In the weeks after she caught COVID, in May 2022, Lauren Shoemaker couldn’t wait to return to her usual routine of skiing, backpacking, and pregaming her family’s eight-mile hikes with three-mile jogs. All went fine in the first few weeks after her infection. Then, in July, hours after finishing a hike, Shoemaker started to feel off; two days later, she couldn’t make it to the refrigerator without feeling utterly exhausted. Sure it was a fluke, she tried to hike again—and
A scientific squabble over how to define self-control draws from an unlikely source: A story from Greek mythology.
Sailing home to Ithaca after the Trojan War, Odysseus longed to hear the Sirens’ legendary song. But he knew that was a very bad idea. The Sirens, the goddess Circe had warned, lured passing sailors to their island to kill them. So Circe helped Odysseus form a plan. As his boat approached the Sirens’ island, Odysseus handed crew members balls of wax
For the first time, researchers have successfully extracted and decoded RNA from an extinct animal.
The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was a wolflike marsupial that went extinct after the last one died in a zoo in Hobart, Tasmania in 1936. Now a roughly 130-year-old museum specimen has yielded bits of RNA, the fragile molecules responsible for turning DNA’s genetic instructions into cellular functions, researchers report in the August Genome Research. The results shed new light on
This article originally appeared in Undark Magazine.
In 2016, Ox Lennon was trying to peek in the crevices inside a pile of rocks. Lennon, who uses they/them pronouns, considered everything from injecting builders’ foam into the tiny spaces to create a mold to dumping a heap of stones into a CT scanner. Still, they couldn’t get the data they were after: how to stack rocks so that a mouse wouldn’t squeeze through, but a small lizard could hide safely
Until recently, gravitational waves could have been a figment of Einstein’s imagination. Before they were detected, these ripples in spacetime existed only in the physicist’s general theory of relativity, as far as scientists knew.
Now, researchers have not one but two ways to detect the waves. And they’re on the hunt for more. The study of gravitational waves is booming, says astrophysicist Karan Jani of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. “This is just remarkable. No field I can think of in
This article was originally published by Knowable Magazine.
For expectant parents, pregnancy can be a time filled with joyful anticipation: hearing the beating of a tiny heart, watching the fetus wiggling through the black-and-white blur of an ultrasound, feeling the jostling of a little being in the belly as it swells.
But for many, pregnancy also comes with serious health issues that can endanger both parent and child. In May, for example, the U.S. Olympic sprinter Tori Bowie died
Scientists may have discovered a new human species for a second time this week.
Anthropologists in France found a 45,000-year-old pelvic bone of an infant, which is neither a match to Neanderthals nor Homo sapiens.
The hip bone was found with the remains of 11 Neanderthals in the Grotte du Renne cave, later settled by anatomically modern humans (AMHs), suggesting the child coexisted with the now extinct species.
The artifact was compared against two Neanderthal and 32 modern baby bones,
AI-generated audio that mimics humans can be so convincing that people can’t tell the difference a quarter of the time – even when they’re trained to identify faked voices, a new study claims.
Researchers at University College London investigated how accurately humans can differentiate between AI-generated audio and organic audio, according to a report in the science and medical journal Plos One. The study comes amid the rise of deepfakes, videos and pictures that can be edited to appear as
Calorie counts listed alongside items on restaurant menus can trigger a relapse in some eating disorder patients, researchers have found.
Since April last year, new laws
A lot of stubborn men would rather find themselves lost in Timbuktu than ask for directions.
So it
