Using the Internet is an easy way to feel omniscient. Enter a search term and the answers appear before your eyes. But at any moment you’re also just a few taps away from becoming an insufferable know-it-all. Searching for answers online gives people an inflated sense of their own knowledge, according to a study. It … Read more
We hate to break it you, but you’re not totally human. It’s nothing about you personally. It’s just that more than 90% of the cells in the human body are actually parasites. You might feel like a single being, but you’re really more of a bug city, teeming with different species. [youtube id=”bQNUqEj9uig” width=”600″ height=”350″] … Read more
It’s no secret that babies love a good game of peek-a-boo. Well, it turns out that this type of innocent play can in fact be beneficial to babies, who learn best by being surprised, according to new research. Infants have an innate knowledge about the world, and when their expectations are defied – for example, … Read more
The human eyeball is kind of incredible, being able to see millions and millions of colors, automatically adjust to light conditions, and, in camera terms, it contains about 50 f-stops of capability. Light enters our eyes and falls on photoreceptive proteins in our retina (the rods and the cones). From there, information is sent to … Read more
Imagine rolling out of bed on a Saturday morning, shuffling into your kitchen, and tossing a few strips of streaky bacon into a skillet. After a few minutes, you’ll hear a delightful crackling and sizzling, soon followed by a complex and savory aroma that could lure even the most resolute of vegetarians to the kitchen. … Read more
Now begins the season of sniffles, itchy eyes, and scratchy throats: Pollen counts all over the country are high. But what does “high” mean, exactly? Before we know that pollen is high we’ve got to count it. The way we sample pollen is ingenious in its simplicity: A device called a Rotorod, a plastic strut that … Read more
Aspirin has long been known to confer various benefits when it comes to health, and now a new study suggests the medication could lower people’s overall risk of developing cancer. According to research led by scientists at Harvard University, regular use of aspirin reduces the risk of cancer in general by 3 percent, primarily due … Read more
Suffer from seasonal allergies? Depending on where you live, you may already be sneezing, sniffling and rubbing your itchy eyes. And you may be in for a whopper of a spring. The first pollen culprit each year is typically trees. If rainfall was good the year before, resulting in solid tree growth, that typically means … Read more
After 340 weightless days, Scott Kelly is finally back on Earth. Strapped into a Russian Soyuz capsule, the NASA astronaut and his fellow crew member, Russian cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienko, landed safely in Kazakhstan just before midnight Eastern time on March 1. Kelly and Kornienko lived aboard the International Space Station for a little less than … Read more
Your eyes can be a window into your soul, and some say that your eyes — be them baby blue, sexy green or deep, mysterious brown — may reveal even more. Like how well you tolerate pain. Or your tendency toward alcohol dependence. Or just how generally agreeable you might be. Eye color and what … Read more