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Wider-faced politicians are seen as more corrupt
The volunteers were able to guess with significant accuracy which politicians were corrupt and which weren’t. The common denominator between the politicians who seemed guilty? A wide face, a trait that...
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Scientists discover what caused the worst mass extinction ever
While the demise of the dinosaurs gets more attention as far as mass extinctions go, an even more disastrous event called “the Great Dying” or the “End-Permian Extinction” happened on Earth prior to...
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Why are we so critical of ourselves after meeting someone new? Self-protection.
We tend to be defensive socially. When we meet new people, we’re often concerned with how we’re coming off. Our anxiety causes us to be so concerned with the impression we’re creating that we fail to...
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How NASA’s ICESat-2 will track ice changes in Antarctica, Greenland
Leaving from Vandenberg Air Force base in California this coming Saturday, at 8:46 a.m. ET, the Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite-2 — or, the “ICESat-2” — is perched atop a United Launch...
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What is the ‘pure carnivore diet’?
New on the diet “scene” is one called the ‘pure protein diet,’ the carnivore diet, and the zero-carb diet. It’s basically meat protein only — ignore the vegetables, fruits, and anything else that is...
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Stem cells help restore damaged teeth, new study finds
Half of all children suffer some kind of dental injury while young. Sometimes the damage isn’t to the baby teeth they will lose anyway, but to the permanent adult teeth lying below the gums that they...
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Early Halloween in this Greek town: 1,000-foot spiderweb
From video by Giannis Giannakopoulos In a phenomenon that can should only be in nightmares and Halloween horror films, stretch spiders have covered the beach of a Western Grecian island lagoon; it’s a...
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Major study: Drug overdoses over a 38-year period reveal hidden trends
Fentanyl bust BOSTON, MA – AUGUST 23: Bags of drugs are displayed on a table during a press conference held by the United States Attorney’s Office at the John Joseph Moakley United States Courthouse...
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Prime numbers aren’t so random after all
They’ve long fascinated mathematicians: prime numbers. They’re numbers indivisible by any number other than themselves or 1, and they occur ever-more randomly as numbers increase in value. As...
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Birds have plastic in their bellies via plastic-eating mosquito larvae
The problem of microplastics in aquatic environments is increasingly well known. Between the 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic in the ocean that animals are liable to eat, there is a lot of plastic...
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Study: How to give up your cake and eat it too
People may be nicer than you think. A new study says that people are generally willing to give up something they want to appear generous. Let’s say you’ve been circling the mall’s parking lot and ended...
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Mount Vesuvius eruption boiled people’s blood, made skulls explode
Residents of Herculaneum found in a “life-like” stance, rather than curled up, indicates near-instant death. PLOS One Archaeological dig Imagine living next to Mount Vesuvius in the 1st century, four...
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3 stunning ways Earth and spacetime could be destroyed
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s biggest scientific instrument, is also the planet’s most powerful particle accelerator. And that makes it a potential danger not just to itself or its...
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NASA spots perfectly rectangular icebergs in Antarctica
Photo: NASA Totally tabular These oddly perfect slabs are known as tabular icebergs, and they’re actually not that uncommon. They form when the edges of ice shelves break apart, and compared with the...
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NASA scientists are developing rocket fuel made from Martian soil
Scientists at NASA are working on a bit of alchemy that would greatly improve the chances of a mission headed there of actually returning. Otherwise, we’d have one of those desperately sad situations...
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Will humans form emotional bonds to robots? Probably — especially if they’re...
As we go about our everyday lives — miraculously getting out of bed, somehow trudging through work, deciding what to eat for dinner — one fact remains quietly on the backburner: The robots are, indeed,...
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Yale scientists restore cellular function in 32 dead pig brains
The image of an undead brain coming back to live again is the stuff of science fiction. Not just any science fiction, specifically B-grade sci fi. What instantly springs to mind is the black-and-white...
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Science in pop culture
Nothing like going head-to-head against the geography teacher’s son in the finals of the geography bee while the entire school watches. We each got the same questions. Crater Lake, North American...
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Understanding how ancient electrons began life on earth
When we think about the origins of life on Earth, we think mostly of biology and chemistry. Still, when we consider the initial “spark” of life, the conversation has to include physics, energy, and...
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Black holes caught eating neutron stars for first time
This article was originally published by our sister site, Freethink. Astronomers have observed a collision between a black hole and a neutron star for the first time — and then 10 days later, they...
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Ripples in Saturn’s rings give us a peek inside the planet
How can you tell what the inside of another planet is like? If it’s a rocky planet like Mars, we could have a lander place a seismometer on the surface and then build a model of what the Martian...
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Glow-in-the-dark milky seas of maritime lore really exist – satellite proves it
For centuries, sailors have been reporting strange encounters like the one below. “The whole appearance of the ocean was like a plain covered with snow. There was scarce a cloud in the heavens, yet the...
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What do Putin and Bieber have in common? A lot, if you think they look alike
Humans are so good at identifying faces that we see them in places where they do not exist, such as on the moon or Mars or in combinations of circles, line segments, and dots. It is a particularly...
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Clever wild boar brings rescue party to save young from a trap
There is a danger in attributing human-like motivations to animal behavior. We have no way, after all, of really knowing what is going on in a non-human’s mind. Controlled experiments can sometimes...
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Exoplanets with moons may be likelier to host life
Though Earth has only one (very special and precious) moon, the average planet in our solar system has 26 moons. (The range is from zero moons for Mercury and Venus to 82 moons for Saturn.) If the...
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What really happens when your foot goes to sleep?
Imagine you’ve just sat down to watch your favorite TV show. You decide to snuggle in with your legs crisscrossed because you find it more comfortable that way. When the episode ends, you try to stand...
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What happens when two different respiratory viruses infect the same cell?
Right now, there’s just one virus on everyone’s minds: SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. But humanity is plagued by many respiratory viruses, such as influenza A (IAV) and respiratory...
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Black or white? Ancient Egyptian race mystery now solved
Egyptologists, writers, scholars, and others, have argued the race of the ancient Egyptians since at least the 1970s. Some today believe they were sub-Saharan Africans. We can see this interpretation...
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Pizza math: For the best price, you should always order the biggest pie
Quick: How much bigger is a 16-inch pizza than an 8-inch pizza? If you answered twice the size, we may need to send you in for some remedial math. A 16-inch pizza is four times the size of the 8-inch...
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After death, you’re aware that you’ve died, say scientists
Time of death is considered when a person has gone into cardiac arrest, which is the cessation of the electrical impulse that drives the heartbeat. As a result, the heart locks up. This moment when the...
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