Ross Pomeroy
All animals sleep — and scientists are still struggling to understand why
All animals sleep, even the diminutive roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans. Tinkering scientists have tried to genetically engineer the act out of ...
What can our eyes reveal about sexual orientation?
Through our eyes, the world is revealed. But can our eyes also reveal ourselves? In particular, the pupil, the black ...
Dismissing sizable sustainability benefits, organic industry petitions USDA to block hydroponics from being classified as organic
Organic food producers, which eschew synthetic pesticides for "natural" ones, regularly market their products as more sustainable than conventional offerings, but they're not ...
Viewpoint: Why are misconceptions about transgender youth so widespread? Maybe too many people listen to misinformed pundits like FOX’s Tucker Carlson
[Fox News pundit Tucker Carlson has] repeatedly mangled and misrepresented the science on gender dysphoria and transgender youth. ... "There ...
‘Auto-activation deficit’: The curious cases of people hard wired to react but not act
One day, a lively and successful businessman was bitten by a wasp, triggering an unexpected encephalopathy of the brain. Afterwards, he ...
Pigs are ‘hot’ as family pets. Are they as social as dogs?
Pork is now the most widely eaten meat in the world. At the same time, owing to the creation of novel, smaller ...
Viewpoint: The failure of corn-powered cars – How America’s ethanol subsidies boosted food prices and carbon emissions
E-15 is only available at about 2 to 3% of gas stations in the United States, so for those unaware, it means ...
There are a lot of psychopaths amongst us… and some of them are gifts to society
As a happily married family man and a successful neuroscientist at the University of California-Irvine, [James] Fallon didn't exactly fit ...
COVID = Less sex and more porn
In a recent paper published to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, [professor of media psychology and design Nicola] Döring explored a few of ...
What is the slippery notion of ‘consciousness’?
As humans, we know we [are conscious] but haven't a clue how it arises. It's a facet of intelligent life ...
Powerful psychedelic drug ibogaine could help people kick opioid addictions
Somewhere around two million Americans suffer from opioid-related substance use disorder. Treatments like buprenorphine and methadone calm the brain circuits affected by opioids, reducing ...
‘Spoken language doesn’t leave fossils’: Did human’s ability to speak arise in an instantaneous hominin mutation?
Linguist Noam Chomsky suggested that a mutation in a single ancient ancestor gave rise to human language today ...
Afraid of glyphosate and other synthetic pesticides? You eat 10,000 times more of the natural ones made by plants
Fruits and vegetables have evolved thousands of built-in pesticides chemically similar to the ones created in labs ...
How did early humans avoid being wiped out by tuberculosis?
Tuberculosis is responsible for as many as one billion deaths in the last 200 years alone, but its murderous history ...
First plants didn’t evolve flower color to attract pollinators, study suggests
Flowering plants feature a wondrous array of colors, the primary purpose of which is to attract insect pollinators. But this ...
Ancient Egyptians loved beer. Here’s the recipe they used to brew it
The ancient Egyptians loved beer. According to Mohamed A. Farag, a Professor of Chemistry at The American University in Cairo: ...
Too many carbs, calories? Nope. Lack of fiber biggest problem with American diets
Ask Americans about what they think is the biggest problem with their diets and you'll probably hear a variety of ...
Viewpoint: 5 popular Netflix documentaries serve up pseudoscience about agriculture, chemicals and nutrition
Netflix brought in $15.8 billion in revenue in 2018 in part because the streaming service floods subscribers with a deluge ...
Podcast: ‘Artificial womb’ raises awkward ethical questions about abortion, child welfare and health freedom
Biotechnology is fundamentally changing food and medicine. Thanks to genetic engineering, for example, we have access vitamin-fortified GMO crops, plentiful ...
As arguments rage over the sources of transgender identity, science weighs in
Discussing gender dysphoria and brain differences in transgender populations ...
Mimicking brain death: The danger of overdosing on this muscle relaxer
In a new case report, Turkish doctors from Dokuz Eylul University present a curious case of drug intoxication mimicking brain ...
Controversial theory linking herpes to Alzheimer’s bolstered by study
An outside-the-box theory received new attention in an extensive study published [June 21] to the journal Neuron. Researchers based out of the Icahn ...
Big data meets taxonomy: Classifying animal species with ‘DNA barcoding’
[T]axonomy – the science of classifying organisms – would be so much easier if life forms came with barcodes… Interestingly enough, ...
Do ‘brain training’ games actually help kids’ cognitive skills?
In just 13 years, brain training has sprouted from a fledgling industry to a behemoth projected to be worth as much ...
Reproductive warfare: Do infertile ‘kamikaze sperm’ thwart rival males?
In the 1990s, biologist Robin Baker put forth the idea that a significant proportion of human sperm are not actually capable of ...
Why we find ourselves at the limits of human lifespan
The 20th century was a period of unprecedented biological growth for our species. The average human lifespan increased from 31 years in ...
Obesity paradox explained? Why muscle mass may reduce risk of death
Nearly twenty years ago, researchers began noticing a curious paradox in health-focused studies: despite common wisdom that being overweight or obese is ...
GMO coffee is on the horizon—but will we drink it?
Remember the Gros Michel banana? If you're under the age of seventy, you probably don't. That's because in the 1950s ...
