On a summer day in 1992, a man dumped a cooler full of a fish called yellow perch into Lake Mary Ronan, in northwest Montana. 

We know this because two teenagers saw him do it; they wrote down his license plate number and called in a tip to the Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks department (FWP), which immediately dispatched biologists to capture and kill the perch with nets and poison. 

The teenagers got a reward of $500 each for their efforts, while the man was charged with illegally introducing non-native fish into the lake, slapped with a small fine, and sent on his way. The law changed soon after: Now, intentionally introducing a non-native, invasive species to Montana’s waters is a felony punishable by as long as two years in prison or a fine of up to $25,000, or both. 

But the perch? The yellow perch — at least two of them — survived, multiplied, and quickly went on to wreak havoc. They established dominance in the lake, wiping out its population of a native fish called the Westslope Cutthroat trout and causing other ecosystem disruptions. This hasn’t only happened here: Montana is filled with thousands of beautiful alpine lakes and rivers, nestled in the sort of rugged territory that sold people on the idea of the West. Yet, across the state, without permission, people keep dumping non-native fish into them. 

The reason is simple: The introduced fish, according to some anglers, are more fun to fish than the stuff that’s already swimming around in Montana’s waters. But this guerrilla ecology — or “bucket biology” as some call it — risks upending delicate, longstanding ecosystems, harming not only native fish, but also animals that depend on them, like bald eagles, bears, and otters. It could turn Montana’s pristine waters into murky messes that also require millions of dollars in cleanup and additional maintenance every year. 

And it’s not just a problem in Montana. Across the country, states are trying to stop people from filling lakes with fish that don’t belong. It’s a high-stakes issue with ramifications that can reach far beyond the underwater neighborhood of a single lake; efforts to stop illegal fish-dumping have now spawned everything from high-dollar bounties and dedicated fish forensics. 

“A decision made by one person can affect an entire interconnected ecosystem,” said Craig Barfoot, Fisheries Program Manager for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes (CSKT), which is based on the Flathead Reservation in northwestern Montana and oversees some of the most pristine aquatic habitats in the state. “It’s like an act of arson.” 

The power of a bucket

Flathead Lake, about an hour’s drive south of Glacier National Park, is the sort of place postcards were made for. The 27-mile-long lake, half within the Flathead Reservation (and overseen by the tribes) and half managed by the state, is one of the cleanest, clearest lakes in the populated world —  a survey last year found that the lake is clear down to about 36 feet — which draws all sorts of creatures to its shore. During a two-day visit in October, I saw a black bear ambling along the shore and a bald eagle sitting in a tree, tearing into a fish it had scooped out of the water. 

This massive glacial lake “was ice about 15,000 years ago,” said Tom Bansak, associate director of the Flathead Lake Bio Station, a research station in the lake that’s run by the University of Montana. “Before western contact, there were maybe eight to 10 species of fish in the lake, which is not very many for a lake of its size.” 

That changed starting in the late 1800s, when wildlife managers at the federal and state levels decided to start stocking lakes around the country with fish that were raised in hatcheries and released into the water for recreational fishing. For decades, states mostly made stocking decisions based not on local ecologies but rather on the kinds of fish people wanted to catch, filling them with nonnative fish like trout, bass, walleye, and pike. If you live in the United States, there’s a good chance the closest popular fishing spot is filled with stocked fish; at Flathead Lake, wildlife managers introduced around 30 different kinds of non-native fish, of which about a dozen established spawning populations, and today non-native fish outnumber native ones. 

Eventually, state wildlife agencies began to realize that this sort of recreation-driven stocking can harm local ecosystems: In the 1970s, for example, Montana decided to stop stocking non-native fish in most of its streams and rivers. It still stocks plenty of fish, though, including a few non-native species, in some of its lakes and reservoirs, as do most other states. 

For some people, however, that’s not enough. Some anglers believe the fish native to Montana, like bull trout, cutthroat trout, and sturgeon, just aren’t as fun to catch or as tasty to eat as, say, northern pike and walleye — both of which have been illegally introduced to the state’s waters in recent years.

Enter the bucket biologists. It can take as little as a bucketful of fish to alter the population of an entire lake, which means that if someone is bored of the fishing options at their local lake, they could unilaterally decide to spice things up with little risk of getting caught. Despite nonnative fish introductions now being a felony in Montana (and at least four other states), not a single person has been charged, let alone convicted there; that man the two teens saw at Lake Mary Ronan more than 30 years ago is the only person to have ever even been reported. 

“People are mad at us, and they vocally say it.”

Sam Bourret, FWP Fisheries biologist

But fish and wildlife officials know it’s still happening because they keep finding non-native fish in the state’s waterways, and the most likely way they got there is by someone illegally dumping them in. 

“They’re obviously avid anglers, and we probably know them,” said Sam Bourret, a fisheries biologist at FWP based near Flathead Lake. Investigating illegal fish introductions is Bourret’s speciality: The Great Falls Tribune called him the “fish detective” for pioneering a forensic technique that looks at chemical clues inside otoliths, fishes’ stone-like ear bones, to figure out where they might have come from. He’s also used data modeling based on conditions like elevation and fishing pressure to figure out which lakes might be most vulnerable to future fish introductions, which could help steer resources towards them and stop would-be bucket biologists. From his time on the job, which has included many firsthand interactions with anglers, he can tell many of them are irked that they can’t stock the fish they want wherever they want them. “I do think some of these people are spiteful in their desire to move fish around,” Bourret said. “People are mad at us, and they vocally say it.” 

Sometimes the culprit is less intentional. Non-native fish that are kept in ponds on private property (which technically require permits to build and stock but often slip by under the radar) can get into nearby rivers or lakes if the pond overflows during a storm, or by being picked up by a bird and then dropped into another waterbody. Earlier this year, FWP biologists on Bourret’s team removed 4,000 goldfish from a pond at a hotel on the edge of Montana’s Thompson River; the pond had been an attraction for families visiting the hotel with small children, who liked to scoop fish out of the water with nets. But goldfish can be disastrous for freshwater ecosystems, and the FWP wanted to be sure they wouldn’t slip into the adjacent river — and from there into a nearby lake. 

But they often don’t get so far ahead of a potential problem. “Introduced fish probably go undetected often,” Bourret said. “We usually find out about them through a needle in a haystack catch. Once a population sets up in a lake, it’s already way too late.” 

Fish-shaped dominoes

Monitoring species in the underwater realm of rivers, lakes, and streams is vastly more challenging than it is on land. “It’s a lot more obvious when a terrestrial animal doesn’t belong,” says Andrew Gilham, Fisheries Management Bureau Chief at FWP. “If you see a zebra in Montana, you’d probably think it’s weird. But if people see a brown trout, which is from Europe, it just doesn’t register in the same way.” 

And that may even play into the general public’s understanding of just how much impact a few fish can have. “Some of it may just be that they don’t really understand the consequences that can follow illegal introductions,” he said. 

Aquatic ecosystems are delicate balances, and in a healthy lake the populations of fish, predators, and small organisms like zooplankton and phytoplankton typically exist in a hard-won equilibrium. To simplify greatly, there are usually enough zooplankton to eat phytoplankton and prevent algal blooms, enough zooplankton-eating fish to prevent the zooplankton from eating all the phytoplankton, and enough predators to keep those zooplankton-eating fish in check — but not so many that the smaller fish get wiped out. 

“If you see a zebra in Montana, you’d probably think it’s weird. But if people see a brown trout, which is from Europe, it just doesn’t register in the same way.”

Andrew Gilham, Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks

Bucket biology, especially with voracious carnivores like pike, is a bit like tossing a fish-shaped grenade into the lake. If the newcomers establish a spawning population, they can compete for resources with the native fish or eat them directly, eventually causing something called a trophic cascade: a domino-like series of events that can upend an entire ecosystem.

What happens to fish in a lake can have huge effects on the creatures outside of it, too. In the Yellowstone region, Yellowstone Lake had long been home to a native fish species called the cutthroat trout. These fish would make long, winding spawning migrations through the Yellowstone lake and river system, where some four mammal species and 16 bird species — bears, otters, eagles, and pelicans, among others — would pluck them out of the water for meals. The migrating cutthroat were also important vectors for nutrients, which came from the fish’s poop and were important food sources for plants and algae growing in and along the waterways. 

But then, in the 1990s, a non-native species arrived (likely through an illegal introduction): lake trout. Lake trout eat cutthroat, and without any predators of their own, they could feast on the smaller fish without anything to stop them. Once the lake trout appeared in Yellowstone Lake, they decimated cutthroat populations; according to a report from the National Park Service, by 1998, there were some 125,000 lake trout in the lake, and they ate somewhere between 3 and 4 million cutthroat that year. 

Zooplankton in the lake, which the cutthroat used to eat, had a population boom, which led to a decline in phytoplankton. And the lake trout just stayed in the lake rather than migrating through the rivers and streams like the cutthroat did, which not only robbed those waters of the additional nutrients they brought, but also took a of a high-impact food source away from bears, otters, and birds. Bear and otter activity alongside the streams declined; while bears are opportunistic feeders and likely found another food source, the otters probably had a harder time finding something to supplement their diets. Bald eagle nests saw a sharp decline in their success rates after cutthroat disappeared, and osprey nest counts fell from 60 in 2001 to 3-5 from 2008-2015. 

“We don’t want to just be moving things around willy-nilly,” said Niall Clancy, director of the Fisheries Lab at Salish Kootenai College. “Because one thing we learned is that we are bad at predicting the impacts — and there’s a good chance that something will go wrong that we didn’t think of.”

And, Clancy added, these sorts of introductions can cause financial cascades alongside trophic ones: FWP now spends millions of dollars each year to reduce invasive fish populations in the state’s lakes and boost native fish populations through hatchery programs. This, in turn, diverts money away from other programs.  

Can the buckets be stopped? 

Stopping illegal fish introductions is a nearly impossible task; catching someone red-handed would require vigilantly monitoring thousands and thousands of miles of shoreline in Montana. Instead, FWP and groups like the CSKT are investing in things like an educational outreach program and signs along popular waterfronts that exhort people not to dump live fish, warning that doing so is a felony. 

FWP has also teamed up with groups like Trout Unlimited, a nonprofit that advocates for fish and waterway conservation, to offer massive rewards for information on bucket biologists. In 2017, for example, they offered a reward of over $35,000 for information related to the illegal introduction of walleye in Swan Lake, a lake about eight miles east of Flathead as the crow flies. But even the promise of a big reward hasn’t worked, and nobody has come forward yet. Instead, FWP declared open season on invasive fish like brown trout and walleye, requiring that anyone who catches one of the fish kill it rather than toss it back into the water, and then bring the entire fish into a FWP office so that biologists can study it. Biologists at FWP are also exploring other solutions like following the lead of Washington state in introducing sterile non-native fish to lakes. This would reduce the populations of non-native fish by tricking fertile ones into wasting their mating efforts on fish that will never be able to reproduce. 

For the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, the issue goes beyond the science. 

“We have stories about the native bull trout and the native West Oak cutthroat going back to before colonization,” said Rich Janssen, head of the CSKT’s department of natural resources. “They’re part of our heritage and our culture, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. It’s like losing our language.”

At Flathead Lake, the lower half of which is in the Flathead Reservation, the fish that were introduced through earlier federal and state stocking programs largely settled into a state of coexistence with the native fish. That doesn’t mean they were completely harmless, however: They competed for resources with the bull trout and cutthroat, which led to a reduction in those fish. Today, the CSKT has placed restrictions on bull trout and cutthroat fishing, banning people from taking those fish except for religious reasons, and has stepped up efforts to proactively monitor for new non-native fish at Flathead Lake. They’ve also removed fishing restrictions for smallmouth bass and northern pike in tribal waters. Both species were illegally introduced to the lake and can not only outcompete the bull trout and cutthroat but eat them outright, so anglers are now welcome to take as many of those non-native fish out of the water as they’d like. 

“They’re part of our heritage and our culture, and when they’re gone, they’re gone. It’s like losing our language.”

Rich Janssen, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes

When I went for a swim in Flathead Lake this fall, the water was startlingly clear and calm, the surface broken every now and then by ripples from a passing fish or insect. But farther north, where the Flathead River meets the lake, a gauntlet of hungry pike lay in wait for bull trout making their way upriver to spawn. And as cold as the water was — it is a glacial lake, after all — it has also been warming with climate change, creating more pockets of warmer water for smallmouth bass to spawn in and shrinking the cold-water areas that the bull and cutthroat trout like. 

I waved at a passing motorboat, which had a fishing pole stuck into a holder on its side. More and more people have been moving to Montana in recent years, attracted by the rugged nature and the allure of the West; new houses and docks have sprung up along Flathead Lake’s shoreline. But much like the pike and bass, their presence has been putting more pressure on the local landscape, and the newcomers could make the problem worse if they decide Montana’s fish aren’t as good as what they have back home. The future of the lake, and many others like it across the country, is murky. What it will look like depends, in large part, on what people decide to do with their buckets. 

As droughts worsen due to climate change, new research shows that hundreds of cactus species could lose the majority of their habitats by 2100.

Dubbed Dianjunus rex, the huge fungus emerged shortly after the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs.

It’s a nightmare; the only difference is you’re actually asleep during a nightmare. Sleep starts, or hypnic jerks, those abrupt, full-body jolts that fire off just as you finally drift off, ruin nights’ sleep before they even begin. According to a new study published in PLOS Mental Health by researchers at the University of Salzburg, these nighttime spasms are not only responsible for you kicking your partner, but research says that they are also taking a major psychological toll on you.

What sounds like a random, innocuous muscle twitch is actually a full-body jerk, often accompanied by the feeling of an electric shock or a blinding flash that lights up the inside of a sufferer’s head. Some even experience the terrifying sensation of suddenly plummeting into a bottomless void.

Their heart starts racing, and they go into a full-blown panic as they are suddenly jolted awake.

Why Your Body Suddenly Jerks Awake Just as You’re Falling Asleep, According to Science

For some, it’s a weekly or even daily occurrence, and you can imagine that it can drive them absolutely nuts. According to the research, frequent sufferers report heavily degraded sleep quality paired with spiked levels of depression and daytime anxiety.

The jolts create a climate of fear, where going to sleep becomes stressful as the sufferer worries about falling asleep, keeping their nervous system on high alert. That hyperarousal makes their brains misfire, causing their bodies to convulse in acute terror. Now they’re too panicked to rest, so they don’t get adequate sleep, which rolls over into more stress tomorrow.

Researchers note that emotional strain triggers episodes more directly than basic sleep deprivation. Doctors used to write off hypnic jerks as a harmless quirk of the body, but new data shows that they deserve to be taken a lot more seriously as a manifestation of severe cognitive hyperarousal, where the brain is basically so overwhelmed by the pressure to fall asleep, to even just relax, that it starts slamming a panic button.

The post The Real Reason Your Whole Body Jolts Right Before You Fall Asleep appeared first on VICE.

If you’ve had an out-of-body experience, new research suggests you may have experienced a weird state between sleep and waking, where the dreamy unreality of unconsciousness spills into consciousness.

As detailed by ScienceAlert, a study published in Consciousness and Cognition by Radboud University neuroscientist Teresa Campillo-Ferrer and her team hooked 35 participants up to EEG caps to figure out why our brains occasionally glitch out so hard that we think our consciousness has left our bodies to go on metaphysical adventures.

They found that those bizarre “unusual bodily experiences,” or UBEs, as they call them, ranging from feeling like you’re hovering above your own bed to dealing with the classic sleep paralysis demon staring at you from the doorway, happen when your brain refuses to choose between being asleep and being awake.

Scientists Found a Surprising Explanation for Out-of-Body Experiences

They found that during this hazy half-state, your temporal regions are still active. Slow sleep-cycle waves mix with fast waking beta and gamma waves. Your internal wiring gets caught between two states, allowing subconscious dream logic to leak straight into your waking reality while you are conscious enough to freak out about it.

Further research will need to look into how, exactly, the brain can produce sensations that feel convincingly real. So the next time you find yourself floating several feet above your bed with your physical body still in it, don’t panic. Go on whatever wild metaphysical adventure you want; just know it probably isn’t a spiritual experience as much as it’s your brain refusing to pick a lane.   

The post Scientists Watched People Have Out-of-Body Experiences. Here’s What They Saw. appeared first on VICE.

After aborting a planned catch of Starship Flight 15's booster, SpaceX successfully captured Starship with its "Mechazilla" launch and catch tower for the first time. The company has performed 'chopstick' catches of its boosters before, but this is the first time the maneuver has successfully been executed on the Starship vehicle itself.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said during the company's third-quarter earnings call that "success is not guaranteed on these first flights, but I'd say it's more likely than not that this succeeds next flight." While not a complete success, in that the company was unable to recover the entire launch vehicle, it sti …

Read the full story at The Verge.

If you live with a cat, you’ve likely spent years trying to keep a nagging thought at bay: this thing is probably just using you as some kind of big, dim-witted, easily manipulated servant. You’d probably try telling yourself that was the case, that it really does love you, but now, a study published in the journal Animal Behaviour comes along to confirm your darkest suspicions.

Researchers from the University of São Paulo think that cats have weaponized their meows, turning the sound into a means of bullying us into solving all of their problems.

The researchers gave 38 food-motivated cats a treat locked inside a clear plastic box with holes. The cats could smell the prize, but couldn’t breach the container with their paws. The team then observed how the animals reacted while completely alone vs. in the presence of a human.

Your Cat Might Be Manipulating You With Its Meows, According to a New Study

It was a blowout. A complete no contest. Cats were 16 times more likely to start screaming when a person was in the room, dropping a matinee 86 frantic meows at humans compared to a paltry 20 when left alone.

When they were alone, they didn’t waste breath yelling at no one. They just stared at the door, waiting for the human to walk back in. Even more telling is that while they were vocalizing at humans, the cats aggressively flashed their eyes back and forth between the box and the person, the internationally known cartoony representation of saying “Hey, open it for me, you idiot.”  

Cats evolved a high-pitched, infant-like shriek over thousands of years specifically to torment us into doing things for them. The next time your cat meows at you, know it’s giving you a direct command to do something for it, and when you do, you are likely just making it feel like it owns you instead of the other way around.

What a life, am I right?

The post The Real Reason Your Cat Meows So Much, According to Science appeared first on VICE.

As Israeli restrictions limit repairs in Gaza, fuel is being diverted from wells to drainage pumps.

The galaxies’ dark matter was ejected during a collision, but ironically, its absence is some of the best evidence of the elusive substance yet.

Under cofounder Jensen Huang, Nvidia has become the engine for the AI boom - and one of the tech industry's biggest environmental liabilities. Its sought-after chips have triggered a new wave of water- and chemical-intensive factories, drained power grids from inside massive data centers, and set the stage for a looming e-waste problem.

Under Huang's leadership, Nvidia clashed with environmental groups seeking to hold the company accountable for its so-called "hidden" emissions. Huang has talked up the idea of using AI to fight climate change while his company's supply chain emissions ballooned. Nvidia's investments, meanwhile, have support …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Coral reefs are dying from rising ocean temperatures. They lose their color and die. A serendipitous event in a Stanford lab may have given scientists a way to save them.

In a tank at the Hopkins Marine Station, a healthy coral fell onto a bleached one. — Read the rest

The post A dying coral brushed a healthy one in a lab tank. It came back to life appeared first on Boing Boing.

The ancient Maya loved using a bright red paint to decorate all sorts of things, from temple walls to pottery. Thousands of years after their civilization collapsed, we’re finding that their favorite shade of red contained mercury that poisoned their water and food supply.

According to a recent study published in Science Advances by Auburn University paleolimnologist Matthew Waters, it’s an environmental catastrophe of their own making. The Maya loved the color red. It held several sacred meanings, from representing blood to the Sun, among others.

To get that vibrant hue, they relied heavily on cinnabar, a bright red mineral that is highly toxic because it contains mercury sulfide. The funny thing is, Cinnabar does not naturally occur in the Yucatán Peninsula, where the Maya resided. They used a complex trade network to import the stuff that was poisoning them.

The Ancient Maya May Have Been Poisoning Themselves With Something They Considered Sacred

Over the centuries, rain washed paint runoff directly into water sources essential to the community, like Lago Coba and Cenote Xcach. When the mercury hit the lake bottom, bacteria transformed the runoff into lethal methylmercury.

When modern researchers pulled sediment cores from those lakes, they found mercury levels up to six times higher than today’s highest safety thresholds. All that mercury nuked the local aquatic ecosystem, killing the algae and freshwater shellfish the Maya relied on for protein.

Historians have debated for years whether climate change or war caused the Maya collapse during the Classic Period. Seems like we could also add in the casual drinking of toxic heavy metals.

The post The Ancient Maya Loved This Color So Much They Accidentally Poisoned Themselves With It, Scientists Say appeared first on VICE.

With Hubble expected to reenter the atmosphere by 2034 and several malfunctions on board, NASA is asking commercial space companies for proposals on how to extend the telescope’s lifespan.

Between 2016 and 2018, a team of researchers at a dig site near Cambridge, England, found a mildly disturbing but archaeologically fascinating ditch filled with 8,000 ancient frog bones. Was it some ancient pagan ritual? Perhaps the bodies of some failed arcane experiment? The researchers were baffled and spent the past decade or so trying to figure out what 8,000 frog bones in a ditch in England could mean.

Now, scientists at Bournemouth University and the Museum of London Archaeology think they’ve figured out who put them there. To their surprise, it’s an animal that says hoo.

As reported by the BBC and detailed in the journal Environmental Archaeology, scientists say the bones are the remains of a frog buffet dined upon by short-eared owls and hen harriers who eat like kings during the Roman period.

Scientists Finally Solved the Mystery of 8,000 Ancient Frog Bones Found in a Ditch

By analyzing how the bones were broken and measuring the tiny upper-arm humerus bones, the researchers realized that hungry predatory birds devoured thousands of young frogs over a single winter.

The researchers say much of this was indirectly fueled by human activity. Local settlers had cleared much of the dense forest to graze their livestock, inadvertently stripping away the natural tree cover that protected local frog populations.

The defendant wetlands were retreating at the time, which was perfect for frog breeding, and even more perfect for hungry birds looking to snack on breeding frogs. The frogs were defenseless as they sat out in the open grassland. The birds gorged themselves on frogs, leaving thousands and thousands of their bones behind.

By the time they were done, the leg left behind a 46-foot ditch stuffed with 8,000 bones as evidence of their incredible feast. A meal so epic it baffled scientists nearly 2,000 years later.

The post Scientists Discovered a Ditch Filled With 8,000 Ancient Frog Bones, and Finally Figured Out How They Got There appeared first on VICE.

There’s something behind Neptune. It’s a big object, and it seems to be orbiting the Sun in the opposite direction from everything else. Researchers have no idea what it is or where it came from, but one thing is certain: it’s weird.

According to data from EarthSky and the Rubin Observatory, this celestial weirdo goes by the temporary name R631. While Earth and everything else in the solar system orbit the Sun in a roughly flat pancake shape, this 62-mile-wide… Thing is cutting through the solar system at an extremely steep 142-degree angle, and all against the natural flow of the cosmos.

Scientists Just Discovered Something Very Strange Lurking Beyond Neptune

It makes no sense, especially given how our solar system formed billions of years ago. A massive cloud of dust flattened out and started spinning like a record. Everything born from that record started spinning in the same direction, and it’s been that way ever since. R631 just up and decided to spin the other way, actively ignoring the fundamental physics that everything else in our celestial neighborhood abides by.

This anomaly is currently sitting about 3 billion miles away and takes almost 548 years to make one full trip around our Sun. Since this rebel plays by its own rules, astronomers suspect it could be a massive comet, possibly from outside our solar system, that will start spewing gas when it makes its closest pass to the Sun in 2047.

Of course, the idea that it is from outside of our solar system is just one theory — that maybe it got kicked out of some neighboring star system and got sucked into our Sun’s gravity. The other option is that it was born and bred right here in our solar system but got flung into a reverse orbit after getting caught in a gravitational game of pinball with Neptune or Jupiter.

Researchers will keep a close eye on it for now, though we probably won’t learn much more about it for some time.

The post Something Strange and Massive Is Lurking Beyond Neptune, and Scientists Don’t Know What It Is appeared first on VICE.

This is Optimizer, a weekly newsletter sent from Verge senior reviewer Victoria Song that dissects and discusses the latest gizmos and potions that swear they're going to change your life. We'll be taking a break next week and will be back on November 25th. Opt in for Optimizer here.

The SS Jeremiah O'Brien is a World War II Liberty ship. The hulking vessel was built in 56 days. It made 11 trips to Normandy, France, to supply the Allied powers in the fight against German U-boats. Last week, it was the site of a black-tie peptide party thrown by a trio of Gen Z venture capitalists.

Roughly 150 people attended the event, where four types of …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Armed with a team of AI agents, Google researcher Pietro Miotti claimed earlier this week to have discovered a potentially unmapped Maya site in Mexico. There was just one problem: The site had already been discovered and was published in an academic journal last year. The incident, which sparked criticism among archeologists online, underscores a growing tension in science as amateurs wielding increasingly powerful AI tools parachute into specialist fields, often without the expertise needed to understand what they are looking at.

Local communities are often already well aware of sites in their area.

Miotti said the idea to use AI to sea …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Humanity has thrived thanks to a stable cryosphere, but burning fossil fuels has increased the risk of “accelerating and partly irreversible” harm to the planet’s cold places.

Creatine is everywhere right now. But are the claims around this classic supplement actually based in real science? Or are they just more marketing hype?

For decades, creatine has been sold to fitness buffs, as a way to build more muscle, faster. Now it’s being pitched to almost everyone, with influencers, podcasters, and celebrity doctors claiming it can sharpen your mind, lift your mood, offset sleep deprivation, and even reverse the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. And these wellness claims are driving a real surge in profit — US sales topped half a billion dollars in 2025. 

So what is creatine actually doing in your body? Will it really help you build muscle, or are those dramatic before-and-after photos telling a different story? And when it comes to your brain, is there real evidence behind the claims about memory, mood, and Alzheimer’s, or is the hype getting ahead of the science?

We dug into the research on creatine, from the muscles to the mind, and spoke with exercise scientist Nick Tiller and associate professor Matthew Taylor, whose team at the University of Kansas studied creatine’s effects on people with Alzheimer’s disease.

Read more about the real science behind creatine:

• Nutrition report: Influence of age, sex and exercise type on creatine and lean body mass
• National Library of Medicine report: The effects of creatine supplementation on cognitive performance
• Nature report: Single dose creatine improves cognitive performance and induces changes in cerebral high energy phosphates during sleep deprivation
• Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition report: The birth of modern sports nutrition: tracing the path from muscle biopsies to creatine supplementation
• Journal of the International Society of Sports Nutrition report: Effects of creatine supplementation with and without exercise and diet intervention on body composition, cognitive function, and markers of health in middle-aged and older adults
• Alzheimer’s & Dementia report: Creatine monohydrate pilot in Alzheimer’s: Feasibility, brain creatine, and cognition
• The Canadian Journal of Psychiatry report: The Effect of Creatine Monohydrate on Mental Disorders: A Systematic Review of Randomized Controlled Trials
• Montreal Gazette article: The Right Chemistry: Creatine, a supplement with a rare commodity: Evidence

This video is presented by Colgate. Colgate doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make videos like this one possible.

After its latest device struggled to perform, brain-computer interface startup Synchon halted clinical trials. The company says it will upgrade the implant’s hardware and is at work on a new device.