I wear my contact lenses most days—especially during the summer when I hope to don some fly-ass sunglasses. At the end of every month, my two flexible lenses’ lives are over. Into the bathroom garbage bin they go.
Archaeologists in Kenya have discovered a 5,000-year-old cemetery containing at least 580 bodies. Built by Africa’s earliest herders, the ancient cemetery contains virtually no signs of social stratification, pointing to a surprisingly egalitarian society.
A disease that often causes no symptoms, but which can suddenly become fatal years after a person was infected, is receiving a big spotlight from the American Heart Association (AHA). On Monday, the organization published a scientific statement in its journal Circulation, urging heart doctors in the U.S. to start…
Archaeologists in Peru have uncovered an ancient wall relief dating back to the Caral civilization—the oldest known civilization in the New World. Though whimsical in appearance, these ancient symbols held very serious meaning.
An entire industry—with its own spokespeople, podcasts, best-sellers, retreats, truisms, etc.—has sprung up around sleep. Give or take a contrarian or two, the message of most of this stuff seems to be that sleep is good, and that if you’re not sleeping seven or eight hours a night, you should be. And since you’re…
Read anything interesting in the news lately? No, really. I’m still catching up, because for much of the past week, I was vacationing in lovely Cook Forest, Pennsylvania, during which my access to the internet was limited to whatever stretches of 4G could be obtained amid supply runs to town. This was indeed lovely—an…
There are now enough pigs in Spain that technically everyone could have one, and there’d be pigs to spare. Per the Guardian, Spanish environmental ministry figures reveal that the country now has 50 million oinking piggies, which is about 3.5 million more than the number of humans. That’s the first recorded time the…
The mere fact that we live in a universe boggles my mind every once in a while. But thankfully, our cosmic home is a place that follows rules; the laws of physics seem to agree everywhere, and galaxies are uniformly distributed throughout. Except for in this 300-million-light-year-long region, which seems to be…
A small but very real percentage of people often smell odors that aren’t actually there. About one in 15 Americans over the age of 40 regularly experience so-called phantom odors. But we have no idea why, according to a new study published Thursday in JAMA Otolaryngology–Head & Neck Surgery.
A mysterious outbreak that seemingly sickened hundreds of Chipotle customers in Ohio might finally have a known culprit. On Thursday, health officials reported that traces of a common foodborne bug called Clostridium perfringens had been found in some of the victims’ stool samples. It’s likely the outbreak was spread…
Humans have been producing and consuming cheese for a very long time, as the recent discovery of 3,200-year-old cheese in an ancient Egyptian tomb attests. Delicious though this cheese may have been, it was also a potential source of disease.
We’ve seen lots of machine learning systems create strange new phrases and dreamlike images after being trained on large amounts of data. But a new website lets you do the generating, and the results are just as bizarre as you’d expect:
The Universe’s earliest epochs appear to be written into the small dwarf galaxies orbiting our own galactic home, the Milky Way.
A life-saving but increasingly expensive treatment for severe allergic attacks is poised to become cheaper.
In August 1943, the USS Abner Read struck a Japanese naval mine while conducting patrols in the Bering Sea. The explosion sheared the ship’s entire stern section, sending it and 71 U.S. sailors to the bottom of the Bering Sea. Lost for 75 years, the World War II destroyer’s severed stern has finally been found off a…
Scientists created this picture of the Mona Lisa using genetically modified E. coli bacteria. Such teeny little artists!
Not everyone who is close to death—or thinks they are, at least—has a “near-death experience.” But those who do often hallucinate that they leave their bodies, meet otherworldly beings, see bright flashes and tunnels of light, and more. Those who take the psychedelic drug dimethyltryptamine, or DMT— a compound found…
As if there isn’t already enough junk in space, an artist is planning to launch a reflective, inflatable sculpture to low Earth orbit in October. The art piece is meant to instill a sense of wonder and alter humanity’s impression of itself, but in reality it’s an empty gesture that’ll only serve to infuriate…
Synthetic cannabinoids are behind yet another mass overdose in the U.S. More than 70 people in New Haven, Connecticut suffered overdoses thought to be caused by the lab-made drug known as K2 within the span of a day, NBC Connecticut reported Wednesday. As a result, 72 people were sent to a hospital to be checked out,…
