Dogs may have stolen the Internet from cats, but cat memes endure – and many center on one theme: Cats are aloof jerks. The primary ambassador of this notion, naturally, is Grumpy Cat. But cats of all sorts, these memes tell us, desire to be left alone with their coffee, or demand darkness, or prefer

It’s amazing what you can find when you do a good clear-out. Just ask chemistry researcher Alan Aitken. The scientist, from Scotland’s University of St Andrews, was rummaging through a storage area under a chemistry lecture room back in 2014 when he stumbled upon a unique relic of scientific history. Stashed amidst chemicals and random

In 2009, supermodel Kate Moss caused a stir when she categorically stated that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”. As jaw-dropping as the sentiment might have seemed to many, Moss’ pithy comment encapsulates a modern Western zeitgeist. From an evolutionary perspective, however, Moss’ statement is ludicrous, if not preposterous. Such a statement could only

It was promising to be an uncharacteristically warm winter day in Boston. The temperature on 15 January 1919, had soared to 40 degrees Fahrenheit from 2 degrees (4 degrees Celsius from -16) earlier in the week, prompting many downtown workers to head outdoors. Shortly after noon in the city’s bustling North End, as Model T

Here’s a funny one: genetically modified food. Okay, so maybe it’s not all that funny. But people’s reactions to it certainly are. Despite numerous and huge scientific studies validating the safety and benefits of genetically modified foods (aka GM or GMO foods), people just refuse to be convinced. Should we be surprised? Perhaps not: Americans

The acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson will be forever remembered as one of the ‘fathers of DNA’. But also as something much worse. In a resurfaced controversy that further dims the shine of one of the 20th century’s most esteemed scientists, Watson – awarded the Nobel in 1962 for his role in the discovery

Dogs are said to be a human’s best friend – but they also provide an environmental conundrum to some of us. Altogether, the eating habits of our pets account for about 20 percent of the world’s meat and fish consumption, and this has an effect on a whole bunch of environmental issues, including the use

The year 2020 will be bringing us a new decade, an American presidential election, and a cruise for people who believe Earth is flat. Although details are currently thin on the ground, the cruise is being organised by the Flat Earth International Conference, and promises to be “the biggest, boldest, best adventure yet”. Well, we

We rarely portray Neanderthals, our close relatives, as telegenic. Museum exhibits give them wild tangles of hair, and Hollywood reduces them to grunting unsophisticates. Their skulls suggest broad faces, tiny chins and jutting brows. But to mock Neanderthals is to mock ourselves: Homo sapiens had lots of sex with Homo neanderthalensis. Neanderthal genes supply between

I teach people how to teach math, and I’ve been working in this field for 30 years. Across those decades, I’ve met many people who suffer from varying degrees of math trauma – a form of debilitating mental shutdown when it comes to doing mathematics. When people share their stories with me, there are common

If you need to remember something, you might do well to… draw it. According to a new study, drawing can be a more effective memory aid than writing and rewriting, simply looking at information, or using various other visualisation techniques. Older adults who take up drawing could even enhance their memory, the researchers say, providing

You may have heard of the Mona Lisa effect, or even felt her famous, haunting gaze yourself. If you’re not familiar, the idea is that the eyes in the iconic painting follow you around the room wherever you stand. A new study has found that the effect can be backed up by science – but

A tiny fragment of lapis lazuli pigment, discovered in the fossilised teeth of a medieval woman, is now challenging some of our most basic assumptions about the history of book production. Before the dawn of the 15th century, scribes and artists in Europe who wrote and illustrated religious manuscripts were often too modest to seal

We’ve barely entered the third week of the partial government shutdown in the US, and yet already, some national parks, such as iconic Joshua Tree National Park, are being forced to close due to growing trash problems. Anyone questioning the necessity of the country’s National Park Service (NPS) need only look at what’s happening at Joshua

The way infants are fed and nurtured in the first year of life could have something bizarre to do with being left- or right-handed, a new study suggests. The meta-analysis, which look at over 60,000 mother-child relationships, has now shown that left-handedness is lower among breastfed infants compared to bottle-fed infants. To be very clear,

They say death and taxes are the only two sure things in life. But before we get to the former, just what is paying the latter actually doing for you? According to political scientist Patrick Flavin, the science on how government spending affects things like public well-being and happiness is something of a mixed bag,

An archaeological dig in Suffolk, England has yielded up a Roman-era cemetery treasure: 52 beautifully preserved skeletons dating back to the 4th century. And of those skeletons, many had been decapitated, their disembodied heads placed neatly at their sides or feet for burial, or buried without bodies altogether. Only 17 skeletons had been buried normally.

Jeanne Calment died in 1997 in the southern French town in which she was born, and her death drew a flurry of attention. At 122, an age that had been certified by the Guinness World Records as well as public health researchers, she was the oldest documented person to have lived. But a Russian mathematician

Five teenage girls have died at a Polish escape room, where a fire broke out while they were celebrating a birthday. The 15-year-old girls were participating in an escape room game in Koszalin, northern Poland when a fire broke out around 5 pm local time according to the BBC. Police spokesperson Monika Kosiec said the

They were called camps, but in truth they were not camps. Most of the people who arrived at them only had a few hours left to live. Thousands did not even survive the trip, dying en route in the cramped, airless boxcars. This was Operation Reinhard: the deadliest saga of the Holocaust, in which Hitler

Police in Australia sent multiple officers to an emergency call about a man shouting death threats, but it turned out he was just trying to kill a spider. Officers visited the home on Wednesday after a passerby walking outside a house in suburban Perth heard a toddler screaming and a man shouting “Why don’t you

It’s not uncommon for New Year’s celebrations to get a little out of hand, but this year, in the Netherlands, the party got especially lit. Just as 2018 was coming to a close, an unruly bonfire in the seaside resort of Scheveningen began to spew an assembly line of firenadoes. Vuurtornado ziet er zo uit

After Chinese scientist He Jiankui shocked the scientific community by announcing last month that he had edited the genes of human babies, he mysteriously vanished. And now he’s been found.  The New York Times reports that guards are holding He in a guesthouse at his university, the Southern University of Science and Technology. It’s unclear whether the guards work for the Chinese government, the university,

There’s something beautiful in deciding how one’s final moments should be confined to the memory of our loved ones. Advances in technology and changing mindsets seem to have people wondering why a coffin in the ground should have to be the only option of final resting place. Residents in Washington state have a brand new

Adam and Eve might have managed it in the Bible, but scientifically speaking, would two people be enough to repopulate our world from scratch, despite the inevitable health issues associated with inbreeding and a limited gene pool?  First of all, let’s deal with the obvious problems. The first ‘new’ generation would obviously all be brothers and

A retired professor from the UK says he might have pinpointed the location of Camelot, the legendary castle where stories claim that King Arthur held court some 1,400 years ago – if he actually existed. According to Arthurian literature expert Peter Field, Camelot used to stand at the site of an ancient Roman fort called Camulodunum in

Some of the world’s most important science is conducted in one of its most inhospitable, hostile places. But not without a cost, new research reveals. A new long-term analysis of researchers stationed in Antarctica sheds new light on a psychological phenomenon very few of us ever have to experience: a unique coping mechanism, triggered when

When you know a particular topic really well, you might say you know it like the back of your hand. But how well do you really know that hand? Or the rest of your body, for that matter? People have a tendency to share misinformation that, over time, can be misconstrued as fact. The human body

Japan’s home prices may be rising, but the country still has more than 8 million unoccupied properties, so many that owners have started giving them away for free. In some cases, local governments are even offering subsidies for people willing to tear down homes and build new ones, according to The Japan Times. Though many

One of the best-known fossils in paleontology, a virtually complete skeleton nicknamed “Little Foot”, could actually represent an entirely new species of early human, scientists have announced. The fossil was first discovered more than 20 years ago, and after decades of careful extraction and research, an analysis of the age, skull and limbs has finally

In our never-ending quest to understand what happens to us after we die, humans have long seen the rare phenomenon of near-death experiences as providing some hints. People who’ve had a brush with death often report seeing and experiencing life-altering events on “the other side,” like a bright white light at the end of a

A new discovery has pushed the timeline of the plague in Europe back even earlier than we had previously thought. A new strain of  the Yersinia pestis bacterium has been identified in 4,900-year-old bones in a Neolithic burial site in Sweden. It’s the oldest strain ever identified, and the most basal we’ve seen – that

Between 2008 and 2017 in Australia, 266 people died from an animal of some sort. At first glance, you won’t find that surprising – after all, Australia is often thought of as a dangerous place. But what might surprise you is the type of animal causing most of these deaths. Is it one of the

Recycling in the United States is piling up at an alarming speed and no one knows where to put it. Up until recently, that was China’s problem. For years, the US offloaded nearly 4,000 shipping containers full of recyclables on China’s shoulders every day. But China is sick of being the world’s recycling bin, and

A meteor that exploded in the air near the Dead Sea 3,700 years ago may have wiped out communities, killed tens of thousands of people, and provided the kernel of truth to an old Bible story. The area is in modern-day Jordan, in a 25 kilometre (15.5 mile) wide circular plain called Middle Ghor. Most

In the mud of London’s Thames river, a strange skeleton that lay hidden for 500 years has finally seen the light of day. Face-down, one arm upflung, the only remnants of his clothing a pair of half-rotted, thigh-high black leather boots. It’s those boots that have archaeologists abuzz – an incredibly rare find. “It’s extremely

He may (or may not) have brought about the world’s first genetically modified human babies using CRISPR-Cas9, but He Jiankui’s shoes are probably not the most comfortable in the world right now. According to reports from Chinese media, the geneticist’s whereabouts are currently unknown. It’s been reported that he is under house arrest at the

In ancient cave art around the world, a particular motif shows up time and again: the impressions of the hands of the people who visited long ago, printed or stencilled. And yet, in some caves decorated by the Palaeolithic inhabitants of France and Spain, something curious has been observed: A very high number of those

When long-dead human remains are found buried in unusual circumstances, anthropologists are usually able to piece together why. But the bones of a child that lived just a couple of hundred years ago in Poland are proving to be a bit of a head-scratcher. In a shallow grave in Tunel Wielki Cave, located in Sąspowska

It may sound like a scene straight out of a horror movie, but statistically you are not that unlikely to end up on a date with a psychopath. It is estimated that about 1 in 100 people are psychopaths – similar to the number of people who are teachers. And while we may associate psychopaths

East Africa is famously the birthplace of humankind and the location where our ancient hominin ancestors first invented sophisticated stone tools. This technology, dating back to 2.6 million years ago, is then thought to have spread around Africa and the rest of the Old World later on. But new research, published in Science, has uncovered

Much like Egypt’s pharaohs, the emperors of China’s Western Han dynasty had a thing for being buried inside pyramids – although less recognisable than the iconic ones we know from places like Giza. Scattered along the outskirts of Xi’an along the banks of China’s Wei River, the sides of these burial mounds align with the

Why is ‘boobs’ or ‘wriggly’ more likely to get a laugh than, say, ‘taxes’? What makes some words funnier than others? Although you might not have thought about it much before, deducing the humour factor in words is a surprisingly complex process. “Nobody has really done a good job at predicting humour in advance,” University

A scene painted on a cave wall more than 15,000 thousand years ago appears to tell the simple story of a hunter collapsing before a disembowelled beast. Reading between the lines, the images might describe something bigger. Maybe even astronomical. Figures depicted in the famous prehistoric paintings at Lascaux were positioned with purpose, according to

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has been going hard on the archaeological discoveries this year, but are we tired of it? No, no we are not. Especially when they come up with spectacular finds like this one. In a tomb in the El-Assasif necropolis in the ancient city of Thebes, two wooden coffins have been

Most modern humans have a little bit of Neanderthal hiding somewhere in their genes. For years, it was assumed that this tiny dose of DNA came from a brief encounter between our ancestors and their Neanderthal neighbours thousands of years ago. But what started as a one night stand now looks more like a frequent

The deepest dive recorded by the free-diving Bajau Laut people of Southeast Asia was to an impressive 79 metres (259 feet), and the longest time spent underwater by them was just over three minutes. Although the Bajau do not dive to these depths or for this length of time during their day-to-day fishing, they spend

A lot of what we think we know about psychology might be wrong. A major research initiative, the second of its kind, tried to reconstruct 28 famous classic psychology experiments. But of those 28, only 14 of the experiments yielded the same results, according to research published Monday in the journal Advances in Methods and