We Have Concerns

Psychologists have reported in Child Development that when four- to six-year-olds pretended to be Batman while they were doing a boring but important task, it helped them to resist distraction and st…

It’s usually OK to be proud of your work and lend your name to it. But most people would draw the line at signing their initials into the flesh of internal organs. Not Dr. Simon Bramhall of the UK, a…

Squirrels can bury up to 10,000 nuts annually, many of which they do go back and find. A recent study on cognition in the journal Royal Society Open Science examines how fox squirrels keep track of …

Engineers at MIT have developed a temporary tattoo that’s 3-D printed with living ink. The tattoo is made up of bacterial cells that are genetically programmed to light up when exposed to different t…

Two neuroscientists at the University of Rochester say they have managed to introduce information directly into the premotor cortex of monkeys. Anthony and Jeff discuss the idea of injecting informa…

According to a new study in the journal PeerJ, the interior surfaces of the 17-year-old, 250-mile-high, airtight International Space Station harbor at least 1,000 and perhaps more than 4,000 microbe …

In a study published in Geophysical Research Letters earlier this year, Roger Bilham of the University of Colorado and Rebecca Bendick of the University of Montana predict that, because of Earth’s sl…

Rather than go with realistic methods of death, many films contain unbelievable movie death scenes that viewers accept as possible because they have been shown so many times. These movie death myths …

Ten of the 12 water companies in the UK have admitted they are still using the practice of water dowsing despite the lack of scientific evidence for its effectiveness. Jeff and Anthony discuss why a…

A small cluster of stem cells in the brain seems to help mice stay young, and injecting extra stem cells helps them live longer. The hypothalamus, which releases hormones that affect other organs, se…

According to new linguistic analysis published in the journal Public Understanding of Science, even scientists who write about public comprehension of scientific ideas overwhelmingly conflate the ter…

We’ve known about zombie ants for some time. These are ants infected with the parasitic fungus, O. unilateralis, which takes over their bodies amd moved them around like a zombie. This fungus is of…

Scientists can grow miniature versions of human brains — called organoids — in the lab, but during the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience two teams of scientists presented previously unp…

Swallowed by a sinkhole. Washed away by a mudflow. Drowned after falling through thin ice. These are the fates that many unlucky mammoths suffered in Siberia thousands of years ago. Their well-prese…

Nathaniel Hoyle of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, UK, and his team have been investigating how the time of day affects wound healing, after they discovered that cuts and burns seem…

Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza—one of the wonders of the ancient world, and a dazzling feat of architectural genius—contains a hidden void at least a hundred feet long. The void is the first large inn…

Brain scans have revealed that when your mind wanders, it switches into “autopilot” mode, enabling you to carry on doing tasks quickly, accurately and without conscious thought. Jeff and Anthony dis…

Marine biologists from the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Portsmouth in the UK published a study on the feeding preferences of nudibranches, a kind of sea slug that might be target…

Behold! It is the 500th episode of We Have Concerns! Since that is a nice, round number, Anthony and Jeff take an episode to answer some listener questions and reflect on how the hell they got here…

According to researchers in New York, a person’s brain is still active after death, meaning in many cases they can be aware that they’ve passed away. Anthony is, of course fascinated with this, and …