Taking a nap might help with solving problems Pavel Marys / Alamy Waking up from a deep nap appears to make people better at creative problem-solving. In a new study, people were more likely to have a “eureka” moment if they had recently entered the second stage of sleep – in which brain activity slows…
Within an hour of receiving a covid vaccination in November 2020, Utah preschool teacher Brianne Dressen felt pins and needles through her arms and legs. In the medical odyssey that followed, she suffered double vision, chronic nausea, brain fog, and profound weakness. Once a rock climber, she became a couch potato. Although Dressen’s symptoms were…
A fireball captured on a dashcam in South Carolina Kathryn Rose Farr via Facebook Sightings of a fireball streaking down from the sky were reported by eyewitnesses in several south-eastern US states on the afternoon of 26 June. The American Meteor Society’s website has logged at least 142 reports about the fireball event from observers…
The feelings, emotions and behaviors of people who lived in the past don’t leave a fossil record. But cultural artifacts, such as paintings, novels, music and other art forms, do. Now, researchers are developing tools to mine these artifacts to decipher how people in past societies might have thought and felt. Consider Hieronymus Bosch’s famous…
Does Using ChatGPT Change Your Brain Activity? Study Sparks Debate Scientists warn against reading too much into a small experiment about ChatGPT and brain activity that is receiving a lot of buzz By Nicola Jones & Nature magazine Thai Liang Lim/Getty Images The brains of people writing an essay with ChatGPT are less engaged than…
Some ash trees have genetic variants that confer partial resistance to ash dieback FLPA / Alamy Ash trees in the UK are rapidly evolving resistance in response to ash dieback disease, DNA sequencing of hundreds of trees has shown. The finding is good news, says Richard Buggs at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the…
A remote outcrop in Canada harbors rocks that are at least 4.16 billion years old, researchers report June 26 in Science. If true, these rocks would be the oldest known on Earth and the first to date to the planet’s earliest and most mysterious eon. The finding is the latest salvo in a debate that…
There’s a giant ball of ice barreling through the solar system right now, and it’s bigger than any we’ve seen before. It poses no threat to Earth, but this comet, called C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), has enraptured astronomers ever since its discovery in 2021. The hulking object, sometimes jovially called a “megacomet,” is 100 times bigger…
Tuvalu is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images How does it feel to lose your home to climate change? The roughly 10,000 residents of Tuvalu will be among the first in the world to have to confront this question. With an average height above sea level of less than 3…
Parents will fret, even among bugs. And even among bugs, it’s complicated. Ferociously protective parenting has evolved four times among the pointy-faced, wide-bodied little leaf dwellers called shield bugs, researchers report in the May Biological Journal of the Linnaean Society. Those shifts from zero to all-in helicopter parenting affected egg shape, analysis of 30 species…
