It is probably no surprise to you that stress is a major driver of illness, including mental health conditions like anxiety and depression and physical ones such as heart disease. We urgently need simple, objective and non-invasive ways to study and measure it. The temperature of someone’s nose – most prominently, on the tip –…
“Disaffection with climate policies has two root causes: economic and cultural” Alex Ramsay/Alamy I have written before about the outcry in my home city of York, UK, when the council announced plans to increase parking fees to discourage people from driving on our polluted streets. In case you were wondering, the council eventually caved in…
September 11, 2025 4 min read Magic Mushroom Edibles Found to Contain Undisclosed Ingredients—And No Psilocybin Researchers tested 12 “magic mushroom” edibles. None contained psilocybin, but most contained undisclosed ingredients, including synthetic drugs whose safety hasn’t been tested in humans By Allison Parshall edited by Dean Visser Magic mushrooms (Psilocybe cubensis). Researchers tested 12 “magic…
Your phone charger needs precise quantum measurements Shutterstock/Zoomik If you are anything like me, you are almost always charging your smartphone. What you might not realise is that the ability to do so safely depends on a delicate quantum measurement at the cutting edge of physics. To understand why, we need to look at what…
Frances Glessner Lee discovered her true calling later in life. An heiress without formal schooling, she was in her 50s when she transformed her fascination with true crime and medicine into the foundation of a new field: forensic science. In the late 1920s she drew inspiration from a family friend, a medical examiner who was…
Ibex can move nimbly across steep mountain slopes Serge Goujon/Shutterstock Nearly 300,000 years ago, Neanderthals had already figured out how to hunt mountain goats along vertical cliffs and process them in well-organised camps. Known for ambushing large animals in Western Europe’s flat meadows and forests, it seems Neanderthals adapted to the hills of Eastern Europe…
Asteroid impacts, microbes, mining: These are a few tactics engineers might one day use to create an Earthlike atmosphere on Mars.
September 11, 2025 6 min read Scientists Clash over whether Polar Geoengineering Is a Dangerous Gamble Scientists are beginning to take clear sides on whether or not to use human-made interventions to preserve polar ice, such as pumping up seawater or launching aerosols into the atmosphere to cool the planet’s surface By Alec Luhn edited…
Unusual clouds form over the Martian volcano Arsia Mons each year ESA/DLR/FU Berlin/J. Cowart CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO A thin cloud that appears on Mars each year has baffled astronomers ever since it was first spotted, but it may be the result of a moisture-rich atmosphere that was thought impossible. Each winter, an 1800-kilometre-long cloud…
All eight arms of an octopus can be used for whatever their cephalopod owner wishes, but some arms are favored for certain tasks. A new, detailed analysis of how octopuses wield their famously flexible appendages suggests that all eight arms share a skill set, but the front four spend more time on exploration and the…
