It’s a good time to be interested in the brain. Neuroscientists can now turn neurons on or off with just a flash of light, allowing them to manipulate the behavior of animals with exceptional precision. They can turn brains transparent and seed them with glowing molecules to divine their structure.…

“I think he’s important,” says the producer of a new podcast probing why Richard Simmons has retreated so dramatically from friends and the public. (Washington Post illustration; Jason Kempin/Getty; iStock) LOS ANGELES — Richard Simmons is gone. His fitness studio in Beverly Hills is shuttered. On…

“I remember looking at her and thinking, ‘She’s totally lying.’ At the same time, I remember something in my mind saying, ‘And that doesn’t matter.’” For Daniel Shaw, believing the words of the guru he had spent years devoted to wasn’t blind faith exactly. It was something he chose. “I remember…

Planet Earth II ’s iguana hero. We begin with a close-up of a marine iguana hatchling, followed by a close-up of the nearly blind snake that’s trying to eat it. The iguana freezes as the snake slithers right behind it. The music swells and … the iguana is off! This is just the start of what might be…

For the first time, scientists have detected a giant neuron wrapped around the entire circumference of a mouse's brain, and it's so densely connected across both hemispheres, it could finally explain the origins of consciousness. Using a new imaging technique, the team detected the giant neuron…

[Photo: Flickr user Steve Maw ] For Andy Molholt, there’s something oddly special about hitting play on his boombox at the beach. The Philadelphia-based musician tours frequently with his band Laser Background and, between that and the many shows he helps book back home in Philly, he winds up seeing…

The genetic mutations leading to gynandromorphy — the possession of male and female sexual characteristics by a single individual — occur throughout nature, appearing in crustaceans, birds and other animals. It is especially noticeable in butterflies (such as this birdwing, Trogonoptera trojana),…

Legitimate protest albums spring from dire political climates. They're an expression of fear, but also a rallying cry. Sixties folk strummed acoustic pleas to, you know, like, get it together, man, while Seventies punk manifested that unity in collective anarchy. With that in mind, Jonathan Meiburg,…

View Images Scientists have found killifish that survive levels of pollution up to 8,000 times the lethal dose. By Lindsey Konkel PUBLISHED Minnow-like Atlantic killifish spend their entire lives swimming in a toxic stew of chemicals in some of the United States’ most polluted waters. Now scientists…

View Images A segment from the feathered tail of a dinosaur that lived 99 million years ago is preserved in amber. A Cretaceous-era ant and plant debris were also trapped in the resin. Photograph by R.C. McKellar, Royal Saskatchewan Museum PUBLISHED The tail of a 99-million-year-old dinosaur,…

Put the Serbo-Croatian word spomenik into Google Images, and you'll find dozens of photos of large, seemingly abstract sculptures, of architectural scale, placed in fields, on mountains, and in woods. These are photographs – each of them numbered, thusly – “Spomenik #1”, “Spomenik #2”, and so forth,…

I wrote a few tweets about Cuba which have caused some anger, not least from certain revolutionary leftists in Spain (one of whom has called me a “spokesman for Soros’ bitch mother” — interesting). So I wanted to bore everyone to death a bit more by writing about my thoughts at length. The Cuban…

A sculptor's rendering of the hominid Australopithecus afarensis . Credit: DAVE EINSEL Getty Images “This is outrageous!” Red-faced and visibly agitated, the 60-something was darting toward a hyperrealistic silicone reconstruction of Lucy, the world-famous, 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus…

Photo: pilesasmiles/Getty Images I am turning 30 in March, and so I was a little unnerved when I recently came across a question that researchers who study personality have apparently been trying to answer for more than a century: How much can a person really change after 30? “ You’re doomed! What…

Photo: Daniel Grizelj/Getty Images Mindfulness sounds pretty great. Who could be against teaching people to be more present in the moment, to try to worry less about the past and future? But in the Sunday New York Times , Ruth Whippman, author of America the Anxious: How Our Pursuit of Happiness Is…

Rebecca Hendin / BuzzFeed Almost half of the adults in 12 European countries now hold anti-immigrant, nationalist views, according to major new research that reveals the spread of fringe political views into the mainstream. BuzzFeed News has been given exclusive access to new data from YouGov, which…

How the iconic game became a portal to hell. T here are currently 1,256 used Ouija boards for sale on eBay. Most of them likely got their start in dark basements and at middle school sleepovers, where children accused each other of moving the planchette as it slid over the cryptic letters. Who’s…

The Creative Independent Matt Berninger on patience I was an artsy kid. I took art classes in high school; that was my main thing. I loved art, but I was also kind of brainy. When I went to college, I decided I was going to be a doctor. I was in pre-med for one year at Miami University of Ohio. I…

I’m not trying to have the same perspective as an American person from inside America. Because I’m not that. It’s OK to have somebody who has a perspective from the outside. It was really interesting to say something and have everyone sort of turn on me and go, “Oh my god, you’re the grossest human…

Despite the fact that their being millennials makes them lazy, whiny, entitled, and resistant to settling down, these two happy kids have invested in home-ownership together. Photo: iStock / Getty Images People really like to lump all millennials — a huge, diverse group of millions of people — into…

If you have read anything about young people in recent years, you could be forgiven for believing that we are living through a cultural revolution, unprecedented in its destructiveness and self-regard. Millennials don’t just reject the music, art, or clothes of their parents; they also reject the…

At the age of seven, Henry Gustav Molaison was involved in an accident that left him with severe epilepsy. Twenty years later, a surgeon named William Scoville tried to cure him by removing parts of his brain. It worked, but the procedure left Molaison unable to make new long-term memories. Everyone…

We have a problem. The music industry has been celebrating a surge of interest in one of its most beloved artifacts: the vinyl record. Major labels are returning to their old business model and are quickly saturating clothes stores, online shops, electronics outlets and international vinyl-themed…

THE SCARS THAT TAUGHT US: The ventral side of H.M.’s brain shows evidence of the surgical scars left by William Beecher Scoville’s 1956 surgery (A and B), which removed portions of the medial temporal lobe, including much of the hippocampus. Also visible is a mark left by one of the surgical clips…

Pour scorn elsewhere. / Joanna Slodownik L ate capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the…

The holiday season poses a psychological conundrum. Its defining sentiment, of course, is joy—yet the strenuous effort to be joyous seems to make many of us miserable. It's hard to be happy in overcrowded airport lounges or while you're trying to stay civil for days on end with relatives who stretch…

When I was a Ph.D. student, a respected professor at our school had a heart attack in his office and died. As he was whisked away to the ambulance, I numbly watched familiar faces in the department succumb to shock. I didn't know it at the time, but this deeply troubling experience would shape my…

Jordin Isip Certain people, researchers have discovered, can’t summon up mental images — it’s as if their mind’s eye is blind. This month in the journal Cortex, the condition received a name : aphantasia, based on the Greek word phantasia, which Aristotle used to describe the power that presents…

J erry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. His research on population and evolutionary genetics has been widely published in professional and trade journals and his 2009 book, Why Evolution Is True , established him as a leading force in the study of evolution. Jerry is…

Bamford at her home in California. Tierney Gearon for The New York Times Maria Bamford has a mantra of sorts, and here it is: Do the work. Three words, three syllables. An easy, orderly thing. She tells it to herself when she wakes up in the morning, whether it’s at her bungalow in a middle-class…

Every three years, the Royal Institute of Navigation organizes a conference focussed solely on animals. This April, the event was held southwest of London, at Royal Holloway College, whose ornate Victorian-era campus has appeared in “Downton Abbey.” For several days, the world’s foremost…

Shedding light on the elusive studio practice that’s all but necessary to make music sound great. Images by Nicole Ginelli According to many Metallica devotees, the official version of the band’s 2008 record Death Magnetic is not the one worth listening to. Upon the album’s release, fan forums…

“Zombies.” That’s the best descriptor medical experts who met identical siblings June and Jennifer Gibbons could come up with to describe the young women. They didn’t speak. They walked in a synchronized fashion. They were the Silent Twins. And they unsettled everyone who came into contact with…

© VALERO DOVAL/GETTY IMAGES O n a closed-circuit television I watch Marie settle into her room, unpacking her toiletries in the bathroom and arranging her clothes for the next day. Her digs at the University of Chicago sleep lab look like an ordinary hotel room, with a bed, TV, desk, nightstand.…

Bild: Linda Forsell Sill eller strömming? Sill fångad norr om Kalmarsund i Östersjön ska enligt ett kungligt påbud från 1500-talet kallas strömming. av: Ingvar Svanberg Facebook Like Google Plus One Nu är det dags att servera brisling , fiska spragg och köpa nya miljonfiskar till akvariet. Följ med…

Ben Weeks The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his “fits” brought on by “excitements,” “flurries” leading to an “uncomfortable palpitation of the heart” and “air fatigues” that triggered his “head symptoms.” In one particularly pitiful letter,…

REX USA In 1976, in Shelbyville, Ind., a city of about 20,000 southeast of Indianapolis, a film premiere was held. The picture was Fellini’s Casanova . A highly conceptual Italian art house flick about sexual deviance was not what this audience was used to; the house, nonetheless, was packed. A…

Credit: ghutchis, courtesy Flickr Billions of years ago, organic chemicals in the primordial soup somehow organized themselves into the first organisms. A few years ago scientists found that something similar happens every once in awhile in the cells of all living things: bits of once-quiet…

Title This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate Author Naomi Klein Genre Non-Fiction Publisher Knopf Canada Pages 566 pages Price $36.95 Year 2014 Environmentalism can often feel like a hobby for the wealthy: organic food, tote bags, energy-efficient light bulbs. All good things, to be…

Kim Goodsell was running along a mountain trail when her left ankle began turning inward, unbidden. A few weeks later she started having trouble lifting her feet properly near the end of her runs, and her toes would scuff the ground. Her back started to ache, and then her joints too. This was in…