Do anything related to science biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc
A study that came out last year: light exposure affects heart disease chances.
Question Is personal light exposure at night associated with cardiovascular disease incidence?
Findings In this cohort study of 88 905 adults aged older than 40 years, exposure to brighter light at night was associated with higher risks of coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction, heart failure, atrial fibrillation, and stroke, independent of established cardiovascular risk factors.
Chocolate, at least in the United States, is becoming more of a flavor than an ingredient. That’s because the major companies are cutting costs and making chocolate products that taste like chocolate to some degree, however, are making a worse product.
From a consumer perspective, there are few things that portend a worse outcome than a company knowingly making its product worse in order to save a few bucks, and finding out that just as many customers will still buy it anyway. This scenario, in a nutshell (beanshell?) has been the dominant story in the world of chocolate for the last few years, with the enshittification of the entire segment the end result of crop failures and cocoa bean scarcity that sent the price of cocoa soaring to stratospheric heights in 2024 and 2025. More recently, those prices have steadily come back down to Earth, but guess what hasn’t changed back to how it was before? The chocolate. In fact, many of the world’s biggest sellers of chocolate-dependent treats are instead pushing forward on the embrace of cheaper replacements, increasingly convinced of the fact that consumers simply don’t know enough to notice or care. And they’re probably right.
Being able to control your dreams iis a fun idea, and maybe. there’s a way, but it’s not easy.
Although it is unclear why this occurred, pairing the sound stimuli with the learning task while they were awake may have activated memories of that puzzle when they heard the same noise during sleep. Known as targeted memory reactivation, this seems to trick the hippocampus – a brain region that is important for memory – by evoking what looks like a spontaneous reactivation of a memory. This may then influence what the hippocampus replays during sleep, enhancing learning.
Although dreams can occur at any time during the four stages of sleep, Konkoly thinks the targeting of REM may have enhanced the participants’ problem-solving prowess. “REM dreams are hyper-associative and bizarre. They mix new and old memories together, and even mix memories with fantastical imagination,” she says. “You have this brain that’s active [during this stage], but maybe with less inhibition, so you can reach farther into the corners of your mind.”
Scientists speculate that mold can learn by creating pathways to transfer fluid.
The result? Through studies like this, as Alim recounts in the Annual Review of Condensed Matter Physics, she has become convinced that the flow of fluid can be a way of transmitting information, and she’s working to understand the underlying mechanisms. Other researchers, meanwhile, are continuing to uncover new, intriguing behaviors in Physarum, a creature that appears able to learn, remember and make decisions — all without a brain.
The US economy is essentially being held together by increased funding from wealthy people, people who already have money to spend. This is causing companies, to cater exclusively to these customers, creating a K shaped economy.
A K-shaped economy describes an economic recovery where different groups or industries experience vastly different outcomes – some thrive and grow, while others struggle or decline. This term was intended to highlight the widening economic inequality during periods of recovery or downturn. It fits the saying, “the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.”
Miles Wu folded a variant of the Miura-ori pattern that can hold 10,000 times its own weight.
Sitting in his family’s living room in New York City, 14-year-old Miles Wu was astonished to find that a simple piece of paper, folded into a Miura-ori origami pattern, could hold 10,000 times its own weight. For a total of more than 250 hours, Wu had diligently designed, folded and tested copious variations of the technique—a series of tessellating parallelograms that can fold or unfold in one fell swoop—to find one that could be used to build deployable shelters for emergency situations like natural disasters.
“I was really shocked by how much [weight] these simple pieces of paper could hold,” says Wu, who’s currently a ninth-grade student at Hunter College High School in New York City.
I found myself nodding along to nearly everything in this article about why certain people can foresee collapse before others. Basically, it comes down to be able to see patterns.
Baron-Cohen’s work on hyper-systemising (2006) describes how autistic people naturally gravitate toward understanding structures, mechanisms, and causal patterns rather than social signalling. They notice inconsistencies, detect contradictions, and see what does not add up.¹
Collapse awareness begins here; with the realisation that the cultural story of infinite growth in a finite system fails even the most basic coherence test.
A cow using a stick to scratch an itch.
For a cow, Veronika has had what might be considered an idyllic life. She lives in a picturesque town in Austria, surrounded by snow-capped mountains and glacial lakes. She is a beloved family pet, rather than a production animal, and spends her days ambling through tree-lined pastures. And when she has an itch, she scratches it — by expertly wielding a stick.
Now, in a new study, Veronika has demonstrated even more advanced scratching skills, deploying different ends of a wooden broom to target different parts of her body. It is, scientists say, an example of flexible tool use, a behavior that is relatively rare in the animal kingdom. The paper, which was published in Current Biology on Monday, is the first scientific paper to describe tool use in cattle, which have not traditionally been celebrated for their smarts.
Pretty cool, a powder that stops bleeding:
KAIST scientists have created a fast-acting, stable powder hemostat that stops bleeding in one second and could significantly improve survival in combat and emergency medicine.
Severe blood loss remains the primary cause of death from combat injuries. To address this challenge, a research team at KAIST that included an active duty Army Major set out to develop a faster and more reliable way to stop bleeding.
Their work led to a next-generation powder-type hemostatic agent that can halt bleeding within one second when sprayed directly onto a wound, offering a potential breakthrough for saving lives on the battlefield.
A toothy prospect: being able to regrow teeth.
Japanese scientists have an experimental drug that may be able to successfully regrow teeth.
Teeth, however, are not bones. Although they’re made of some of the same stuff and are the hardest material in the human body (thanks to its protective layer of enamel), they lack the crucial ability to heal and regrow themselves. But that may not always be the case. Japanese researchers are moving forward with an experimental drug that promises to regrow human teeth. Human trials began in September 2024.