Category: 9. Sci/Tech

In the Peruvian Andes, thousands of years ago, humans were making liberal use of psychoactive drugs.

We know this for a fact: For the first time, direct chemical evidence of these drugs has been found, in residual traces left on the…

It turns out that a shocking number of mammals can glow in the dark.

Shine a blacklight on a mob of Australian animals and you’ll be forgiven that you’ve somehow found your way into a bush doof. But it’s not just Australia. A 2023 study…

“How we end up with similar circuitry was more flexible than I would have expected,” Zaremba said. “You can build the same circuits from different cell types.”

Zaremba and her team also found that in the bird pallium, neurons that start…

As the old saying goes, you can’t polish a turd, but you can – and arguably should – study them.

Doctors have long known that the contents of our toilet bowls offer real insights into our overall health. Now that wisdom extends to how often…

There’s nothing quite like getting lost in an excellent book (or an article from your favorite science news site). But we know surprisingly little about what actually goes on in the brain as it transforms strings of squiggly symbols on our…

In moments of intense pressure, the mind can feel like it’s spinning. Too many decisions, too little time, and too much to lose. But when your job is navigating life-or-death situations in foreign countries, you need a mental…

Sometimes, science moves forward with a spark of genius. Other times, it happens by accident—like when a graduate student shook a vial of liquid and ended up discovering a material that seems to rewrite the rules of nature. That’s…

The crisis of fentanyl and other opioids is far from over in the U.S., and a new study stresses that point, finding that the illicit use of these substances is much more prevalent than prior studies suggest. Published today in JAMA Health Forum,…

Here’s a question you probably shouldn’t ponder while eating: what animal has the fastest pee on Earth? Elephants? Lions? Horses?

One surprising contender, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:…

Women always seem to get drunk faster than men for some reason. But what if that weren’t just a stereotype? What if the difference were real, measurable, and rooted in basic biology?

As it turns out, the idea holds up under scientific…