Animal rights activists have done stellar work in foregrounding the question of creature-consciousness: no meat-eater is now ignorant of the fact that their food once lived, breathed, maybe nuzzled its kin in a blood-soaked slaughterhouse. Environmentalists have a harder go of it. Fracking footage will always be less…
Cats are enigmatic little creatures. It’s hard to get a read on them. Does your cat love you, or would it gladly stab you in your sleep, if only it had thumbs and a slightly larger brain? The cat never tells—it thrives on inscrutability. But it can’t help betraying certain signs of its inner life: it’s hard to play…
The term “Asperger’s syndrome” will never be heard the same way again, owing to new research showing that Hans Asperger—the Austrian pediatrician for whom the disorder was named—was an active participant in the Nazi eugenics program, recommending that patients deemed “not fit for life” be sent to a notorious…
Anyone who’s taken the psychedelic drug LSD (formally known as lysergic acid diethylamide), or had the joy of listening to their favorite relative talk about it during Thanksgiving, knows it can be a utterly bonkers experience. A small new study published in the Journal of Neuroscience seems to offer some insight into…
A Toronto therapist who attempted to “treat” homosexuality in his male patients has been found guilty by his peers of sexual misconduct.
Scientists have long been interested in understanding the underpinnings of empathy. Being able to share the feelings of another person plays a critical role in our inner lives, how we behave towards others, and the way human societies function as a whole. Harnessing the power of empathy, some suggest, could go a long…
Dramatic mood shifts while drinking alcohol are normal, but for some of us, booze takes us down a path toward nasty, belligerent, and downright aggressive behavior. By studying brain scans of drunk men, Australian scientists have pinpointed the parts of our brain that go weak when we drink, making us meaner than…
The first bitcoin transaction ever was by man who bought two pizzas. That arrangement would be worth over a $100 million today. Regret was baked into Bitcoin from the beginning. Last year, somewhat inexplicably, Bitcoin’s price rose more than 1,000 percent. That number has since dipped, but a single bitcoin is still,…
One 63-year-old man had so many prostate orgasms that he couldn’t stop.
New research shows that many young children, prior to reaching the age of six or seven, mistakenly believe that birthday parties cause aging. It’s a truly adorable finding, but the study also offers an important glimpse into the developing brain and our early tendency to seek out causal explanations for the unfolding…
Can you trust science based on teenage subjects? Let me ask you a different question: Can you trust teenagers not to prank scientists?
Recent scientific progress has allowed us to begin decoding the significance of many different patterns of activity in the brain. Researchers have begun to understand patterns associated with disorders such as depression, in hopes of correcting it. Other research has zeroed in on how language and speech is signaled in…
You live and then you die and then you rot in a hole—or so say the elites, with their glasses, and their PhDs in neuroscience. This bummer reality has never appealed much to Americans, 72 percent of whom believe in some kind of afterlife. It’s a comparatively rarer, though still sizable, breed of American who believe…
In the first study of its kind, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine have shown that people who use pot have sex about 20 percent more often than those who do not. It’s an eye-opening finding, but a classic case where correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.
The ongoing feud between President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson reached absolutely bizarre, reality-bending levels this week, with Trump responding to reports Tillerson had called him a “moron” by suggesting that they could “compare IQ tests ... I can tell you who is going to win.”
Every so often, you come across a comic that throws you for the sort of loop that makes you pause a few pages in and think, “I wasn’t at all prepared for how damned good this is.” Atari and Dynamite’s new Centipede series, based on the classic 1980s video game, is definitely one of those comics.
Religion has played an important part in countless wars, conflicts, terrorist attacks, murders, and genocides, yet people seem to associate it with morality. In fact, these same people—even other atheists—seem to think atheists are the immoral ones.
You surely remember a time you said a word to yourself and started laughing. Something about the syllables bouncing around your mouth just didn’t make sense. Maybe the word was “booby” or “piss” or “dingus” or “moist.” Maybe it was the name “Brumbpo Tungus” or “Scrimmy Bingus.” Well thankfully, now science is here to…
