Weird World News

July 9, 2025

Top Headlines

Matching Your Workouts to Your Personality Could Make Exercising More Enjoyable and Give You Better Results

July 9, 2025 — Less than a quarter of us hit WHO activity targets, but a new UCL study suggests the trick may be matching workouts to our personalities: extroverts thrive in high-energy group sports, neurotics ...

Hate Exercise? Neuroscience Maps the Routine Your Personality Will Love

July 8, 2025 — A new UCL study reveals that aligning workouts with personality boosts fitness and slashes stress—extroverts thrive on HIIT, neurotics favor short, private bursts, and everyone benefits when enjoyment leads the ...

Scientists’ Top 10 Bee-Magnet Blooms—turn Any Lawn Into a Pollinator Paradise

July 7, 2025 — Danish and Welsh botanists sifted through 400 studies, field-tested seed mixes, and uncovered a lineup of native and exotic blooms that both thrill human eyes and lure bees and hoverflies in droves, ...

New Research Shows Monday Stress Is Etched Into Your Biology

July 7, 2025 — Feeling jittery as the week kicks off isn’t just a mood—it leaves a biochemical footprint. Researchers tracked thousands of older adults and found those who dread Mondays carry elevated cortisol in their hair for months, a stress echo that may ...

Multisensory VR Forest Reboots Your Brain and Lifts Mood—study Confirms

July 6, 2025 — Immersing stressed volunteers in a 360° virtual Douglas-fir forest complete with sights, sounds and scents boosted their mood, sharpened short-term memory and deepened their feeling of nature-connectedness—especially when all three senses were ...

Pregnancy’s 100-Million-Year Secret: Inside the Placenta’s Evolutionary Power Play

July 6, 2025 — A group of scientists studying pregnancy across six different mammals—from humans to marsupials—uncovered how certain cells at the mother-baby boundary have been working together for over 100 ...

Avocado Alert! DNA Reveals How Native Plants Keep Brunch on the Menu

July 4, 2025 — Preserving strips of native vegetation beside avocado orchards gives insects a buffet of wild pollen when blossoms are scarce, doubling their plant menu and boosting their resilience. Using cutting-edge eDNA metabarcoding, Curtin scientists revealed ...

This Sun-Powered Sponge Pulls Drinking Water Straight from the Ocean

July 3, 2025 — In a leap toward sustainable desalination, researchers have created a solar-powered sponge-like aerogel that turns seawater into drinkable water using just sunlight and a plastic cover. Unlike previous materials, this new 3D-printed aerogel ...

Mining the Deep Could Mute the Songs of Sperm Whales

June 24, 2025 — Exploration for deep-sea minerals in the Clarion Clipperton Zone threatens to disrupt an unexpectedly rich ecosystem of whales and dolphins. New studies have detected endangered species in the area and warn that mining noise and sediment could ...

Artificial Intelligence Isn’t Hurting workers—It Might Be Helping

June 23, 2025 — Despite widespread fears, early research suggests AI might actually be improving some aspects of work life. A major new study examining 20 years of worker data in Germany found no signs that AI exposure is hurting job satisfaction or mental health. ...

Superbugs in Your Shrimp: Deadly Colistin-Resistance Genes Ride on Imported Seafood

June 22, 2025 — Colistin, a last-resort antibiotic, is losing its power due to rising resistance—and the culprits might be hiding in your seafood dinner. A University of Georgia research team discovered ...

Scientists Create Living Building Material That Captures CO₂ from the Air

June 21, 2025 — Researchers at ETH Zurich have developed an astonishing new material: a printable gel that’s alive. Infused with ancient cyanobacteria, this "photosynthetic living material" not only grows but also removes CO₂ from the air, twice over. The ...

Latest Headlines

updated 11:30am EDT

Why Anger Cools After 50: Surprising Findings from a New Menopause Study

July 3, 2025 — Anger isn’t just a fleeting emotion—it plays a deeper role in women’s mental and physical health during midlife. A groundbreaking study tracking over 500 women aged 35 to 55 reveals that anger ...

Are Lefties Really More Creative? 100 Years of Data Say No

July 1, 2025 — A sweeping review of more than a century’s research upends the popular notion that left-handers are naturally more creative. Cornell psychologist Daniel Casasanto’s team sifted nearly a thousand ...

Buried for 23,000 Years: These Footprints Are Rewriting American History

June 29, 2025 — Footprints found in the ancient lakebeds of White Sands may prove that humans lived in North America 23,000 years ago — much earlier than previously believed. A new study using radiocarbon-dated ...

Scientists Just Reconstructed Half the Neanderthal Genome—thanks to Indian DNA

June 29, 2025 — India’s complex ancestry—intertwined with Iranian farmers, Steppe herders, and local hunter-gatherers—has now been decoded through genomic data ...

Scientists Finally Know Why Early Human Migrations out of Africa Failed

June 26, 2025 — New research reveals why early human attempts to leave Africa repeatedly failed—until one group succeeded spectacularly around 50,000 years ago. Scientists discovered that before this successful ...

New Test Unmasks Illegal Elephant Ivory Disguised as Mammoth

June 26, 2025 — Poachers are using a sneaky loophole to bypass the international ivory trade ban—by passing off illegal elephant ivory as legal mammoth ivory. Since the two types look deceptively similar, law ...

Farming Without Famine: Ancient Andean Innovation Rewrites Agricultural Origins

June 26, 2025 — Farming didn t emerge in the Andes due to crisis or scarcity it was a savvy and resilient evolution. Ancient diets remained stable for millennia, ...

This Team Tried to Cross 140 Miles of Treacherous Ocean Like Stone-Age Humans—and It Worked

June 26, 2025 — Experiments and simulations show Paleolithic paddlers could outwit the powerful Kuroshio Current by launching dugout canoes from northern Taiwan and ...

Scientists Reprogram Ant Behavior Using Brain Molecules

June 25, 2025 — Leafcutter ants live in highly organized colonies where every ant has a job, and now researchers can flip those jobs like a switch. By manipulating just two neuropeptides, scientists can turn ...

Half of Today’s Jobs Could vanish—Here’s How Smart Countries Are Future-Proofing Workers

June 22, 2025 — AI is revolutionizing the job landscape, prompting nations worldwide to prepare their workforces for dramatic changes. A University of Georgia study ...

Cluck Once, and the River Shakes: Inside the Amazon’s Giant Snake Saga

June 16, 2025 — A lifelong fascination with nature and fieldwork led this researcher to the world of ethnobiology a field where ecology, culture, and community come together. Investigating how local people relate to ...

Africa's Pangolin Crisis: The Delicacy That's Driving a Species to the Brink

June 14, 2025 — Study suggests that appetite for bushmeat -- rather than black market for scales to use in traditional Chinese medicine -- is driving West Africa's illegal hunting of one of the world's ...

2,000 Miles Through Rivers and Ice: Mapping Neanderthals’ Hidden Superhighways Across Eurasia

June 10, 2025 — Neanderthals may have trekked thousands of miles across Eurasia much faster than we ever imagined. New computer simulations suggest they used river valleys like natural highways to cross daunting ...

Clean Energy, Dirty Secrets: Inside the Corruption Plaguing California’s Solar Market

June 11, 2025 — California s solar energy boom is often hailed as a green success story but a new study reveals a murkier reality beneath the sunlit panels. Researchers uncover seven distinct forms of corruption ...

Nearly Five Million Seized Seahorses Just 'Tip of the Iceberg' in Global Wildlife Smuggling

May 28, 2025 — Close to five million smuggled seahorses worth an estimated CAD$29 million were seized by authorities over a 10-year span, according to a new study that warns the scale of the trade is far larger ...

Five Things to Do in Virtual Reality -- And Five to Avoid

May 28, 2025 — A review of experimental research reveals how VR is best used and why it's struggled to become a megahit with ...

Emotional Responses Crucial to Attitudes About Self-Driving Cars

May 27, 2025 — When it comes to public attitudes toward using self-driving cars, understanding how the vehicles work is important -- but so are less obvious characteristics like feelings of excitement or pleasure ...

Is AI Truly Creative? Turns out Creativity Is in the Eye of the Beholder

May 8, 2025 — What makes people think an AI system is creative? New research shows that it depends on how much they see of the creative act. The findings have implications for how we research and design creative ...

Is Virtual-Only Couture the New Clothing Craze?

May 7, 2025 — As fast fashion continues to fill wardrobes and landfills at a staggering pace, new research suggests that the future of fashion might lie not in fabric, but in ...

Children as Young as Five Can Navigate a 'Tiny Town'

May 5, 2025 — Neuroscientists are developing methods to map the brain systems that allow us to recognize and get around our ...

Space Junk Falling to Earth Needs to Be Tracked: Meteoroid Sounds Can Help

May 2, 2025 — Space junk and meteoroids are falling to Earth every year, posing a growing risk as they re-enter the atmosphere at high speeds. Researchers are using infrasound sensors to track these objects, ...

New Research Reveals How Physiology-Inspired Networks Could Improve Political Decision-Making

May 1, 2025 — A new study has unveiled a groundbreaking framework for rethinking political decision-making -- drawing inspiration from how the human body maintains stability and ...

Good Karma for Me, Bad Karma for You

May 1, 2025 — Many people around the world believe in karma -- that idea that divine justice will punish people who do bad deeds and reward those who good. But that belief plays out differently for oneself versus ...

Advancing AI for Diverse Applications in Manufacturing, Business and Education

Apr. 28, 2025 — Large language models (LLMs) are at the forefront of artificial intelligence (AI) and have been widely used for conversational interactions. However, assessing the personality of a given LLM remains ...

What Happens in the Brain When Your Mind Blanks

Apr. 24, 2025 — Mind blanking is a common experience with a wide variety of definitions ranging from feeling 'drowsy' to 'a complete absence of conscious awareness.' Neuroscientists and ...

Making AI-Generated Code More Accurate in Any Language

Apr. 24, 2025 — Researchers developed a more efficient way to control the outputs of a large language model, guiding it to generate text that adheres to a certain structure, like a programming language, and remains ...

Skeletal Evidence of Roman Gladiator Bitten by Lion in Combat

Apr. 23, 2025 — Bite marks found on a skeleton discovered in a Roman cemetery in York have revealed the first archaeological evidence of gladiatorial combat between a human and a ...

Current AI Risks More Alarming Than Apocalyptic Future Scenarios

Apr. 23, 2025 — Most people generally are more concerned about the immediate risks of artificial intelligence than they are about a theoretical future in which AI threatens humanity. A new study reveals that ...

Using ChatGPT, Students Might Pass a Course, but With a Cost

Apr. 22, 2025 — With the assumption that students are going to use artificial intelligence and large language models such as ChatGPT to do their homework, researchers set out to learn how well the free version of ...

What If Mother Earth Could Sue for Mistreatment?

Apr. 21, 2025 — The study highlights the transformative potential of the Rights of Nature, which views nature as a rights-bearing entity, not merely an object of regulation and subjugation by extractive industries. ...