We Have Concerns

Honeybees' role in pollination enables the production of at least 90 commercially grown crops, including apples, blueberries, melons and broccoli, but recently a dwindling bee population has led to c…

Studying its effects in the brain, researchers set out to genetically engineer mice that would be more prone to cocaine addiction. Instead, they created mice that appear impervious to it. Even afte…

Human activity has changed the ocean - rising temperatures and acidifying waters has caused fish populations of all kinds to dwindle. But not all creatures are adversely effected. New research shows…

Piaggio, the same company that created the Vespa scooter, has announced it will sell a robot called Gita, which is designed to carry and deliver your stuff around town. It will follow you, or move a…

Many different emotions have similar bodily symptoms. When we are angry, our pulses race, we breathe faster, we feel our faces flush, and our skin becomes sweaty, but when we are happily excited we a…

More than 80 years after it was predicted to be possible, a Harvard University team has finally managed to create metallic hydrogen. Why? For one thing, physicists predict that metallic hydrogen is a…

Extreme music – such as heavy metal – can positively influence those experiencing anger, a study by The University of Queensland has revealed. In contrast to previous studies linking loud and chaoti…

A very different kind of episode of We Have Concerns, this one was recorded live at the PAX South convention in San Antonio Texas, and consists entirely of questions from the audience. Thanks to eve…

The Austrian town of Saalfelden in the state of Salzburg is looking for someone to live in a nearby hermitage which was built more than 350 years ago in steep, rocky cliffs. So they put out an ad fo…

Scientists have created the first successful human-animal hybrids. The project proves that human cells can be introduced into a non-human organism, survive, and even grow inside a host animal, in thi…

Why do we, as humans, have a sense of self? One new theory is that a "self" actually contributes to a stronger and more robust group dynamic. In order for a group to be more capable of surviving, i…

Scientists have created bacteria that thrive using an expanded "genetic alphabet". The blueprint for all life forms on Earth is written in a code consisting of four "letters": A, T, C and G, which pa…

During WWII, there was a mathematician named Abraham Wald. Wald had an idea about allied bombers. Essentially, bombers were coming back after bombing runs with a lot of damage. Engineers were saying …

It's generally thought that the evolution of complex life was a rare, once-in-4.5-billion-years event. But new research suggests that conditions were right for complex cells to evolve and die off at …

Everything we eat is flooded with “virtual water,” or water used indirectly to produce food from cradle to grave. In fact, 70% of the world’s water consumption feeds the agriculture industry, and dem…

After exploring a virtual world, some people can’t shake the sense that the actual world isn’t real, either. Does the new technology of VR bring with it a new kind of depression? Anthony and Jeff d…

Plastic surgeon Stanley Jacobs was obsess with an ancient Egyptian text about surgery known as the Edwin Smith Papyrus. Particularly, a recipe at the back of the book, titled “Transforming an Old M…

Scientists have never been certain what the appendix used to do -- and if it is still, in fact, useless. On Jan. 9, a team of researchers led by scientists at Midwestern University Arizona College of…

As self-driving cars become the norm, road deaths due to driver error will begin to diminish. It’s a transformative advancement, but one that comes with consequences in an unexpected place: organ don…

A few years ago, three separate books were discovered in Harvard University's library that had particularly strange-looking leather covers. Upon further inspection, it was discovered that the smooth …