Part map, timeline, and image archive, https://www.rovers.land puts a fun interface together to view the Mars Curiosity rover.
Category: Science
Do anything related to science biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc
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Tripping on tomatoes
Scientists have created a breed of tomatoes that contain psychoactive properties.
The breakthrough could lead to more sustainable and scalable production of these compounds by using model plants to biosynthesize common psychedelic “tryptamines,” such as psilocybin from hallucinogenic mushrooms, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) from plants, and psychoactive compounds secreted by the Sonoran Desert toad.
Eventually, this research could pave the way toward—as one example—tomato plants that contain microdoses of psychedelic cocktails in each fruit. However, the study’s authors emphasized that these modified plants would need to be limited to medical use in clinical settings, and should not be accessible to consumers for recreation.
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Selena Gomez Oreos trapping possums
In New Zealand, opossums are an invasive species. Selena Gomez Oreos are helping locals trap the critters.
“We wanted to try something that we could do in the field that mimicked the effect of a psychoactive drug,” Hickling explains. “And that’s when I came across this psychological paper which suggested that a combination of fat and sugar was quite addictive.” That finding, combined with a US study on rats that used Oreo cookies, sent Hickling down to the local New World. “It just so happened that they had these Selena Gomez Oreos, which I hadn’t even heard of. They had both cinnamon and chocolate, which possums like, and they were on sale.”
Hickling estimates he bought 20 packets of Selena Gomez Oreos for the trial, and soon was out in the field in Leeston attaching the cookies along the planks that lead up to the possum traps. “One of the things that’s nice about an Oreo is that you can just drill a little hole through it and just tap it on with a flathead nail,” he says. “People have tried to use Tim Tams in the past, but they are really expensive. Oreos are quite a bit cheaper, and they actually stand up to the rain quite well too, which is a little disconcerting.”
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Maybe Ozempic can fight addictions
There is growing research that Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs may help fight addiction.
People struggling with many addictions, ranging from opioids to gambling, are reporting similar experiences in clinics, on social media and around dinner tables. None of them started these drugs to quit. This pattern of people losing their cravings across a broad range of addictive substances has no precedent in medicine.
But my patients were giving me an important clue. People taking GLP-1 drugs often talk about “food noise” vanishing: the constant mental chatter about food that dominated their days simply goes quiet. But my patients were reporting that it wasn’t just food: They were noticing that the preoccupation with smoking, drinking and using drugs that drives people back despite their best intentions to stop was going quiet too.
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Light exposure affects heart disease chances
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.
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Chocolate isn’t what it used to be
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.
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Controlling your dreams
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.”
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Smart slime mold
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.
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The K Shaped Economy
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.”
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Origami inspires new structural design
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.