Science

Three days after Jenna Tocatlian saw Taylor Swift perform at Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, she was still on cloud nine. But something felt weird when she tried to relive the memories: in her mind, where vivid specifics of the concert should have been playing on loop, there was just a blank space.T

For us humans, our home planet of Earth is about as perfect as it gets. This shouldn’t be surprising since we evolved here, and natural selection made sure that we were well adapted to the environment.

Most real numbers are unknown—even to mathematicians.

Some 252 million years ago, it was a disastrous time to be alive. Erupting supervolcanoes destabilized ecosystems, plunging the planet’s living things into a series of extinctions over the course of a million years and permanently changing life on Earth.

Consciousness, our experience of being in the world, is one of the mind’s greatest mysteries, but as the neuroscientist Anil Seth explains to Steven Strogatz, research is making progress in understanding this elusive phenomenon.

Ninety-nine years before I was born, Alice James collapsed. She was nineteen years old in 1868, two years younger than I would be when illness took me under.

It’s tempting to think of purchasing plastic cups labeled as compostable or using plastic cutlery made of biodegradable materials as a better choice for the environment—but there are a lot of complexities at play.

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Long before humanity learned to write, stories were told about spirits and demons and things that go bump in the night. Similar stories are told today involving religious beliefs, extrasensory perception, auras, miracles, and ghosts, just to name a few.

Using artificial intelligence, researchers say, they’ve found a new type of antibiotic that works against a particularly menacing drug-resistant bacteria.