How exactly do our brains sort between the five taste groups: sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami? We’ve now got a much better idea, thanks to research that has pinned down where in the brain this taste processing happens. Step forward: the insular cortex. Already thought to be responsible for everything from motor control to

A sunken ship found in the Nile river may have lain undisturbed for over 2,500 years, but now it is finally ponying up its secrets. Scientists think that this ship has revealed a structure whose existence has been debated for centuries. In fragment 2.96 of Herodotus’ Histories, published around 450 BCE, the Ancient Greek historian –

Birth order, according to conventional wisdom, molds personality: Firstborn children, secure with their place in the family and expected to be the mature ones, grow up to be intellectual, responsible and conformist. Younger siblings work harder to get their parents’ attention, take more risks and become creative rebels. That’s the central idea in psychologist Frank

The human capacity for language divides our species from the rest of the animal kingdom. Language has not only allowed us to conquer all corners of the globe, but to devise writing, mathematics and all things thereafter. But researchers can find many of language’s basic design features in the communication systems of other animals. For

We already knew China kept a close eye on its population, monitoring everything from their spending habits to their social interactions. Now we know someone in the nation is also tracking which female citizens are “breedready”, a term apparently used to signal that a woman is likely able to have children – and the disturbing

Death metal has a reputation. Its lyrics and imagery revel in a stomach-churning zone of ultra-violence, profanity, and torment. We’re talking crushed skulls. Slit throats. Mutilated everythings and violated etceteras. What kind of effect does this nightmarish barrage have on people who listen to the music? According to new research by psychologists from Macquarie University

Love them or hate them, traffic laws exist to keep people safe and to help vehicles flow smoothly. And while they aren’t legally enforceable, pedestrian traffic also tends to follow its own set of unwritten rules. Most pedestrians use walking etiquette as a way to minimize discomfort – “Oops! Sorry to bump you!” – and

When bad things happen, we don’t want to remember. We try to block, resist, ignore – but we should perhaps be doing the opposite, researchers say. A new study led by scientists in Texas suggests the act of intentionally forgetting is linked to increased cerebral engagement with the unwanted information in question. In other words,

It was a chance encounter that neither man nor beast was fully prepared for. Wildlife photographer Rainer Schimpf was simply swimming along, filming a sardine run off the coast of South Africa, when suddenly, the sea began to churn. “I was trying to get a shot of a shark going through the bait ball,” Schimpf said in

It’s not always easy to work out percentages in your head, but a simple maths trick being shared on Twitter can make it incredibly easy to perform difficult or unwieldy mathematical calculations on the spot. Described as a “fascinating little life hack” by UK-based copywriter Ben Stephens, the trick involves doing a simple number swap

Alcatraz has a pretty well stocked history. The relatively small island has been home to an important lighthouse, become a military fortification, and eventually a prison to hold the likes of Al Capone and George “Machine Gun” Kelly. It was occupied by ‘Indians of All Tribes’ in the 1960’s and today is a huge tourist

A little bit of knowledge can go straight to your head, and not in a good way. New research has found that those who only read snippets of their Facebook newsfeed often think they know more than they actually do. By glancing through article previews, instead of reading the full piece, many users overestimate their

Luis Un was just a boy when he first visited the cave. It was 1966, and farmers had stumbled upon the hidden cavern by chance. They alerted a prominent Mexican archaeologist, who promptly sealed the entrance. Decades passed, the strange place was forgotten. But not by Luis Un. Last year, Un, now a 68-year-old, led

Scientists have uncovered grisly, chilling evidence of the largest known mass sacrifice of children in the history of the New World. In a new study, an international team reports the discovery of a shocking ritualistic slaughterhouse in ancient Peru: a mass killing that took place in the 15th century, claiming the lives of over 140

We all want more time to spend doing things we enjoy. But according to Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans, we aren’t doing the one thing that can afford us more time: spending money to eliminate our most stressful daily or weekly tasks. During a podcast with the Harvard Business Review’s Curt Nickisch, Whillans says

A chunk of a Denisovan skull has been identified for the first time – a dramatic contribution to the handful of known samples from one of the most obscure branches of the hominin family tree. Paleoanthropologist Bence Viola from the University of Toronto will discuss the as-yet-unpublished discovery at the upcoming meeting of the American

Neanderthals have a reputation they do not deserve. Hunched over and hairy, these ancient hominins are often depicted as primitive and uncultured, resembling apes more than us. But a mounting body of evidence suggests that, in reality, we share more similarities than differences. And one of the most famous features of Neanderthals is actually wrong.

It’s hard to say exactly why you like someone. Maybe it’s their goofy smile; maybe it’s their razor-sharp wit; or maybe it’s simply that they’re easy to be around. You just like them. But scientists generally aren’t satisfied with answers like that, and they’ve spent years trying to pinpoint the exact factors that draw one

How many times have you thought about starting a company, taking a year out to write that novel or leaving a loveless relationship but ended up doing nothing about it? A fear of regret – which is a powerful driver of maintaining the status quo in our lives – may be to blame. As research

The first thing you’d see if a nuclear bomb exploded nearby is a flood of light so bright, you may think the Sun blew up. Wincing from temporary blindness, you’d scan the horizon and see an orange fireball. The gurgling flames would rise and darken into a purple-hued column of black smoke, which would turn in

Deadly tensions between India and Pakistan are boiling over in Kashmir, a disputed territory at the northern border of each country. A regional conflict is worrisome enough, but climate scientists warn that if either country launches just a portion of its nuclear weapons, the situation might escalate into a global environmental and humanitarian catastrophe. On February

The tanned skins of mummies prove humans have been pushing pigments into the skin to create tattoo art for many thousands of years. Unfortunately not all cultures leave such perfectly preserved canvasses for us to study. Now, a tool discovered decades ago in Utah provides solid evidence that the Ancestral Pueblo people indigenous to the

History hasn’t left us with the best impression of the Roman emperor Nero. Depending on who you ask, he was a tyrant who robbed the throne of dignity or a narcissist who taxed the masses heavily for self-gratification. Maybe all of the above. Then there’s his face. Hey, nobody looks sexy when squished into a

People who believe in conspiracy theories might be more likely to engage in petty crime, and no, this is not a conspiracy. A new study from researchers at the University of Kent and Staffordshire University in the UK has demonstrated a link between this type of thinking and how people feel about, uh, not acting

It was the most explosive scientific controversy of 2018: Chinese scientist He Jiankui brazenly announced in November he had created the world’s first gene-edited babies using CRISPR. He’s admission – including that twin girls called Lulu and Nana from his experiment had already been born – provoked immediate international uproar in the scientific community, with critics

Never before in American history had so many people received a text message at the exact same time. It was bearing grave, unthinkable, catastrophic news – and it wasn’t even true. A little over a year ago, this is what more than a million people in Hawaii saw on their phones, television screens, and flashing

For centuries, the pyramids of Giza have puzzled researchers – not just their mysterious voids and hidden chambers, but exactly how ancient Egyptians built such impressive structures without modern technology. One of the most confounding issues is how the structures became so perfectly aligned. Although it’s slightly lopsided, overall the square sides of the 138.8 metre (455

We might have a new contender for the youngest person to ever achieve nuclear fusion. Tennessee teenager Jackson Oswalt is not your average 14-year-old. While other kids are playing video games or watching TV, he’s been busy putting together a nuclear laboratory in an old playroom in his house. The budding nuclear engineer has been

After several years of controversy and debate, researchers in Sweden are more convinced than ever that female Viking warriors once existed. Re-examining a contentious discovery from 2017, the researchers have again determined that the ancient Birka skeleton, found in a 10th-century Viking warrior tomb, did, in fact, belong to a biological female. “The buried person has

For those of us outside the conspiracy, the idea that Earth is flat is so ridiculous, the people who believe it are easy to make fun of. But on forum groups, in YouTube comments, and in person at conferences, flat-Earthers are deadly serious. And one of the biggest sources for renewed interest in flat Earth

Almost a century ago, British geologist and archaeologist Herbert Henry Thomas provocatively claimed he knew where Stonehenge’s famous rocks came from. While his findings and methods have since been disputed, it turns out Thomas was almost right – with new results from a painstaking eight-year excavation project finally identifying where the mysterious megaliths originated. A

Something inexplicable has been going on at the Grand Canyon museum, and the truth is stranger than fiction. It all started in March of 2018, when the teenage son of a park employee was testing out their Geiger counter in the museum collection room. As the young radiation enthusiast was wandering around the space, they

We finally have real evidence about what microdosing psychedelic drugs does to your brain. Long advocated by people who claim that a teensy daily dose of LSD helps them with their high-pressure jobs, microdosing has been shown to reduce depressive symptoms and stress while boosting focus and levels of neuroticism, according to research published in

It was a cold and hazy afternoon when Travis Kauffman set out on a scenic run through the foothills of the Rocky Mountains in northern Colorado. The 31-year-old runner told reporters that he ran up a nature trail earlier this month near Fort Collins and made his way to the top to take in the

The Pinna-Brelstaff illusion is tremendous fun: concentric rings of shapes, with inverse shading. When you move your head closer to or farther from the illusion, the rings appear to rotate, expand, and contract (go ahead, we’ll wait while you try this with the picture above). We know the shading effect plays a role in tricking our brains

Thousands of years ago, an ancient hominin strode through a sand dune, leaving footprints behind. Most of these marks were lost to the ravages of the years, but one was preserved as the sand hardened to stone. That print, scientists have now determined, may have been made by a Neanderthal on the island of Gibraltar.

There’s been a recent increase globally in outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases. This can be seen in recent measles outbreaks in parts of the world where it was thought to have been eradicated. This has prompted the World Health Organisation to list “vaccine hesitancy” (the reluctance or refusal to vaccinate despite the availability of vaccines) as

There’s an old saying, “When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on.” In other words, before you give up, take matters into your own hands and try a little harder. As a psychology researcher, I believe this adage applies to relationships, too. Before you let go, look

The British Columbia Coroners Service has asked the public to help identify a foot found in West Vancouver, on the shores of the Salish Sea. It might sound like a gruesome find at first,  but it’s actually a surprisingly common occurrence in these parts. Detached human feet in various states of decay have been appearing

The life of a sperm isn’t easy. From cervix to egg, the female reproductive tract puts these tiny swimmers through an obstacle course of doom. It’s like being forced into a haunted house where the only way out is forward. At every turn there are more ways to die: bathed in acid, tangled in mucus, attacked

It’s the start of a new year, which means it’s time for another stern talking to from Harrison Ford. Speaking at the World Government Summit in Dubai this week, the 76-year-old actor and climate activist practically begged us to stop electing people who don’t understand science. “All of us whether rich or poor, powerful or powerless,

Humans have a need to leave a legacy behind us when we pass on. For some, that might mean inspiring an entire region to build massive rock structures, such as Stonehenge. New research suggests the megaliths littering ancient Europe weren’t conceived independently, but were all influenced by the work of a single hunter-gatherer community that lived in

All the war, conflict, and misery that has beset civilisation for centuries and longer may lead you to think human society is tragically defined by a constant clash of irreconcilable cultures. Not so, according to a new study, which in fact found startling and optimistic evidence to the contrary: all cultures are actually bound by

Nobody knows who she was, just that she was different: a teenage girl from over 50,000 years ago of such strange uniqueness she looked to be a ‘hybrid’ ancestor to modern humans that scientists had never seen before. Only now, researchers have uncovered evidence she wasn’t alone. In a new study analysing the complex mess

It’s one of the weirdest, most magical-seeming tricks there is: the ability to instantly transform hot, boiling water into an icy mist in the blink of an eye. This bizarre demonstration of what’s called the Mpemba effect might seem like sorcery, but just because you can impressively fling hot, scalding water into the sky above

We’re not sure why it happened. Even ‘when’ is a topic of ongoing debate. But at some point, for some reason, our brains got big. There are plenty of hypotheses as to how we got here, but to find supporting evidence we need experiments on the brains of chimpanzees and humans, which involves practical (not to

There’s a saying in medicine: You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead. Turns out it applies to cats, too. The polar vortex was raging in the Upper Midwest last week, and temperatures had dropped below zero on the morning of Jan. 31 in the city of Kalispell, Mont., near Glacier National Park. Fluffy —

The amount of close and comforting contact that young infants get doesn’t just keep them warm, snug, and loved. A 2017 study says it can actually affect babies at the molecular level, and the effects can last for years. Based on the study, babies who get less physical contact and are more distressed at a