News
Roughly five and a half million years ago the Mediterranean dried up almost entirely, and when the Atlantic finally broke back through at Gibraltar it may have refilled the whole basin in only a few years.
1+ hour, 13+ min ago (283+ words) The Mediterranean looks permanent because human history is short. Rome, Alexandria, Athens, Carthage and Istanbul all belong to a sea that seems older...
Psychology says the calm people feel in a forest is not simply in their imagination — studies find that even a short walk among trees can lower cortisol, possibly activating a stress response shaped long before modern life
1+ hour, 13+ min ago (265+ words) The calm many people feel in a forest is not just a romantic story about trees. A small but serious body of research has measured changes in...
The human bloodstream now carries an average of 1.6 micrograms of plastic per milliliter, and the polymers showing up most often are the same ones used in single-use bottles and food packaging
5+ hour, 7+ min ago (826+ words) The fragments detected in blood are vanishingly small in mass but persistent in presence. An adult carries roughly five liters of blood, and the polymer fragments detected cycle through the heart every minute, traveling continuously through the circulatory system. The…...
A University of Basel study found that around the full moon, participants took longer to fall asleep, slept less deeply and produced less evening melatonin — even inside a darkened laboratory where they could neither see the Moon nor know its phase
5+ hour, 21+ min ago (554+ words) The full moon has been blamed for sleeplessness for centuries, usually with more folklore than evidence behind it. But one laboratory study from the...
Bananas are naturally slightly radioactive because they are rich in potassium, and the dose is so measurable that scientists half-jokingly use the 'banana equivalent dose' to explain how small everyday radiation exposures really are
5+ hour, 51+ min ago (895+ words) The banana is radioactive because potassium is radioactive. There is no way around it. Bananas contain potassium, most of it stable potassium-39. But a fixed sliver of natural potassium is potassium-40, an isotope with a half-life of over a billion…...
In 1938, a South African fisherman hauled up a fish that scientists believed had been extinct for 65 million years — the coelacanth, a deep-water species that had simply been living unseen in waters no one routinely dredged
5+ hour, 13+ min ago (309+ words) The coelacanth story is often told as if a fossil came back to life. The more interesting version is quieter: the fish had never left. It had simply been...
Sharks have been swimming Earth's oceans for over 400 million years, which makes them older than trees, older than the dinosaurs, and survivors of all five mass extinctions
7+ hour, 13+ min ago (378+ words) Sharks are often introduced as ancient animals, but the phrase can be misleading. A living tiger shark or great white is not a 400-million-year-old...
Columbia researchers combed through 9,000 patient records and found a link between the most prescribed antidepressants and faster-failing heart valves — but only in people whose valves were already breaking down
7+ hour, 6+ min ago (689+ words) The finding pulls a well-worn psychiatric drug class into a cardiology conversation — carefully. The researchers stress that SSRIs remain safe for most people. The risk they describe applies to a specific slice of patients whose mitral valves are already breaking…...
A Nature Neuroscience study used GPS to track 122 people across New York and Miami for months, and found the days they moved through more varied places, they felt measurably happier — and the pattern ran both ways
9+ hour, 13+ min ago (740+ words) There is a familiar version of happiness advice that says we should get outside, move around, see people, and break up the routine. A 2020 paper in Nature Neuroscience asked a sharper question: can the variety of places a person actually…...
Nearly three kilometres beneath a Canadian mine, geologists found water that may have been isolated in the rock for roughly two billion years — older than animals, plants and almost everything we think of as complex life. The brine was so salty and bitter that, when one researcher tasted it, she was sampling a flavour shaped by a world humans never knew
10+ hour, 7+ min ago (429+ words) The water did not look like a message from deep time. It came from cracks in rock nearly three kilometres below the surface of a Canadian mine, in a place...