ...read more

Houston just can't seem to catch a break. After a band of extreme thunderstorms rampaged through on May 16, knocking out power to large parts of the city, new storms have caused continuing misery there — and, for that matter, large swaths of the Lone Star State and beyond. On Tuesday, May 28, powerful storms pummeled Texas with high winds and baseball-sized hail, tragically causing one death. Houston was not spared: Streets were flooded for the second time in two weeks, and more than 100,000 C ...read more

The French Broad River winds through the mountains of western North Carolina, fed by dozens of mountain streams, and crosses the city of Asheville. At over 2,000 feet above sea level and more than 250 miles from the coast, it is an unlikely place to prepare for a hurricane.Yet, the remnants of several hurricanes have swept through this region over the years, sending rivers in the region raging out of their banks.When these storms hit back to back, the devastation can be enormous. In September 20 ...read more

Plato’s Theory of Forms addresses the question of how we know that an object, such as a table, is what it is, even though we may never have seen it before and even though it might look entirely different to any table we have ever seen. Plato’s answer is that a table gets its “tableness” because it partakes of the perfect Form of a table. This Form is an ideal, absolute, timeless entity that is the essence of tableness but that we cannot experience directly. In his Allegory of the Cave, P ...read more

You’ve heard of diets like the paleo diet, which claim to harken back to the foods of our ancestors, recreating the diets that we would have eaten during the Paleolithic or Stone Age. It’s a reference to eating the way we’re naturally supposed to eat, identifying the foods that are healthiest for human consumption.However, according to experts, these diets present a number of unlikely scenarios. First, early humans didn’t shop at the health foods store or choose foods that best suited th ...read more

You have probably heard of sensory deprivation tanks. A number of celebrities swear by them for relaxation, and they have steadily grown in popularity over the past few decades. They work by minimizing sensory inputs from the external world: The tank is filled with high salinity water that allows the user to float freely on the surface; the water is body temperature; earplugs are worn to reduce sound; and the tank is usually situated in a dark room or enclosed space.The potential therapeutic ben ...read more

Millions of people around the world were dazzled by the aurora borealis in mid-May — "possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras on record in the past 500 years," according to NASA.Now, the huge, still-active sunspot region responsible for the multi-day auroral displays is rotating back into view of Earth. Between about June 4 and 6, it will be in perfect alignment to affect us again, according to Ryan French, a researcher at the National Solar Observatory who investigates solar flares. ...read more

Social networks existed long before Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram. But how they formed in ancient times has sometimes stymied scientists. Now, a study in Nature Human Behaviour demonstrates that music played an important role in connecting different hunter-gatherer groups in Central Africa.Central Africa provides a rich trove of history for anthropologists to plumb. Hunter-gatherers have lived there for hundreds of thousands of years. But finding the cultural connectivity that has developed b ...read more

Six monotremes living in the same place at the same time, 100 million years ago at Lightning Ridge, NSw. Clockwise from lower left: Opalios splendens, a newly described species dubbed an ‘echidnapus’; Stirtodon elizabethae, the largest monotreme of the time; Kollikodon ritchiei, with hot-cross-bun shaped molars; Steropodon galmani, now known from additional opalised fossils; Parvopalus clytiei, the smallest monotreme of the time; and Dharragarra aurora, the earliest known species of platypus ...read more