Around the turn of the twentieth century, there wasn’t much space in academia for female scholars. Certain disciplines, like psychology, were almost exclusively male. Graduate programs didn’t permit women to enroll, and there were few opportunities for women to study psychology and impact the field with their ideas.Margaret Floy Washburn was one of the few women who was able to fight her way into the field. Many psychologists now consider her one of the founding scholars of comparative psych ...read more
Drugmaker Lykos Therapeutics announced on Aug. 9, 2024, that the Food and Drug Administration declined to approve the company’s application for the use of MDMA-assisted therapy in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder. It is the first such decision issued on a psychedelic drug application.Many investors and researchers have been predicting a psychedelics boom, with MDMA being just the first of a number of psychedelics in the drug development pipeline.The FDA’s decision has disappoi ...read more
And since natural selection shares so many features with play, we may, with some justification, maintain that life, in a most fundamental sense, is playful. At Cambridge University Library, along with all the books, maps, and manuscripts, there’s a child’s drawing that curators have titled “The Battle of the Fruit and Vegetable Soldiers.”The drawing depicts a turbaned cavalry soldier facing off against an English dragoon. It’s a bit trippy: The British soldier sits astride a carrot, an ...read more
The years between 662 million years and 700 million years ago — just before and after glaciers left a half-mile thick rock layer — were mysterious. There is little information about the planet's conditions just before the period of the deep freeze, which covered the planet in ice and is sometimes referred to as Snowball Earth.Now, researchers have examined a rock feature showing what life on the planet was like — both before the freeze and after the subsequent thaw. The report in the Journ ...read more
From the first time a curious wolf approached fearful humans and managed to befriend them, dogs have been a big part of the human experience. For over 15,000 years, they’ve been our co-workers and companions. Since then, we've learned a lot about dogs and our relationship to them (as you'll learn if you watch Inside the Mind of a Dog, a new documentary on Netflix that includes research based on citizen science contributions). And yet there’s still so much we don’t know about them! To celeb ...read more
Author Vishay SinghPosted on Categories Discover Magazine