For every professional musician, athlete, or chef, there are hundreds if not thousands of schmucks still playing empty bars on Tuesdays, limping out of the minors on torn ACLs, or flipping burgers at the farthest possible location from a Michelin star. While the barriers to entry might be lower for vlogging fame, new…
Science doesn’t give answers. Instead, it’s a tool that humans have created to make meaningful conclusions from data. So, if someone tells you that science says energy drinks will turn you into a cocaine user, well, science won’t ever do that.
Cocaine, as they say, is a hell of a drug. It affects three of the neurotransmitters in our brains that make us feel fantastic—dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine—and tolerance for the stuff doesn’t seem to dissipate even months after quitting. (It’s also expensive and bad for you.) Today, new research published…
Feeling drained? According to a new study, a vampire bat species that typically feeds on native birds has turned to sucking the blood of humans at night, likely due to human encroachment.
Stradivarius stringed instruments—the finely constructed, highly sought after multi-million dollar wood boxes* crafted in the 17th and 18th century by Italian luthier Antoni Stradivari—are a bit of a mystery to modern day observers. Despite their quality, nobody quite knows what makes them so superior.
If you’re currently single, falling in love with an inanimate object might seem like the obvious solution. Whether its 15 inflatable pool toys or just a potentially explosive cellphone, dating the non-living instantly eliminates some of the trickiest relationships issues. Worried they might not like you back? Not a…
Scientists have been working on materials that change shape for a while now. But as New Scientist points out, these metamorphoses usually require external stimuli to get going—until now. New research published in Nature Communications shows that some non-living substances can be made to transform all on their own.
Activity monitors are supposed to help us reach our fitness goals, but when it comes to staying motivated, you might want to look beyond your wrist.
One might think that caring for a robot baby—one that cries and sleeps like a regular human baby—might discourage teenage girls from getting pregnant. According to new research, however, the robo-babies actually appear to have the opposite effect.
Did you know that beaked whales are a thing, and that they’re more than just giant, weird-looking dolphin clones?
Wonder Bread is already semi-miraculous: It’s impossibly soft, sweet, and shelf-stable. But unlocking the true potential inside this fluffy stuff results in a substance nearly impervious to heat and electricity, not dissimilar from what used to cover the exterior of spacecraft.
What do you think you’re doing? Why didn’t you use a turn signal? You’re getting the finger now, asshole. Hey, wait, what’s going on? Why are you getting out of your car? Ha ha, I was just kidding. Wait, is that your kid? Is he getting out? What’s he... is he banging his tiny fists on my car? I was joking, man!
Some combinations of notes inherently sound better than others, right? It’s why the bread and butter of pop music, which is engineered to be upbeat and danceable, is highly consonant major chords. It’s why unpredictable 12-tone compositions create unease in the listener, and why Stravinsky’s dissonant Rite of Spring…
Jet lag is objectively terrible. It grants no immunity and bends to no form of treatment, unless “consuming an entire bottle of liquor and popping a few Ambien” is considered treatment. (It’s not.) But according to conventional wisdom, some kinds of jet lag are worse than others—traveling east, for example, is harder…
Turns out brown bears are trash monsters whose habit of noshing on garbage leads them to develop a more sedentary lifestyle. Wow, same!
In an effort to learn more about the dreaded disease, the National Institutes of Health is funding a study in which a group of US athletes, coaches, and staff will be monitored for exposure to the Zika virus while attending the 2016 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Brazil.
There’s a common refrain among people of a certain age: “Wow, I’m really glad I wasn’t a teenager in the age of smartphones and Snapchat.” They’re not wrong. After polling over 10,000 18-year-olds from 25 different countries, a new UNICEF study confirms that being a teen online these days is fraught with risk, danger,…
Fruit flies have enormous sperm. This is a well known fact in the scientific community—so well known, in fact, that there’s a name for it: the big sperm paradox. But the massive, spermy problem has long confounded scientists, who couldn’t figure out why such a tiny creature needed such humongous baby batter soldiers.…
People are putting butter in their coffee. And hey, if you're just craving a new flavor experience, more power to you. The problem is that Bulletproof Coffee, the company behind the trend, is claiming that drinking a mug of fatty joe every morning instead of eating breakfast is a secret shortcut to weight loss and…
Congratulations, humanity: After millennia of building cathedrals and toiling over great works of art and science, we've finally created something that will far outlast us. It's called Plastiglomerate, a stone made out of molten plastic, and yes, we should probably be ashamed of ourselves.