We Have Concerns

Virtual rabbits across Second Life will fall asleep and never wake up, now that the their digital food supply has been shut down by a legal battle. The player-made and player-sold Ozimals brand of di…

Researchers at Tilburg University in the Netherlands surveyed both scientists and highly educated nonscientists and asked them to rate the two categories of people in terms of objectivity, rationalit…

Fear, for the most part, is controlled by the brain’s amygdalae, but a team of researchers at University College Cork have discovered that the gut microbiome, that collection of bacteria that lives …

On October 30, 1919, Tony Pizzo arrived in New York City chained to his bicycle. He had pedaled 3,000 miles in five-and-a-half months, attached to his bike by a three-and-a-half-foot chain and handcu…

The Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Alberta, Canada recently unveiled what is perhaps the best-preserved dinosaur specimen ever unearthed. That’s because, 110 million years later, the bones …

When residents of other countries are asked “What’s a dead giveaway that someone is American?” one trait comes up over and over again: big, toothy grins. Why do Americans smile so much? Anthony and…

A huge fish covered in ‘tattoos’ has been caught in the Philippines. Where you would expect plain scales, the fish has intricate blue designs of a crown and a shield, lettering and entwined plant le…

An exhaustive comparison of Neandertals’ injuries to those of people today finds that water tubing and mishaps involving tables, result in top-heavy fracture patterns most similar to those observed o…

All mammals poop in 12 seconds and there’s an equation for the ‘duration of diarrheal defecation'. All this and more revealed in a new paper from Nobel Prize winning scientists from Georgia Tech. J…

A new paper by Kate Sweeny, psychology professor at the University of California, Riverside, argues there's an upside to worrying. Anthony, a professional-level worrier, agrees, but Jeff needs some …

Researchers have discovered that mole rats can survive for 18 minutes without oxygen. What is even more astonishing is how they manage it. The mole rats effectively become plants, altering their meta…

Scientist Federica Bertocchini of the Institute of Biomedicine and Biotechnology of Cantabria in Spain discovered a worm that eats plastic bags and leaves behind antifreeze. Jeff and Anthony discuss…

For a study published in the journal Nature Communications, researchers from Philadelphia suspended premature lambs, a close animal model for human fetuses, in a special bag filled with lab-made amni…

Researchers in the US say they've created a fluid with negative mass in the lab. What it means is that, unlike pretty much every other known physical object, when you push this fluid, it accelerates …

We don't always have a good sense of why we fight. What pushes us to the point of conflict, when we know it will make us unhappy? And why does it leave us feeling so glum afterward? Jeff and Anthony …

When we think of augmented reality face filters, we tend to think of goofy novelties like Halloween masks, face swapping, or inadvertent racist caricatures. But AR could go far beyond that, putting o…

A chicken embryo with a dinosaur-like snout instead of a beak has been developed by scientists. Is this a good thing or a terrifying thing? Jeff and Anthony are here to think it through.

GET BONUS …

Squids, cuttlefish and octopuses do not follow the normal rules of genetic information, according to research published in the journal Cell. Their RNA is extensively rewritten, particularly the codes…

Fed up with the theft of toilet paper from public bathrooms, tourist authorities in China's capital have begun using facial recognition technology to limit how much paper a person can take. Jeff and…

Architecture firm Clouds Architecture Office has proposed a building that, instead of being supported by the ground and reaching up into the sky, would instead hang suspended from an asteroid. Named …