Now We Know What It Feels Like to Be Invisible
First, Arvid Guterstam made himself invisible. When he looked down at his body, there was nothing there. He could feel he was solid; he hadn’t vanished into thin air. He even felt a paint brush tickle...
View ArticleHuman Head Transplant Proposed—How Did We Get Here?
Yes, in case you haven’t heard, a doctor in Italy has announced plans to transplant a guy’s head onto a new body two years from now. Sound nuts? Many of the headlines say so. “No, Human Head...
View ArticleThis Is What Happens When You Use Rat Poison: Flymageddon
I killed the rats in my basement ceiling. At the time, they were my biggest problem. Then I found myself in my car one night with the headlights aimed at my back door, hoping to lure a swarm of carrion...
View ArticleWorld’s Oldest Murder Mystery Was 430,000 Years in the Making
The first known murder was just as brutal as any other. The attacker smashed the victim twice in the head, leaving matching holes above the victim’s left eyebrow. The dead body was then dropped down a...
View ArticleInjecting Electronics Into Brain Not as Freaky as it Sounds
No need to wait for the cyborg future—it’s already here. Adding to a growing list of electronics that can be implanted in the body, scientists are working to perfect the ultimate merger of mind and...
View ArticleSurgeon Reveals Head Transplant Plan, But Patient Steals the Show
ANNAPOLIS, Md.—Valery Spiridonov looks impossibly small. He is dressed in all white, from his white button-down shirt to the white socks on his feet, which dangle at the ends of white pants and a white...
View ArticleShould You Put a Baby Bird Back in the Nest? Depends If It’s Cute
The first days of summer are here: long lazy days, the smell of cut grass… and baby birds falling out of trees. Every year, I see a new flock of people rescuing fallen birds, and then arguing on...
View ArticleEver Wonder What a Neanderthal Considered a Delicacy?
I suppose “Neanderthal delicacy” may sound like an oxymoron. Most people think of Neanderthals and other ancient people as cave men, brutes capable of little more than smashing and grunting. To the...
View ArticleThe Week’s Most Eerily Fascinating Stories
I can’t look away. That’s the mark of an eerily fascinating story, and this week served up a pile of them. Whether it’s the clown who scaled a cemetery fence in Chicago and then stood waving very, very...
View ArticleWhy Do We Sometimes Like To Smell Stinky Things?
When a corpse flower named Trudy bloomed last weekend, more than a thousand people lined up for a whiff of its “magnificent stink.” The giant blossom smells like a heady mix of rotting fish, sewage,...
View ArticleYes, Rats Can Swim Up Your Toilet. And It Gets Worse Than That.
They eat our food. They furnish their nests with our detritus. They chew through our sheet metal, our lead pipes and our concrete. They outsmart us at every turn. They are our shadow, our enemy, our...
View ArticleDo You Have a Face-Finding Superpower for Fighting Crime?
At a crowded tourist site, a young man in a yellow T-shirt angles for a spot on a bench. He sits, removes his backpack, and places it on the ground. After riffling through a blue plastic shopping bag,...
View ArticleOldest Decapitated Head in New World Found in ‘Vogue’ Pose
Archaeologists have unearthed the oldest case of decapitation ever found in the New World. The skull belonged to a young man and was buried in Brazil about 9,000 years old, with severed hands covering...
View ArticleBloodletting Is Still Happening, Despite Centuries of Harm
An illustration of a bloodletting, circa 1675. WELLCOME LIBRARY In the shadow of India’s largest mosque, the gutters run red with blood. It’s a bizarre scene, if you’ve never seen a modern-day...
View ArticleYou’re Surrounded by Bacteria That Are Waiting for You to Die
Antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus bacteria (yellow) killing and escaping from a human white blood cell. Photograph by NIAID You are filled with bacteria, and you are covered in them. And a...
View ArticleAre These Crime Drama Clues Fact or Fiction?
Steven Avery, featured in the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer, served 18 years in prison for rape before being exonerated by DNA in 2003. In 2007, he was convicted of murder, based partly on DNA...
View ArticleWATCH: Amazing Video Reveals Why Roaches Are So Hard to Squish
No door will stop them: American cockroaches can squeeze through a space just three millimeters high. Photo Credit Tom Libby, Kaushik Jayaram and Pauline Jennings. Courtesy of PolyPEDAL Lab UC...
View ArticleFlies Could Falsely Place Someone at a Crime Scene
The Australian sheep blowfly doesn’t just eat nectar. It has a taste for a particular human body fluid—and it’s not blood. CSIRO [CC BY 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons This might be the grossest science...
View ArticleButterflies Behaving Badly: What They Don’t Want You to Know
Small grass yellow butterflies feed on fresh elephant dung in Kenya’s Tsavo West National Park. Photograph by Nigel Pavitt, Getty Butterflies have had us fooled for centuries. They bobble around our...
View ArticleHow Do Women Deal With Having a Period … in Space?
Cat’s Eye Nebula NASA, ESA, HEIC, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA) Sally Ride’s tampons might be the most-discussed tampons in the world. Before Ride became the first American woman in space,...
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