Loneliness is detrimental to well-being and is often accompanied by self-reported feelings of not being understood by other people. What contributes to such feelings in lonely people? We used functional MRI of 66 first-year university students to unobtrusively measure the relative alignment of people’s mental processing of naturalistic stimuli

Roberto Zenit of Brown University, Rhode Island, is a bubble person, having spent his career studying various aspects of how these tiny spheres of gas behave. As a result, he says, he has “developed certain intuitions on how a bubble should behave under certain conditions.” One of those intuitions is

(…) Debashis Chanda, a nanoscience researcher with the University of Central Florida, and his team have created a way to mimic nature's ability to reflect light and create beautifully vivid color without absorbing any heat like traditional pigments do. Chanda's research, published in the journal Science Advances, explains and explores structural

Individual paintings by artists including Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch have been shown to depict specific atmospheric phenomena, raising the question of whether longer-term environmental change influences stylistic trends in painting. Anthropogenic aerosol emissions increased to unprecedented levels during the 19th century as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution,

More than a century after Ernest Rutherford discovered the positively charged particle at the heart of every atom, physicists are still struggling to fully understand the proton. High school physics teachers describe them as featureless balls with one unit each of positive electric charge — the perfect foils for the negatively

(…) There are times when I'll head into a bog-standard New York slice joint, see those pre-cooked squares with their flat disks of pepperoni, watch some poor sap order them, and think to myself: Ah, you've fallen victim to one of the two classic blunders, the most famous of which is

The Zanclean flood or Zanclean deluge is a flood theorized to have refilled the Mediterranean Sea 5.33 million years ago. (…) The Mediterranean Basin flooded mostly during a period estimated to have been between several months and two years. Sea level rise in the basin may have reached rates at

When two black holes collide, the titanic crash ripples out through the very fabric of the cosmos. Physicists have used Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity to predict the rough contours of these gravitational waves as they pass through Earth, and wave after wave has been confirmed by the LIGO

Here's a brain teaser that seems easy but is actually very hard: We've got a cylinder split in half by a diaphragm. On the left side is some Helium gas at 0°C and 1 atmosphere of pressure. On the right side is a perfect vacuum. We're going to snap

(…) Long derided as a prospect that is forever 30 years away, nuclear fusion seems finally to be approaching commercial viability. There are now more than 30 private fusion firms globally, according to an October survey by the Fusion Industry Association (FIA) in Washington DC, which represents companies in the sector;

Czech researchers develop revolutionary nuclear heating plant –  A team of scientists has come up with a radical solution to heat cities using spent nuclear rods, which they say is cost-effective and greener than natural gas. As the EU moves away from coal, many are interested. Almost every major city in