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

Archaeologists in Sweden have combined historical documents, digital excavation records, and cutting-edge 3D modelling to tell the story of what it may have been like to live with a disability in the Middle Ages.The study, published in Open Archaeology, analyzes the skeleton of a man in his thirties with a severe knee injury. By using an interdisciplinary approach, researchers were able to get a more accurate picture of the medical and cultural treatment of medieval disabled people.“Deducing s ...read more

On May 13, 2025 and May 14, 2025, the sun fired solar flares, and the radiation of those flares triggered radio black outs in some parts of the world, according to a forecast discussion from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Association (NOAA).Solar flares — sudden, intense bursts of radiation — are the result of the sun releasing energy pent-up magnetic energy. Sunspots, which are concentrated areas of such energy, are often the source of many flares.Although fascinating for astronomers to o ...read more

Coral reefs are natural wonders that don’t just mesmerize us with their colorful and diverse ecosystems — they’re also economically invaluable. Industries like aquaculture, tourism, and fisheries rely on them, amounting to a staggering US$375 billion globally each year. That means entire coastal communities depend on the health of local reefs.But reefs are in trouble. Climate change, pollution, and other human impacts are driving a rapid decline, with scientists warning that up to 90 perce ...read more

A recent study found that people with diets high in fat and sugar had worse spatial memory than those who ate these foods less often. This may not be much of a surprise. We’ve long known that unhealthy eating can contribute to the onset of cognitive decline. What may come as a surprise is that the people in this study were between the ages of 18 and 38.Do we need to start protecting our brains from cognitive decline while we’re still young? “Definitely,” says lead author of the study, Do ...read more

It’s difficult to pin the destruction of a tsunami to a tsunami — that is, unless someone was around to witness the devastation. But a new study shows that there are some surprising geological sources that scientists can consult as an archive of ancient tsunami occurrences, many millions of years after they occur. Turning to Hokkaido Island in Japan, the Scientific Reports study suggests that deposits of amber in deep-sea sediments on the island may reveal tsunamis that occurred there betwee ...read more

Solar storms batter Earth every year, creating the occasional aurora and sometimes even paralyzing power grids. But these common phenomena pale in comparison to a monstrous event that inundated the planet with particles from the Sun around 14,300 years ago, identified as the strongest solar storm ever recorded in a recent study.The study, published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters, has shed light on the extreme solar particle event that Earth experienced in 12,350 B.C.E. Such extreme event ...read more

Horses migrated back and forth repeatedly between North America and Eurasia, during the Late Pleistocene. But when a warming environment flooded a land bridge, it cut off travel between the continents, leading to both the decline of the horses in North America and changes to the land caused by their absence, according to a report in the journal Science by an international team that includes 18 indigenous scientists.The team drew upon both tribal knowledge of environmental events as well as the c ...read more

Geologists turned to tiny bubbles to investigate the dynamics driving magma flow beneath Hawaii’s volcanoes as the country’s islands drift northwest on a tectonic plate. They found that, as the islands slip away from the hotspot that fuels Kiluaea on the “Big Island, magma flow not only slows, but shifts deeper underground," according to a report in the journal Science Advances.“This challenges the old idea that eruptions are fueled by magma stored in the Earth’s crust and suggests a n ...read more

When arsenic is mentioned, many people associate it with a bygone poison. The type of quiet killer used in a murder mystery set on a train somewhere in Victorian England. It seems like a problem of the past.However, arsenic is a naturally occurring substance that can contaminate groundwater and food irrigated with tainted water. And in an alarming new study, researchers have found that climate change is impacting the level of arsenic that people are ingesting. Given that arsenic is a carcinogen, ...read more