Editor-in-Chief

Lachlan Brown

Editor-in-Chief

Lachlan Brown is Editor-in-Chief of Science Blog and co-founder of Brown Brothers Media. He writes about psychology, human behavior, and the unexpected ways scientific findings reshape how we understand everyday life.

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Brain & Behavior

A study of more than 26,000 people found that night owls outperformed morning risers on memory, reasoning and processing speed—challenging the assumption that the sharpest minds always start their day early.

Evening types scored modestly higher in two older UK Biobank cohorts, but the cross-sectional study did not control for education or testing time and cannot show causation.

Aug 6, 2026

Brain & Behavior

After a single distraction — a text message, a Slack ping — research suggests it takes roughly 23 minutes on average to fully return to the depth of focus you had before; most people are interrupted again long before that

The famous 23-minute interruption statistic measures when people returned to a task, not when deep focus fully recovered. The original workplace study is more nuanced than its viral retelling.

Aug 6, 2026

Brain & Behavior

A 2026 study of 202,898 people across 22 countries found three questions treated as measures of wellbeing told different stories: life satisfaction and happiness tracked each other closely, while the ‘best possible life’ ladder leaned much more toward national wealth

A global study found life satisfaction and happiness tracked closely, while the familiar wellbeing ladder captured a more wealth-oriented picture of a good life.

Aug 5, 2026

Brain & Behavior

A study of 730,000 Norwegian conscripts found the IQ gains of the 20th century reversed after 1975, falling by roughly seven points a generation, and ruled out genetics as the cause by comparing brothers raised in the same family

A massive study of Norwegian conscripts reveals that IQ scores, which climbed steadily for a century, have been falling sharply since the 1970s—and the culprit isn't in our genes.

Aug 5, 2026

Brain & Behavior

People with broad vocabularies often score higher on intelligence tests, but no word can identify a smart person: these 10 terms test verbal knowledge, not the full range of human intelligence

Knowing rare words signals education and experience, but a failed vocabulary test reveals nothing about how your mind actually works.

Aug 4, 2026

Brain & Behavior

Intelligent people can still be surprisingly bad at knowing when they are wrong, because solving a problem and judging the reliability of your own answer are partly separate mental tasks

Confidence and competence are wired differently in the brain than we assume, which means even the smartest people can be dangerously sure they're right.

Aug 4, 2026

Social Sciences

Being single is becoming the norm rather than a phase: a record quarter of American 40-year-olds have never married, up from 6 percent in 1980, and research increasingly suggests the old assumption that marriage automatically makes people healthier and happier is shakier than we were told

As millions of Americans stay single into their forties, decades of research suggesting marriage equals happiness faces serious scrutiny.

Aug 4, 2026

Brain & Behavior

The internet treats returning your shopping cart as the ultimate test of character, but the psychology of small unwatched good deeds says they are driven far more by the situation than by who you are

Our moral self-image may be less about who we are and more about where we are—a finding that upends one of the internet's favorite character judgments.

Aug 4, 2026

Brain & Behavior

The quality we call class lines up with something researchers have a name for: prestige, the respect people grant you freely rather than under pressure, and the evidence says it is earned by competence and generosity, not by displays of wealth or status

What people actually mean by class has little to do with money and everything to do with how freely others choose to respect you.

Aug 3, 2026

Brain & Behavior

A Yale study that followed more than 3,600 older adults for twelve years found that book readers outlived non-readers by almost two years, an advantage that held even after accounting for wealth, education and health

The longevity boost from reading books proved surprisingly robust in a major study—but what it actually reveals about living longer is far more complex than the headline suggests.

Aug 3, 2026

Brain & Behavior

What makes someone attractive is far less fixed than we assume: people mostly agree on a stranger’s looks, but the longer they actually know someone, the more that agreement dissolves and attraction turns personal

Strangers see beauty the same way; people who actually know each other rarely do.

Aug 3, 2026

Brain & Behavior

The size of a person’s vocabulary is one of the best single predictors of their general intelligence, not because big words make anyone smarter, but because quietly acquiring and keeping thousands of them draws on the same ability an IQ test measures

The vocabulary test reveals not what you know, but how your mind works—the same mental machinery that powers every form of intelligence.

Aug 3, 2026

Life

There is no such thing as a tree in the biological sense: a tree is not a family of plants but a shape unrelated lineages have evolved over and over, so an oak is more closely related to a strawberry than to a pine

What you call a tree is just convergent evolution's favorite solution to reaching sunlight—which means your family tree might be closer to a strawberry than you'd expect.

Aug 1, 2026

Earth & Environment

The Pacific is the largest ocean on Earth, bigger than all the continents combined, and it is also the one that is slowly closing, consumed around its edges a little faster than its floor can spread

Geologically, the world's biggest ocean is also its most doomed, consumed at its margins faster than new seafloor can emerge to replace it.

Aug 1, 2026