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In 1916, Professor Lewis M. Terman created the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Originally designed to identify childr...
07/24/2025

In 1916, Professor Lewis M. Terman created the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale. Originally designed to identify children needing special education, Terman decided instead to study gifted children, following 1,528 children with an average IQ of 151 into adulthood. This longitudinal research tracked the subjects, affectionately known as "Termites," throughout their lives.

Despite their exceptional intelligence, none became unambiguous geniuses; most became successful professionals like professors, doctors, lawyers, and engineers, but not renowned figures like Pavlov or Freud. Many Termites, particularly males, achieved only moderate success regardless of their IQ scores, suggesting that intelligence alone wasn't the determining factor in their accomplishments. In fact, one of the children rejected from Terman's study for a low IQ score went on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics.

Over the past several decades, scientists have learned that, in fact, mountains often contain a greater diversity of spe...
07/24/2025

Over the past several decades, scientists have learned that, in fact, mountains often contain a greater diversity of species than the plains and jungles at their feet. Though mountains cover only 25 percent of all land on Earth outside of Antarctica, they’re home to some 87 percent of all species of birds, mammals, and amphibians. But biodiversity varies wildly from one mountain to the next, which has been difficult to explain. Some scientists have called this “Humboldt’s enigma.”

Now a new paper published in Science suggests that the process of mountain building itself may be responsible—that the pace and magnitude of tectonic uplift determines how much rock, river channels, and microclimates fragment the landscape, and how many distinct ecological niches emerge. The greater the altitude and rate of lift, the greater the biodiversity a mountain will hold, the authors found.

Today more than 55 million people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which ravage the minds ...
07/23/2025

Today more than 55 million people around the world have Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, which ravage the minds of those who suffer from them and have devastating impacts on their family members. In spite of decades of research, the precise origins of these diseases continue to elude scientists, though numerous factors have been found to be associated with higher risk, including genetics and various lifestyle and environmental factors.

A decade of research suggests traumatic brain injury, whether from accidents or high-contact sports, is a standout risk factor for Alzheimer’s and other forms of neurodegenerative decline. Some estimates suggest that up to 10 percent of cases could be attributed to at least one prior head injury, but why is not fully understood. Separately, a growing body of research proposes that viral infection, including a common virus known as herpes simplex one, can also increase susceptibility to these diseases.

But all three things—head trauma, viral infection, and dementia—have not been directly connected in experimental research, until now.

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect—sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real num...
07/23/2025

We’ve all heard of the five tastes our tongues can detect—sweet, sour, bitter, savory-umami, and salty. But the real number is actually six, because we have two separate salt-taste systems. One of them detects the attractive, relatively low levels of salt that make potato chips taste delicious. The other one registers high levels of salt—enough to make overly salted food offensive and deter overconsumption.

Exactly how our taste buds sense the two kinds of saltiness is a mystery that’s taken some 40 years of scientific inquiry to unravel, and researchers haven’t solved all the details yet. In fact, the more they look at salt sensation, the weirder it gets.

Cloud-​forests form at higher altitudes than rainforests: typically between 3,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level, in ste...
07/23/2025

Cloud-​forests form at higher altitudes than rainforests: typically between 3,000 and 8,000 feet above sea level, in steep landscapes of peak, ridge, and valley. The elevation means that ​cloud-​forests are cooler than rainforests, and the drama of their topography means that their rivers are fast, shallow, clear, and ​rock­bedded, compared to the muddier, slower rivers of rainforests.

Altitude and coolness ​co-create the cloud. Humid air is pushed upward by the land, bringing the water it bears to a condensation point, and forming the mist which cloaks such forests ​year-​round. The mist also reduces direct sunlight, reducing transpiration from the trees and retaining more water within the forest system.

Did you know that mushrooms can get sick? It was 1948, on a Pennsylvania mushroom farm operated by the La France brother...
07/23/2025

Did you know that mushrooms can get sick?

It was 1948, on a Pennsylvania mushroom farm operated by the La France brothers, when scientists first observed a mushroom malady featuring puny caps and crooked stems. But only in 1962 did researchers finally realize viruses were behind La France disease, as it had come to be called, and that viruses caused other fungal afflictions as well—thus launching a whole new field of study.

Today, scientists researching fungal viruses are enjoying a “golden age of discovery,” says Matt Kasson, a mycologist (aka fungus researcher) at West Virginia University in Morgantown. Researchers are finding all sorts of weird and wonderful interactions between fungi and their viruses and even between fungal viruses and plants or animals. Most fungal viruses don’t seem to do much of anything to their hosts, but others definitely do: Sometimes they cause sickness, sure, but sometimes they offer surprising benefits.

One of the most enduring defenses of meat eating is that we evolved to do it, and therefore must continue to do so. The ...
07/22/2025

One of the most enduring defenses of meat eating is that we evolved to do it, and therefore must continue to do so. The claim goes that our ape and hominin ancestors were frequent, even obligatory meat eaters, and that we thus remain obligatory meat eaters. Most recently, this idea was invoked to promote yet another magical diet that would reverse weight gain and keep degenerative diseases at bay, the so-called “paleo” diet.

The argument primarily focuses on a period in our evolutionary history during which our brain expanded rapidly while our digestive system shrank, which is taken to reflect a dietary transition from plants to meat. From this, proponents suggest a causal link in which meat was the indispensable fuel that propelled the development of bigger brains during our evolutionary transition from apes to abstract analysts.

But the evidence that eating meat requires smaller digestive tracts is limited. At roughly 400 to 600 calories and 10 to 20 grams of protein per 100 grams, nuts and seeds are low-volume, high-nutritional-density foods for which small stomachs suffice. Top your greens off with peanuts and some honey, and you can do well as a plump, small-stomach, obligatory plant-eater.

It turns out it’s true: Plants do stuff. For one thing, they can sense their surroundings. Plants have photoreceptors th...
07/22/2025

It turns out it’s true: Plants do stuff.

For one thing, they can sense their surroundings. Plants have photoreceptors that respond to different wavelengths of light, allowing them to differentiate not only brightness but color. Tiny grains of starch in organelles called amyloplasts shift around in response to gravity, so the plants know which way is up. Chemical receptors detect odor molecules; mechanoreceptors respond to touch; the stress and strain of specific cells track the plant’s own ever-changing shape, while the deformation of others monitors outside forces, like wind.

Plants can sense humidity, nutrients, competition, predators, microorganisms, magnetic fields, salt, and temperature, and can track how all of those things are changing over time. They watch for meaningful trends—Is the soil depleting? Is the salt content rising?—then alter their growth and behavior through gene expression to compensate.

Pollinators enhance reproduction in 90 percent of the planet’s flowering plant species, including 75 percent of our majo...
07/22/2025

Pollinators enhance reproduction in 90 percent of the planet’s flowering plant species, including 75 percent of our major food crops. The many different organisms that serve as pollinators—including insects, birds, even sometimes wolves and frogs—help sustain ecosystems and have a hand in producing a third of humans’ food supply.

Researchers long assumed that daytime or “diurnal” pollinators—butterflies, flies, hummingbirds, and especially bees—provide most of these essential ecological services. But recent research has steadily shifted that view. This includes a recent global meta-analysis which found that nocturnal pollinators—primarily moths, and to a lesser extent other night-loving insects and bats—contribute as much or even more to reproduction in many plant species, incluUpload from Deviceding several food crops.

Ecologist Chris Cosma says it’s time to embrace moths as important pollinators. Our appreciation for them has perhaps been delayed by the handful of moth species that eat our clothes, invade our pantries, and destroy our crops. These troublemakers have given moths a bad rap, even though most species are not pests.

When astronomers dropped the news that nearby star TRAPPIST-1 was circled by seven planets about the size of Earth, most...
07/22/2025

When astronomers dropped the news that nearby star TRAPPIST-1 was circled by seven planets about the size of Earth, most of the headlines were focused on the prospect of scouring these worlds for life.

Daniel Tamayo noticed something else. He investigated this fascinating system after initial simulations suggested the planets' orbits could become unstable in just a million years—far shorter than the system's age. Tamayo's new research proposes a solution: simulations of the protoplanetary disk show how the planets could gradually form their resonant chain and remain stable for about 50 million years, though this still doesn't fully explain the current stability.

The mathematical relationships between these orbits have implications beyond astronomy. When translated into musical frequencies, with the outermost planet representing a C note, the orbital relationships create a major ninth chord. This connection between cosmic mechanics and music theory led Tamayo to collaborate with musicians Matt Russo and Andrew Santaguida to transform the TRAPPIST-1 system's orbital dance into a musical composition.

You might not find ants and termites tasty, but plenty of animals have throughout evolutionary history: It turns out tha...
07/21/2025

You might not find ants and termites tasty, but plenty of animals have throughout evolutionary history: It turns out that ant-eating mammals have evolved independently more than 12 times over the past 66 million years. But how did species who exclusively dine on termites, ants, or both emerge so many times?

While they’re pretty picky about food, myrmecophages might have an advantage in a warming world. “In some ways, specializing on ants and termites paints a species into a corner,” Barden said. “But as long as social insects dominate the world’s biomass, these mammals may have an edge—especially as climate change seems to favor species with massive colonies, like fire ants and other invasive social insects.”

Aggressive microbes tend to win under idealized lab conditions, where the variables are tightly controlled and the envir...
07/21/2025

Aggressive microbes tend to win under idealized lab conditions, where the variables are tightly controlled and the environment is relatively unchanging, the researchers found. But the tables are turned when the environment is harsh or fluctuating, with frequent and recurrent disturbances, for example, when one removes plaque during toothbrushing, takes a course of antibiotics, or when dry soils are soaked by heavy rains. Researchers call these “boom and bust” cycles. Under these circumstances, the metabolic costs of toxin release didn’t seem to be worth it because the mortality of all microbes spiked.

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