Science

Did you just yawn reading the word yawn? For 20 years, science has argued that contagious yawning is really your brain cooling itself down.

Your brain is wired for remembering the unexpected: a new study shows why surprises stick and routines quietly disappear.

Astronomers have finally found the Milky Way black hole wind after a 50-year search, using ALMA and Chandra. Here’s how they did it.

A study of 5,800 genomes reveals your DNA follows fixed evolutionary highways, with no way back, dating to 600 million years ago.

Eating ice cream fast triggers a jolt of pain in your forehead — and it took science over a century to explain exactly why.

You slice into an onion, you’re not thinking about anything sad, and within thirty seconds you’re blinking like you just watched the end of a dog movie. It’s not you — it’s straight chemistry, and the onion has spent millions of years perfecting the trick. A biological weapon in every layer Onions don’t produce tear … Read more

It sounds like the tagline for a B-movie, but it’s real, peer-reviewed science: when your diet runs low on fiber, the bacteria living in your gut don’t just quietly starve. They switch menus. And the new main course is you — specifically, the thin layer of mucus that lines and protects the walls of your … Read more

Ever wondered why, exactly, ice is so treacherous underfoot? The explanation you probably picked up somewhere along the way — if you ever picked one up — turns out to be wrong. A recent study by German physicists has just knocked down a theory that had been treated as settled fact for almost 200 years. … Read more

For centuries, the dodo has been the official mascot of clumsiness. Its name became shorthand for “idiot” in more than one language, and the popular image is of a fat, cross-eyed, waddling bird that couldn’t even get out of the way of the sailors who wiped it out. Well, an international team of paleontologists just … Read more

Put your ear next to a cat purring away for a good long while. That little engine never gets tired, never loses the beat, and keeps running whether the cat is breathing in or breathing out. For decades, science assumed it knew why: the cat’s brain acted like a metronome, firing off 20 to 30 … Read more