In a crisis, the smartest person in the room often looks calm. Is that cool head a lack of feeling, or a different kind of empathy at work? A new review in the journal Intelligence argues that highly intelligent people are not inherently more tenderhearted, they are more likely to lean on thinking rather than feeling when they empathize. The authors, drawing on research in executive control and social cognition, suggest that many high-IQ individuals default to…

LLMs Are Easy To Trick. In Medicine, That Can Be Deadly. A famous drug disaster is back as a test case, and it exposes a deeper problem with how we are deploying generative AI in health Picture a worried patient, late at night, copy pasting a paragraph from a forum into a health chatbot and asking if a drug is safe in pregnancy.

The lab is quiet until the faces appear. One after another, women’s portraits flash on the screen. A group of men rate them, decide whether they’d want to date them, then watch as someone treats each woman fairly or unfairly in a simple money-splitting game. Half the men have rubbed a hormone gel into their skin a few hours earlier. The difference it makes is not just about lust.

What if the way to help a weak eye is to switch it off, briefly, then let the brain reintroduce it to the world? In a small lab room filled with quiet electronics and blinking LEDs, researchers at MIT’s Picower Institute did something that sounds like a prank the nervous system should not fall for. They temporarily silenced the retina…

Policy loves round numbers. Biology does not. The neatest myth in modern drug debates is that brains "finish" at 25. It’s a tidy line for lawmakers, a mantra for public campaigns — and, as two substance-use researchers argue, a fiction that risks bad policy. Bryon Adinoff, an addiction psychiatrist at the University of Colorado, and Julio Nunes, a Yale psychiatry resident, recently published a perspective in the…

The whale was already dead when the polar bear found it. The photos that followed — a colossal bear, cheeks slicked with blubber, tongue peeking out like a satisfied thief — ricocheted around the internet as a celebration of chonk. It reads as a happy ending. It is also a complicated one. The images, made near Norway’s high Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, show a bear in extraordinary condition.

It starts with a small exception, a harmless tweak. Then someone says, if we allow this today, what will we say no to tomorrow? Few arguments travel faster in politics than the slippery slope, and few are as polarizing. A new wave of research claims conservatives are more likely than liberals to find such arguments logically sound, attributing the gap to reliance on intuitive thinking.

The cursor blinks. A chat box on the left, a draft on the right. Ideas flow, phrasing improves, citations appear with a keystroke. It feels like good work. It is also, according to new research from MIT, a kind of borrowing from the future. The viral headline said AI “reprograms the brain” and causes “cognitive decline.” That is not what the study shows.

The map of American longevity may be hiding in plain sight on your nightstand. In the county where you live, the average number of hours people sleep helps predict how long your neighbors will live. That is the arresting headline from new work out of Oregon Health & Science University, which reports that communities with more insufficient sleep tend to have shorter life expectancies.

Walk down a quiet side street a few minutes from the Brandenburg Gate, past embassy blocks and the rippling field of the Holocaust Memorial, and you will find it: a patch of gravel behind an apartment complex, some cars, a scraggly tree. No statue. No flame. No gift shop. Yet beneath this unremarkable lot once sat the most notorious room in Europe.

On crisp evenings in the 1700s, respected astronomers pointed small refractors at a glaring white lantern in the west and swore they saw a tiny companion flitting beside it. They gave it a name, sketched orbits by candlelight, and argued in journals. Then the companion stopped showing up. There is no confirmed moon of Venus, and that is the more interesting story.

Two people open ChatGPT. One asks it to map Earth’s mass extinctions and correlate them with CO2 and temperature. The other asks for a bedtime plan that finally breaks a 2 a.m. habit. Only one walks away impressed. Same model. Different job. The argument that “less intelligent people are more impressed by ChatGPT” is a tempting dunk. It is also lazy.

DOGE promised trillions, delivered chaos and a bill to taxpayers Inside the efficiency crusade that inflated savings, sidelined oversight, and may have cost more than it saved The checks never arrived. For months, supporters floated a catchy idea, the “DOGE Dividend”, a taxpayer rebate fueled by a blitz of cost-cutting from the Department of Government Efficiency. But by the time DOGE was quietly dissolved ahead of schedule, the only thing most Americans had in hand was a longer wait at the Social Security office and a nagging question: what did it actually save?

The plaque at Port Arthur is quiet. The politics around it is not. For a generation, Australia has been held up as the world’s tidy case study in gun control: tragedy, decisive action, problem solved. The story is potent because it is simple. The data, as usual, is not. In the weeks after the 1996 massacre, Canberra and the states struck the…

Somewhere in a wind-carved gully in Morocco, a 315,000-year-old face looks back at us. The bones from Jebel Irhoud, reanalyzed in 2017, pushed the origins of Homo sapiens deeper in time and, crucially, anchored that story on African ground. That is the quiet power behind an oft-repeated line: Africa is the only continent with fossils of our species and its ancestors at every key stage of human evolution.

You sneeze at spring, your kid swells up with peanut butter, your friend suddenly cannot take acetaminophen. The through line is not bad luck. It is a highly trainable immune system that sometimes studies the wrong flashcards. Allergies feel arbitrary from the outside, yet inside the body they follow a script. The immune system, tuned to detect parasites and poisons, meets something harmless like pollen or peanut protein.

The press room in Brussels has a particular quiet before the lights come up. On Friday, it was the sound of another shoe dropping. Three months after a multi‑billion euro hit to Google’s advertising empire, the European Commission handed Elon Musk’s X a 120 million euro fine for breaching the bloc’s online content rules. No throat clearing, no apology. Just the steady rhythm of a regulator that believes history is on its side.

Your brain does not carry a NIST‑traceable thermometer. It does something stranger. From birth, without ever seeing a Celsius scale, you stabilize around a narrow thermal zone where your chemistry works best, sweating and shivering in a choreography you never consciously learned. That is why the folk memory of “normal” as 98.6 °F persists, even though it was never a magic number.

The joke wrote itself. “AI, Actually Indians.” Variations of that punchline ricocheted around the internet after a viral post claimed a buzzy startup, lavishly funded by Microsoft and SoftBank, had no artificial intelligence at all, just 700 engineers in India furiously typing behind the curtain. It was a perfect meme for the moment, combining suspicion of tech hype with the oldest illusion in computing, the human inside the machine.

In late 1984, a 21-year-old George Michael shut himself inside a London studio, dialed up a drum machine, stacked glittering synths, and built a Christmas classic almost entirely by hand. No committee. No outside songwriters. Just a young pop star with something slightly sad to say about love, and the confidence to do it all himself. “Last Christmas” wasn’t just performed by George Michael — it was…

In waiting rooms across Australia, people in their 30s are telling a story doctors did not expect to hear for another two decades. Blood in the stool. Unexplained weight loss. Persistent fatigue. Then the diagnosis comes, and the calendar suddenly reorganises itself around treatment. Australia has grown used to leading the world in some forms of cancer prevention, from HPV vaccination…

Why Neanderthal Mothers Left No Mitochondrial Trace Today Sex bias, chance, and a quiet genetic coup

The timer beeps, the bar returns to its rack, and something subtle shifts. Breathing steadies. Words feel easier to find. Decisions come faster. If you have ever noticed that your mind seems crisper after lifting weights, a new study gives that sensation scientific backing. Inside the lab, a simple question Researchers set out to test whether a single bout of moderate intensity resistance exercise could sharpen key mental abilities in the short term.

Under a microscope in a Texas lab, tired human cells brightened as their energy returned. The spark did not come from a drug or a gene edit. It came from a fresh supply of mitochondria, the tiny power units that keep cells alive. Biomedical engineers at Texas A&M University report they have found a way to coax healthy donor cells to manufacture extra mitochondria, then share the surplus with nearby cells that are damaged or old.

The Island That Ate Itself: Nauru’s Highs and Ruin From the ring road you can look inland and see a jagged forest of limestone spires, chalk white under the equatorial sun. Locals call the plateau Topside. It was once a canopy of pandanus and palm. Today it looks like a set of broken teeth, a landscape mined so thoroughly that most of the island’s heart is uninhabitable.