Psychology
Human
The universal psychology lane. Stories about how people relate to one another, themselves, and the world — written for readers who are curious about why we behave the way we do. Sister section to Space Psychology.
Human Behaviour
The grandparents of Okinawa, Japan, are among the longest-lived humans on Earth. Their grandchildren are dying younger than the rest of Japan. Within a single generation, one of the world's most famous longevity populations has collapsed, in a peer-reviewed finding that has overturned decades of assumptions about the secret to a long life
Human Behaviour
Approximately 10,000 years ago, teenagers in what is now western Sweden chewed wads of birch bark pitch and spat them out, and the saliva preserved in the wads contained enough human and microbial DNA that scientists have since sequenced the chewers' complete genomes, identified the food they had eaten that day, and detected the bacterial signature of their gum disease.
Human Behaviour
An email with the subject line "ILOVEYOU" infected 45 million computers in 24 hours after it was released in May 2000 — disabling email systems at the Pentagon, the CIA, and most of the world's largest corporations — and the 23-year-old Filipino college dropout who wrote it now runs a phone repair booth in Manila, never prosecuted because cybercrime was not yet illegal in the Philippines
Human Behaviour
A 2020 study in Sweden found that dogs can sense heat and thermal radiation with the tip of their nose — meaning they can detect a warm object across a room even with their eyes closed — making them only the second mammal on Earth known to possess this ability, alongside the vampire bat, which uses it to find blood vessels beneath the skin of sleeping prey
Human Behaviour
More than two-thirds of the world's people now live in countries having too few children to hold their populations steady — a quiet reversal, crossed gradually over the past two decades, that demographers say will reshape economies, cities and old age within a single lifetime.
Psychology
You can have a loving family, a close partner, and a dense network of friends, and still be measurably, scientifically lonely. The phenomenon is called emotional loneliness, and it was first described in 1973 by the American sociologist Robert Weiss, who showed that the absence of close attachment relationships cannot be compensated for by the presence of social ones
Human Behaviour
Nikola Tesla said he could build, improve, and operate machines in his mind before making them real, and the surprise is what that reveals about imagination — not fantasy or escape, but a private laboratory where the future sometimes arrives first, and not always accurately
Human Behaviour
In 1991, a hiker in the Italian Alps discovered the frozen body of a man who had been murdered approximately 5,300 years ago — with an arrow still embedded in his back — and modern analysis has since identified his last meal, his tattoos, and the genetic signatures of descendants still alive in Austria today
Human Behaviour
The FDA has added a new active ingredient to over-the-counter sunscreens for the first time in 20 years, and the reason bemotrizinol matters is not just regulation — it absorbs both UVA and UVB rays, offering U.S. formulas a tool many countries have had for years
Human Behaviour
In 1820, the whaleship Essex was rammed and sunk by an 85-foot sperm whale in the Pacific, leaving 20 men in three small boats 2,000 miles from land, and the survivors' decisions over the next 90 days would later inspire Herman Melville's Moby-Dick
Human Behaviour
The lining of the human stomach completely replaces itself every three to five days — one of the fastest-renewing tissues in the body — because the same hydrochloric acid that breaks down a tough steak is strong enough to dissolve the stomach wall itself, and continuous regeneration is one part of a layered defense system that keeps the acid from doing damage
Psychology
At eighteen, the human brain processes information faster than it ever will again. At sixty-seven, the same brain has acquired a vocabulary that will not begin to decline for another decade. The peer-reviewed evidence from a 48,537-person study has overturned the popular assumption that the human mind has a single peak.
Human Behaviour
The longest piece of music ever composed is being performed right now in a church in Germany — a piece designed to last 639 years, played on a special organ that holds each note for months or years at a time — and the performance, which began in 2001, is not expected to end until the year 2640
Psychology
People with the least competence in a given subject consistently rate themselves as the most competent — a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect, identified by Cornell psychologists in 1999 — in research that can quietly explain why the most confidently wrong people in any room are often the ones who know the least
Psychology