There is a popular rule of thumb about social media: scrolling in silence is bad for you, but posting and chatting is good.
Vitamin B12 is built only by bacteria and archaea — no plant, animal, or fungus can make it. The human liver hoards enough to last roughly three years, which is why deficiency hides for so long before it shows.
The liver, kidneys and pancreas together produce roughly one gram of creatine every day, and about 95% of the body's total creatine sits inside skeletal muscle — a closed loop that explains why the same 5-gram scoop of white powder produces wildly different results in different people.
An astronaut does not return to Earth as someone who has forgotten gravity. The problem is quieter than that.
For a long time, the most visible changes to astronauts in orbit were the obvious ones.
Every year around late October, a number surfaces again: 113 calories, apparently the amount you burn sitting through a horror film, roughly what a short walk would cost you.
The body feels like a fixed object because consciousness rides inside it without interruption.
The claim is easy to over-romanticise. The English coast has its postcard version: cliffs, beaches, wind, water, a horizon wide enough to make ordinary worries feel smaller.
In February 2021, Japan appointed Tetsushi Sakamoto as the world's second cabinet minister for loneliness, three years after Britain created the role. The move came after a pandemic-era surge in suicides, particularly among women, forced Tokyo to treat social isolation as a matter of state.
Leafcutter ants routinely haul loads 50 times their body weight — a scaling trick rooted in Galileo's square-cube law and a neck joint that can bear 5,000 times an ant's weight before failing.
Most explanations of American loneliness are explanations of character. People have forgotten how to talk to strangers.
A typical morning in Seoul is routed through a handful of family conglomerates before the commute is over.
In 1998, Japanese psychiatrist Tamaki Saito coined the term hikikomori for young people who withdraw completely from society, estimating over a million cases in Japan — a number later government surveys would confirm.
For most of her life, a western lowland gorilla named Koko was among the best-known non-human animals on the planet.
In May 1967 a single-file column of roughly 500 men and 300 mules stretched for more than a mile along a ridge in Shan State, hauling sixteen tons of raw opium toward a lumber town across the Mekong in Laos.
Show a mother a photograph of her own dog, then a photograph of her own child, slide her into an MRI scanner, and a good deal of what lights up looks the same.
