Brain & Behavior
A reminder from Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius to live in the present
Aurelius builds the argument to a point. Since the present is all anyone can lose: this instant, and nothing more.
Jul 20, 2026
Writer at Science Blog
Mal James
Mal James is an editor at Science Blog, where he reviews evidence-led coverage across science, health, technology, and the natural world. He focuses on whether articles represent their sources clearly, distinguish findings from interpretation, and give readers the context needed to understand the evidence.
Earth & Environment
Sunlight reaches only the top 200 metres of the sea before the water swallows it, which means the overwhelming majority of the living space…
Yet beneath a wafer-thin layer of illumination lies a vast realm of creatures that have never known sunlight—and we barely understand what lives there.
Jul 18, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Two thousand years on, Stoic philosopher Seneca's line still stings
You know the shape of the day. First coffee, a quick check of the phone, and then some soft dissolve happens between morning and dusk where the hours go somewhere you can't quite account for.
Jul 18, 2026
Brain & Behavior
Rest and holidays, we assume, are what happiness is made of
Ask people what would make them happier and the answer is usually the same: time off, fewer demands, a quieter calendar.
Jul 18, 2026
Life
Around 70 years after they became absent, fourteen wolves rode into Yellowstone in crates in 1995 and ecologists are still fighting over…
A four-minute video called "How Wolves Change Rivers" has been watched more than 46 million times.
Jul 17, 2026
Life
Most people assume a dog explores the world by sight, as we do, yet it lives in a world built almost wholly of smell, sniffed in stereo…
Take a dog for a walk and watch where its attention goes. Not to the view, not to the sky, not to the other dog fifty meters ahead that you spotted first.
Jul 17, 2026
Space
You never see the Sun as it is, only as it was
You have never seen the Sun. Not the real one, not the one that exists at the moment you look up.
Jul 17, 2026
Life
We tend to read a wagging tail as pure canine joy, but scientists who watched dogs closely suggest something subtler
There's a piece of folk wisdom so widely shared that almost nobody questions it: a wagging tail means a happy dog.
Jul 17, 2026
Life
Ostriches do not bury their heads in sand — they would suffocate
The bird with the most famous survival trick has never actually done it. An ostrich with its head packed into sand wouldn't be hiding — it would be smothering itself.
Jul 17, 2026
Life
A dog year is not seven human years: dogs age fastest when young, so a one-year-old is more like a teenager than a seven-year-old, and a…
Almost everyone learns the same rule about dogs: one dog year equals seven human years.
Jul 17, 2026
Social Sciences
Summer is not warm because Earth nears the Sun — in truth we sit closest to it every January
Ask people why summer is hot, and a lot of them give the same answer: Earth must be closer to the Sun.
Jul 17, 2026