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

Earth is on average ten times closer to Mercury than Jupiter, but missions to both planets can take a similar amount of time to reach their science orbits. Why is that? (…) The energy our spacecraft needs to shed is on a completely different scale to using brakes to slow down

An unexpected superconductor was beginning to look like a fluke, but a new theory and a second discovery have revealed that emergent quasiparticles may be behind the effect. (…) Two papers published in the journals Nature and Science described (…) a three-layer graphene sandwich with the “bread” sheets aligned and the filling

It could happen to anyone. Maybe you're out trying to find a new habitable planet for the human race, or maybe you're just on a long walk and you slip. Whatever the circumstances, at some point we all find ourselves confronted with the age-old question: what happens when you fall

> Why do stars twinkle? Our atmosphere is to blame as pockets of slightly off-temperature air, in constant motion, distort the light paths from distant astronomical objects. Atmospheric turbulence is a problem for astronomers because it blurs the images of the sources they want to study. The telescope featured in this

Welcome! In this post, we’ll be taking a character-by-character look at the source code of the BioNTech/Pfizer SARS-CoV-2 mRNA vaccine. (…) Now, these words may be somewhat jarring - the vaccine is a liquid that gets injected in your arm. How can we talk about source code? This is

In squash, it exists a perfect killing shot which is almost impossible to catch. It occurs when the ball hit an edge of the court. In this situation the ball exits at very low speed and rolls along the wall or the floor. With Caroline Cohen [http://www.researchgate.net/

(…) You may have seen such meme images before. They are always pure click-bait garbage: “95% of MIT graduates couldn’t solve this!”, where “this” is some inane, or ill-defined, or trivial brain teaser. This one is not. The meme is a clever, or wicked, joke. Roughly 99.999995% of the

Ok, so you can’t really fire a vacuum optimized engine at sea level… and this, really, is where aerospikes come in. The idea behind aerospikes is you allow the ambient air pressure to actually form the walls containing the flow of the exhaust so it’s always in nearly

Loud sounds can harm our ears, especially if the noise appears all of a sudden. It's because the so-called acoustic reflex [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_reflex] has not enough time to take effect. A car manufacturer has studied this phenomenon because drivers got ear injuries after car accidents.

In any conventional silicon-based solar cell, there is an absolute limit on overall efficiency, based partly on the fact that each photon of light can only knock loose a single electron, even if that photon carried twice the energy needed to do so. But now, researchers have demonstrated a method