News

This article first appeared in Issue 7 of our free digital magazine CURIOUS.  If you’ve ever taken a high school biology class, you might well fancy yourself an accomplished geneticist. Why are your eyes blue? Genes. Why is your hair curly? Genes, duh. We’re taught early on that our traits are predetermined by our DNA, […]

When Lord Carnarvon died shortly after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb, the media was ablaze with rumors of a “mummy’s curse”. A 2002 study shut down the idea by demonstrating how exposure to the curse wasn’t associated with a significant increase in risk of death, but could such an ancient tomb be harboring dangerous pathogens? […]

A 35-year-old man with red-green color blindness experienced lasting improvements in his ability to distinguish different colors after taking magic mushrooms, a new case report reveals. According to the authors, this example may indicate the power of psilocybin to alter visual processing capabilities, despite the fact that color blindness is a genetic condition. The subject […]

Prehistoric Planet is back for season two, showcasing dinosaur species never seen on screen before in an epic five-part series. Now the first full season two trailer has just dropped, you can check out the new faces making their debut this time around, including the long-necked sauropod Isisaurus and a fierce feathered hunter called Pectinodon. […]

XBB.1.16 “Arcturus”, a new COVID-19 variant that appears to be more infectious than previous strains, has been confirmed in Los Angeles and comes with a strange new symptom that was previously extremely rare in coronaviruses.  Announced by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LACDPH), it is believed that the variant causes conjunctivitis (also known […]

Ringing phones, bills to pay, screaming kids – some days you need to get away. Not just a weekend break or a holiday, but as far away from humans as possible. RealLifeLore have created a video travel guide for doing just that. Take the volcanic islands of Tristan Da Cunha in the South Atlantic Ocean, […]

Whale watchers in California were recently treated to a rare experience when among a pod of killer whales, aka orca (Orcinus orca), a white calf was spotted.  CA216C1, or “Frosty” as the calf is known, is a three-year-old male orca who is leucistic. Frosty has patches of black on his dorsal fin and the front […]

A man often referred to as the “Godfather” of artificial intelligence (AI) has quit his job at Google this week over concerns about where AI is headed. Geoffrey Hinton is best known for his work on deep learning and neural networks, for which he won the $1 million Turing Award in 2019. At the time […]

Archaeologists have unearthed 500-year-old medical flasks that were used to test (and smell) pee at a medical dump within Caesar’s Forum in Rome. The flasks may provide important insights into late medieval and Renaissance disease prevention.  Italian physicians played an important role in developing early measures to prevent the spread of disease. This included the […]

Being “ghosted” – that is, having somebody totally shut down communication with you, effectively turning themselves into a “ghost” – is rarely a nice feeling. As disappointing as it may be to experience, though, chances are the person doing it to you feels even worse – at least, if you two were originally friends rather […]

Water vapor has been seen in the atmospheres of exoplanets before, but they were massive gas giants. Now, researchers report that detection but in a completely different system, GJ 486, where a rocky super-Earth orbits a red dwarf star. But the team is unsure if the signal comes from the star or the planet. The […]

When two groups of people were assigned different breathing exercises for 40 minutes a day participants ended up with dramatically different levels of amyloid beta, the peptide associated with Alzheimer’s disease. Whether one exercise can stem the rising tide of dementia in society remains to be proven. However, after the failure of more than a […]

In the 1930s, archaeological excavations at Dura-Europos, Syria, uncovered an unusual battle scene. Skeletal remains buried near the ancient city’s western walls indicated that a fight between Sasanian Persian soldiers and the occupying Roman side had taken place in a small mine shaft not large enough to stand in. Nineteen Roman soldiers, as well as […]

A recording of a strange sound said to be heard by people with Havana syndrome has been released by a US official, allowing the public to make conclusions for themselves about what it could be.   Havana syndrome is a collective term for a mysterious set of symptoms experienced by military and diplomatic service personnel […]

German archaeologists have discovered a spectacular pair of ancient scissors while investigating a construction site in Munich. The scissors are exceptionally well preserved and can still cut. Archaeologists from the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Monuments (BLfD) were originally called in by a bomb disposal team who were searching a construction site in […]

Supermassive black holes are impressive objects. They can weigh from a few hundred thousand to billions of times the mass of the Sun. A gravitational pull from which nothing, not even light, can escape. These objects are incredibly dense, and density is about mass and volume so it’s important to understand how big these giants […]

The “breakfast, lunch, and dinner” sign is an indicator of parasites recognized by medicine, and if you’ve woken up with the tell-tale bite pattern it could mean you have bedbugs. and they’re feasting on your blood. The lesions appear in this way because of the way bedbugs map the skin looking for the best lunch […]

You might already be aware that the name “strawberry” is a misnomer, as strawberries aren’t really berries at all. Well, it seems strawberries are full of surprises, or rather covered in them, because those seedy-looking white dots aren’t actually seeds. The strawberries’ pitted accessories are called achenes, and they are in fact the plant’s fruit, […]

ChatGPT may actually be more empathetic than human doctors, according to a new study looking at patient ratings. While many people would assume that AI would deliver uncaring, factual advice, when confronted with healthcare problems, it actually was rated better than real doctors when it came to tact.  The idea of using AI as a […]

A skin cancer that was almost invisible to the human eye has been successfully detected, a feat that has seen the medical team recognized with a Guinness World Record. More importantly, for patient Christy Staats, it means her cancer was caught at an early stage before it had a chance to spread. “I believe it […]