Imagining performing a specific action is a technique used to great effect by sportspeople ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP via Getty Images This article is part of a special series exploring the radical potential of the human imagination. Read more here. Feeling stressed about an upcoming event? Imagine, for a moment, that you have a magic anti-anxiety pill…
Planting herbs with your tomatoes may lift yields and deter pests Shutterstock/Irina WS As an obsessive plant collector with little impulse control, I will take any excuse to cram a few more species into my tiny plot. So the concept of companion planting, an old belief that adding certain plants around existing crops can boost…
The skeleton of a sabre-toothed cat chrisstockphotography/Alamy Studies of tens of thousands of fossils from the La Brea tar pits in California have found no clear evidence of any of the species evolving in response to falling temperatures as ice sheets spread across the continent, or to the later warming when the glacial period ended….
A statue of the saint in Cucullo, Italy, is draped with harmless local snakes Piero Castellano Every year on 1 May, San Domenico di Sora gets some spectacularly bizarre accessories. During a religious procession in the Italian village of Cocullo, a statue of the saint is adorned with harmless snakes (above). The origins of this…
Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård) just wants to be left alone Apple TV+ MurderbotApple TV+ Friends and colleagues spent years trying to get me to read The Murderbot Diaries, a sci-fi series by Martha Wells about a cyborg security unit that gains free will. I resisted. They pitched it to me as quirky, which raised my hackles, or…
Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Death of the author? Now and then, Feedback sees ads for courses promising to teach us how to become an excellent creative writer. It sounds like fun,…
Sunset over the ruins of Wheal Coates in Cornwall, once among the UK’s most important tin mines David Chapman/Alamy Under a Metal SkyPhilip Marsden (Granta (UK, on sale) Counterpoint (US, 4 November)) Travel writer Philip Marsden lives on the river Fal in Cornwall, UK. About 3500 years ago, after a little tin was added to…
CLIMATEWIRE | The oil and gas industry is pushing the Trump administration to kill a proposed rule that would protect workers from extreme heat, arguing that it jeopardizes the president’s vision of achieving “energy dominance.” The opposition comes as people who work in U.S. oil and gas fields face increasingly dangerous conditions as global temperatures…
Nearly half a million people are murdered around the world every year. While the means vary across nations – knives in Australia and the UK, guns in the US and Mexico – what is universal is the sense of hopelessness about these deaths. Yet there is a solution, one that comes from an unexpected source:…
Rachel Feltman: For Scientific American’s Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman. How are you doing today, listeners? Would you say you’re flourishing? I’m guessing you probably wouldn’t—unless you have a particularly florid vocabulary. But researchers are increasingly focused on the idea of “human flourishing,” a multifaceted measurement that aims to take a holistic look at our…
