Writer at Science Blog

Lachlan Brown

Lachlan Brown writes for Science Blog on psychology, behavior, and the ways research changes how everyday life looks.

Intelligent people can still be surprisingly bad at knowing when they are wrong, because solving a problem and judging the reliability of…

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

Life

There is no such thing as a tree, biologically speaking

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…

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

Brain & Behavior

Chosen solitude can lower emotional arousal, but cancelling plans has many possible explanations

Research suggests chosen solitude can reduce emotional arousal. It does not show that people who cancel plans read their energy more accurately than others.

Jul 24, 2026

Brain & Behavior

Seven capacities pet-directed speech may express, without proving a personality profile

Pet-directed speech is a real communication style. It may draw on attention, adaptation and care, but research does not establish a seven-trait profile for people who use it.

Jul 23, 2026

Brain & Behavior

Adults who eat the same breakfast every morning, take the same route to work and order the same drink at every restaurant aren’t boring

Repetition isn't necessarily rigidity—it might be how we free mental energy for what actually matters.

Jul 22, 2026

Brain & Behavior

NASA’s astronaut selection process goes far beyond résumés, intelligence and physical fitness

The astronauts who survive NASA's gauntlet aren't necessarily the smartest—they're the ones who stay sharp when everything falls apart.

Jul 21, 2026

Earth & Environment

A University of California, Riverside study published in Nature Communications found that a weakening Atlantic Ocean current thousands of…

Thousands of miles away, a faltering Atlantic current could turn California's storms into catastrophic deluges, trapping the state in an even more brutal cycle of flooding and drought.

Jul 20, 2026

Earth & Environment

Earth's inner core is not pure iron — a 2025 Oxford study found it could only have begun to freeze if roughly 3.8 percent of it is carbon…

The planet's magnetic shield may owe its existence to carbon, the element that animates all life on Earth.

Jul 20, 2026

Earth & Environment

The world's tallest waterfall is not Angel Falls

The planet's most dramatic waterfall exists in total darkness, where colliding ocean temperatures create a cascade far taller than anything water has ever done on land.

Jul 20, 2026

Space

Energy created in the Sun’s core can spend around 170,000 years bouncing through the radiative zone before reaching the outer layers

The light warming your face this morning left the Sun's core when mammoths still roamed the Earth.

Jul 20, 2026

Earth & Environment

In 1970, Soviet scientists began drilling into the Kola Peninsula and eventually reached 12,262 metres

Fifty years ago, Soviet scientists drilled deeper into Earth than anyone before or since—only to discover they'd barely begun.

Jul 19, 2026

Science

Australia's Finke River, known as the Larapinta, is estimated to be between 300 and 400 million years old

A river older than dinosaurs may sound mythical, but Australia's Finke has the geology to back it up—and a humbling reminder of how little we truly understand about deep time.

Jul 19, 2026

Science

The world has three different 'tallest mountains' depending on how you measure

The world's tallest mountain depends entirely on what "tallest" means.

Jul 19, 2026