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Imagine answering the call of nature in a dark, stinking chamber alongside dozens of strangers, all while making pleasant conversation. When it’s time to wipe, perhaps you reach for a communal sponge on a stick, hoping that the person before you rinsed it well. You’re also hoping that the hole you’re sitting over won’t suddenly release rats, or flames. 

This might sound like some kind of punishment or endurance challenge today, but in Ancient Rome this was just a standard public restroom.

So what exactly was it like to use a Roman toilet? Here are all the smelly details. 

The different kinds of Roman toilet

At home, the poorest Romans relieved themselves in chamber pots. Some apartment buildings were equipped with a shared pit toilet on the ground floor, while wealthier homes might have their own private ones. Unfortunately, these private toilets were often placed near the kitchen, likely because it was also on the lowest level of a Roman home and close to a source of water for washing. 

While some of these latrines connected to pipes that moved waste underground, very few drained into Ancient Rome’s sewer system. Rome had one of the world’s first urban sewer systems, a network that included the Cloaca Maxima. Rivaling modern sewers in size and complexity, this remarkable network of tunnels dates as far back as 500 BC, and parts are still in use today, draining runoff from the Forum in the heart of the city.

Rome had one of the world’s first urban sewer systems, known as the Cloaca Maxima. Video: Ancient Rome: Cloaca Maxima, Ancient Engineering Marvel (Episode 020) | Roman History, History in Minutes: The Ancient World

But the Cloaca Maxima was primarily designed to drain marshland and alleviate flooding. Only a small portion of it was used to carry wastewater away from the empire’s capital. This meant that latrines had to be periodically emptied. 

Household slaves emptied the private toilets of the wealthy, while paid waste removers cleaned out public pit toilets and chamber pots. These paid removers would shovel waste into horse-drawn carts, which they drove out of the city at times when no other street traffic was permitted for maximum efficiency. The collected waste was then sold as fertilizer. 

The poorest Romans, often isolated on the upper floors of tenement buildings, would also empty chamber pots out of windows, although this was made illegal by the third century.

Classicist and Roman plumbing expert Ann Olga Koloski-Ostrow suggests that private toilets might have been cut off from the municipal sewers to prevent animals crawling up the pipes and into homes. And not just rats. Koloski-Ostrow cites one ancient account of an intrepid octopus, which climbed out of a toilet to devour fish stored in the household pantry.

Inside Roman public toilets

As Rome’s population grew, public toilets were installed in high-traffic areas for the free access of all (although in practice, they were used mostly by men). By the third century, the city had 144 such facilities. Known as foricae (singular forica), they are also found in other Roman settlements, such as Ostia and Pompeii.

Foricae were generally connected to city sewers and equipped with running water. Many had a channel for rinsing that ran along the floor, as well as a pool in the center of the room to help diffuse odors (how much, no one can say), and sometimes an additional washbasin. Sewage would be flushed by releasing collected rainwater or runoff from bathhouses. Foricae were typically placed near bathhouses for this reason. 

From there, the sewers carried waste off into the river or ocean, where it ran the risk of contaminating water sources. The second-century physician Galen warned against eating fish from “the outlets of rivers which clean out the sewers, the tavern, and the baths,” suggesting that at least some Romans were aware of the health risks.

What was it like to use a Roman public toilet?

Inside a forica, stone benches lined the walls, with open holes to sit on over the drainage channel below. Foricae varied widely in size. One from the Roman port of Ostia could seat 20, but the elaborate Baths of Caracalla had two adjacent restrooms seating 100 each. The absence of privacy in these open rooms was a nonissue for the Romans, who also slept, ate, and bathed in view of one another.

Public Roman bathrooms in Ostia Antica near Rome in Lazio, Italy, could seat up to 20 people at a time. Image: Sir Francis Canker Photography / Getty Images / Picasa

Lacking modern long-distance communication, Romans relished any opportunity for connecting with each other in person, even in the restroom. Ancient writers like the first-century satirist Martial described foricae as a hub for socialization. 

In one poem, Martial mocks a friend who “spends hours in all the privies, sitting all day long” in hopes of getting invited to a party: “He doesn’t want a shit. He wants a dinner.” In another poem, Martial suggests that a writer seeking fame should copy his works on the toilet walls for all to read. Even in Ancient Rome, there was toilet graffiti.

Foricae could also be quite scary. Hydrogen sulfide and methane gas rising from the cesspits were known to suddenly burst into flames, not unlike the natural phenomenon of burning marsh gas. Superstitious Romans imagined demons lurking in the darkness under the toilet seats. Many toilet walls bore images of Fortuna, the goddess of luck, just in case.

What did Romans use as “toilet paper?”

When it came to wiping, Romans had several options. The humblest was leaves or moss. One could also scrape oneself clean with discs of pottery called pessoi, made by rounding off the edges on broken potshards.

A gentler method was a natural sea sponge on a stick, known as a tersorium, which means “wiper” in Latin, or xylospongium, “sponge stick” in Ancient Greek. These were likely found in public foricae. After using a sponge stick, you would rinse it off in the running water channel if there was one, or else in a provided bucket of water or vinegar, and pass it to the next person.

As horrifying as this might sound, remember that the Romans didn’t know about germs. If something looked clean, they likely assumed it was. The sponge stick was such a normal, everyday object that it could even be used in metaphor. In a letter from the second century, a soldier named Claudius Terentianus complained about someone who “pays no more attention to me than to a sponge stick.”

What about urinals?

Standing urinals in the form of gutters are found at some Roman public buildings, such as the Colosseum. Like foricae, they were connected to running water and could be used by many people at once. 

Just as solid waste was valued as fertilizer, urine was a commodity in Roman industry due to its ammonia content. It was used for tanning leather, making toothpaste (yes, really), and most of all for cleansing and fortifying fabric in a process called fulling.

Instead of letting it all go to waste down the Cloaca Maxima, fullers and others who needed urine for their business placed pots on the streets to be filled by passersby. This resource was so valuable that the first-century Emperor Vespasian even imposed a tax on it. When his son expressed disgust at this, the Emperor is said to have replied “Pecunia non olet:” Money doesn’t stink.

Faced with the challenge of keeping their great city clean, the Romans had some solutions that were ingenious and sophisticated for their time. Still, if you ever plan on visiting Ancient Rome in a time machine, you should probably use the bathroom before you leave.

In That Time When, Popular Science tells the weirdest, surprising, and little-known stories that shaped science, engineering, and innovation.

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The post For ancient Romans, pooping was a group activity appeared first on Popular Science.

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As the sun rose over Southern California’s Big Bear Valley on Monday morning, Shadow the bald eagle and his new companion Kaydee were spotted perched on the top of a roost tree near Shadow’s nest. 

Kaydee then visited the nest, with a feather in one of her nostrils. However, the accessory did not appear to bother her, as she got to work rearranging sticks like she and Shadow did over the weekend. Eagles frequently move around sticks to maintain their nests. Afterwards, Kaydee joined Shadow perched on another tree limb, before he flew off.

It is still too early to tell if she will be a new mate for Shadow, following the death of his former partner, Jackie, earlier this month. 

“While we will forever have our queen Jackie in our hearts, it is captivating to observe Shadow and Kaydee interacting with one another,” Friends of Big Bear Valley (FOBBV) wrote in their latest update.

FOBBV added that former executive director Sandy Steers’ message that we are mere observers of nature resonates even more right now. Steers passed away in February, following a bout with cancer.

“We will always be grateful to her for showing us the way to watch, to listen and to learn,” FOBBV writes.

Viewers can follow Shadow and Kaydee and their journey via the nest livestream.

Who is KD1 aka Kaydee?

Kaydee, formerly known as KD1, is a banded female bald eagle that has been spotted in Big Bear Valley following the death of Shadow’s former partner, Jackie. She was born in 2022, about 70 miles away from Big Bear Lake in the Prado Basin between Anaheim and Riverside, California. Coincidentally, her parents are also named Lucky and Ricky like Jackie’s parents, but they are a different eagle pair. 

Kaydee was banded as part of the Orange County Water District’s work to track the eagles born in the area. These bands help biologists track and monitor the birds over time. Kaydee currently has a black spot on her head, but it may not be permanent. It’s possible that not all of her white feathers have come in or it could be tree sap or dirt. She also has two small bands on her legs. One is a small metal band, while the other is a lavender band with “KD1” on it. 

Kaydee is almost five years old, so she is just about ready to mate. She was recently spotted on FOBBV’s livestream inspecting the nest and has also been seen hanging out near Shadow. Flying around Big Bear is completely normal behavior for young adult eagles at this time of year.

It is still too early to know if Shadow and Kaydee will mate. The full bald eagle nesting season lasts over six months, depending on when the fledged chicks leave the area. FOBBV tracks the nesting season beginning on September 1, and eggs are generally laid in January. 

Jackie and Shadow’s story

Jackie and Shadow became official in 2018. FOBBV’s nest cameras documented Jackie and Shadow’s life together, offering us a direct look into the brutality and beauty of nature. They successfully raised chicks in 2019 (Cookie and Simba) and 2022 (Spirit). The pair’s eggs failed to hatch in 2023 and 2024. In 2025, Jackie laid three eggs that all hatched in early March. However, a strong snowstorm dumped up to two feet of snow and battered the nest with strong wind and only two of the chicks (Sunny and Gizmo) survived.  

In January, Jackie laid two eggs in the nest, but ravens destroyed them. She later laid two more eggs that hatched in April and named Luna and Sandy. The name Sandy is in honor of FOBBV’s former executive director Sandy Steers who died from cancer in February. 

On July 17, Jackie was found injured on the ground near Dana Point Park, California. Cell phone video from a witness confirmed that she had an altercation with two other subadult eagles. She successfully fended off the other eagles by turning over and using her talons, but could not fly far away. 

She was transferred to the Ojai Raptor Center for care, where she was diagnosed with severe anemia. Her anemia worsened during the first week of August, the Ojai Raptor Center said that she was in unstable condition on August 9. Her packed cell volume (PCV) fell below percent, before rising to nine percent. 

Jackie died early in the morning on August 10. The necropsy did not reveal a single cause of death, and instead pointed to several factors including severe anemia, blood clots in her wing and one kidney, and liver and lung abnormalities.

The post Kaydee the bald eagle visits Shadow’s nest with a feather in her nostril appeared first on Popular Science.

The excavation of an over 400-year-old grave in Poland revealed a burial scene that, although macabre, was likely orchestrated in the hopes of protecting local villagers. In the town of Pień about 60 miles east of Kraków, archaeologists discovered the 17th century remains of a young woman interred with booby-traps to prevent her from returning as a vampire.

Researchers from Poland’s Nicolaus Copernicus University described their findings in a study recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. First discovered in 2022, Grave 75 contained the body of a 17 to19 year old woman who likely died sometime between 1620 and 1674 CE. DNA analysis indicates she possessed a rare maternal lineage that traces back to Scandinavia, yet remains almost nonexistent in more modern Slavic regions. Despite this genetic anomaly, examinations of her childhood teeth showed she was raised near Pień.

Archaeologists were immediately surprised by the scene inside her grave. Disrupted soil inside the burial plot suggests someone briefly dug up the body before it even finished decomposing. They then rearranged her arm towards the northeast, placed an iron sickle across her neck with the blade angled to her throat, and attached an iron padlock to her left big toe.

Both the sickle and the lock are traceable to historic folk rituals intended to combat supernatural or demonic forces. Archaeologists note that Polish-Lithuanian communities in the 17th century often blamed disease, famines, and other disasters on the recently dead—meaning this woman may have become a scapegoat for recent calamities.

However, she likely wasn’t an ostracized peasant. Thin metallic threads composed of gilded gold and silver wires that were once part of a silk cap were found near her skull. The inclusion of such a lavish accessory indicates that the young woman came from a wealthy family, although fears about potential malevolent powers didn’t stop people from taking post-burial precautions. Her status also appears to contradict hints about her health, since her nitrogen and carbon levels point to periods of malnutrition.

Meanwhile, a green stain on her neck and palate bones is likely tied to a copper-containing object or medical treatment intentionally placed deep in her mouth or nasal cavity near the time of death. Even the grave’s location suggests that a wealthy life couldn’t always guard someone against supernatural suspicions. The Pień cemetery where she is buried doesn’t appear on historical maps, and its location outside the village near a crossroads implies it functioned as a false cemetery—a site reserved for a community’s shunned individuals.

While grim, this scene illustrates the complex intersections between faith, superstition, community, and wealth within rural European life during the 17th century. But if it’s any consolation, the falsely accused vampire at least got to keep her head.

The post 400-year-old ‘vampire’ grave discovered in Poland appeared first on Popular Science.

In the United States, the Burmese python (Python bivittatus) is most often associated with zoos or the invasive chaos it’s brought to Florida over the last 50 years. That doesn’t mean the giant snake can’t potentially threaten local ecosystems in other parts of the country, too. At least 10 states including New York currently ban or heavily restrict the importation, trade, and selling of pythons.

It’s still unclear if the owner of a Burmese python understood the local laws before recently showing off his massive pet to onlookers at Coney Island in Brooklyn, New York. But according to New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation (NYSDEC), officers were quick to inform him of the issue before confiscating the reptile.

“On July 12, [Officer] Maynard observed a large snake near Riegelmann Boardwalk in Coney Island with a crowd of about a dozen people, including small children, gathered around it,” the NYSDEC recounted in its monthly rundown of notable events.

The man, who also had a ball python (Python regius) draped around his neck, quickly admitted to owning the sizable Burmese specimen. The officer then issued a ticket for illegal possession, which likely includes a potential fine of up to $500, before confiscating the snake.

The officer couldn’t do it alone, however. Given its huge size, transporting the reptile to the Nassau County Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) on Long Island required backup from at least one additional officer. While NYSDEC didn’t specify the snake’s exact weight and length, the announcement’s accompanying photo suggests the snake was at least 10 feet long. Burmese pythons regularly grow upwards of 16 feet long in the wild while weighing close to 200 pounds.

Unlike Florida’s hotter and more humid climate, New York State isn’t well suited for pythons outside captivity. So while it’s unlikely that local conservationists will ever need to organize their own annual python hunting challenge, the predators could still prove dangerous to native wildlife and local pets.

The post Police seize massive Burmese python near Coney Island boardwalk appeared first on Popular Science.

Signs of the waning summer are everywhere. The sun is setting earlier, yellow school buses are emerging from hibernation, and birds are showing up on weather radar once again. The fall migration is in full swing and we humans can follow along with BirdCast. 

Over the next two nights (August 25 and 26), BirdCast predicts that over 200 million birds will begin their long journey towards their head for their wintering grounds. Over 300North American bird species are long-distance migrants, meaning they will travel hundreds to thousands of miles annually. These migrations can take days to weeks, depending on the species

BirdCast’s daily forecast maps show their predicted nighttime migration patterns that begin roughly three hours after sunset. The brighter and warmer colors represent more birds expected overhead. They are also updated every six hours.

On August 25, expect the largest concentration of birds around Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota. 

The data is updated every six hours, so estimates may change. Image: Van Doren, B. M., and K. G. Horton. 2018. A continental system for forecasting bird migration. Science 361:1115-1118. doi: 10.1126/science.aat7526.

On Wednesday, August 26, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas should see the highest concentration of birds.

The data is updated every six hours, so estimates may change. Image: Van Doren, B. M., and K. G. Horton. 2018. A continental system for forecasting bird migration. Science 361:1115-1118. doi: 10.1126/science.aat7526.

If you are curious which bird species may be traveling through your area, the dashboard is integrated with Cornell’s eBird database. This database uses common bird sightings from the same time in previous years to make predictions.

To make these maps, BirdCast uses weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), since their radar picks up large groups. It also uses weather forecasts to predict these nightly migration hotspots. A live map will also go up every night, so users can zero in on what might be going on in the skies where they live. BirdCast is made possible by participating scientists from Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Purdue University, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and other contributors.

To migrate, or not to migrate

Typically, birds migrate for two reasons: nests and food. In the Northern Hemisphere, this means heading north during warmer months, when there are more insects and budding plant life to eat. During the spring, many species are also rushing to mate and nest. 

Ahead of the colder months, some will return south to avoid freezing temperatures. Earlier in August, a famous, toeless piping plover (Charadrius melodus) named Phoenix was spotted back in Florida, after spending the summer over 1,000 miles away in Maine. 

After spending several months in Maine, Phoenix the Footless was spotted back in Florida on August 10. Image: Lorraine Margeson.

However, not all birds head south. Many birds, including mallard ducks (Anas platyrhynchos), black-capped chickadees (Poecile atricapillus), and the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) don’t migrate and fare just fine in snowy conditions. 

At least 4,000 bird species (or roughly 40 percent of world’s known birds) are regular migrants. The Arctic tern wins the award for longest migration of any bird in the world. These can fly almost 50,000 miles in one year, when traveling between their wintering ground in the Antarctic north to their breeding grounds in the Arctic. 

How to help migrating birds

As the migration continues over the next several weeks, there are some easy ways to help make sure that the birds safely make it to their destinations. 

• Add a film or decals to windows. This can help keep birds from colliding with the glass. 
• Plant native plants and avoid pesticides when possible. This gives them safe places to land and eat. 
• Keep cats indoors. This is good advice in general, as housecats can be destructive to the ecosystem, but rings particularly true during bird migration.  
• Turn off all excess outdoor lights. Too many lights can impact their navigation

The post Over 200 million migratory birds are hitting the sky this week appeared first on Popular Science.

Managing air traffic on a global scale requires juggling a dizzying combination of logistics, international regulations, and environmental variables. But in the not-too-distant future, commercial plane travel could feel quaint when compared to the organizational efforts needed to run humanity’s first lunar spaceport.

If all goes as planned, NASA hopes to have the Gateway installation up and running on the moon within the next 20 years. Once operational, the revolutionary orbital transportation nexus will ferry astronauts, cargo, and scientific equipment all headed to the moon’s first permanent lunar base. Setting aside everything involved in building such a vast structure, Gateway will only function safely so long as it runs on precise mathematical and gravitational calculations that simply isn’t necessary for air travel on Earth.

As researchers explain in a study recently published in the journal Acta Astronautica, these systems will all relate back to a route called the Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit (NRHO). The largely stable orbital path offers the most fuel efficient cosmic highway and an interrupted line of sight between spacecraft and mission specialists back home.

That won’t make harnessing the NRHO simple by any stretch, however. The NRHO will need to follow a highly elongated, egg-shaped loop that passes within 1,000 miles of the moon’s north pole. It will then round its turn about 40,000 miles past the lunar south pole. Thanks to physics, Gateway as well as any crew or cargo will also constantly contend with the gravitational struggle between Earth and the moon.

An artist’s concept art depicting an Orion spacecraft approaching Gateway. Credit: NASA

Then there is lunar “rush hour” to consider. Planning a single spacecraft’s trip to the moon is (relatively) straightforward, but what about when multiple crews are simultaneously en route to the moon? Just like commuting to work or taxiing on an airport runway, planning the solution comes down to loitering.

“Loitering in space means maintaining a spacecraft relative to a specific orbit or trajectory without executing an immediate maneuver,” Diane Davis, a study co-author and Texas A&M University space engineer, said in a statement.

On Earth, vehicles at rest remain at rest—at least relatively speaking. Loitering in space will involve combating orbital physics for days or even weeks at a time.

“Every spacecraft is constantly moving,” Davis explained. “It’s a Goldilocks zone of keeping ‘parked’ vehicles far enough from each other to be safe, but close enough to their destination so that resources are used efficiently.”

Davis and her colleagues from NASA and Purdue University ran thousands of computer simulations to identify the best ways to keep multiple spacecraft loitering safely near Gateway, while also including inevitable variables like thruster issues and navigational errors. They concluded that a handful of new maneuvers are necessary to ensure vehicles remain as close to their intended spots as possible. These can then be stacked as the spacecraft queue lengthens around Gateway. Davis likens the calculations to arranging a string of pearls on a necklace.

“Spacecraft would arrange themselves naturally along the lunar orbit and relative to Gateway,” she said.

Although it sounds straightforward on paper, the concepts remain incredibly complex to translate into multibillion dollar missions with dozens of lives on the line. It might not sound as dramatic as actually launching from Gateway for a lunar rendezvous, but it’s just as vital to the future of human space travel.

“The future of lunar exploration depends as much on the traffic management as it does on the rocket science,” said Davis.

The post How NASA is prepping for lunar traffic jams appeared first on Popular Science.

Earlier this year, a team of researchers in Virginia spent more than eight weeks tracking down Eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina) nests, employing a technique that seems straight out of ancient Greece’s Minotaur myth. 

The Turtle Conservation Ecology Lab has been collecting data on Eastern box turtle habits since 2022. The team started studying their nest survival rates in the spring, hoping that their research will better inform conservation leaders on how to safeguard Virginia’s native turtles’ nesting sites.

Mark Ketner, a researcher with the lab, and his field collaborator found 16 nests, but the search for each one began before the nest had even existed—with the mothers. Working with turtles that had previously been tagged with a telemetry transmitter and a GPS tag, the duo uses a VHF receiver to track down the turtle. Just like in the movies, the receiver beeps faster the closer they get to the turtle. Once the signal peaks, the researchers start looking through the underbrush. 

If they find a turtle, the duo note down basic information about the reptile before checking to see if the (presumably female) turtle is carrying eggs, which would make her a gravid turtle. To check for eggs, the scientists feel for a hard bulge under the skin just above the hind legs. This approach, however, doesn’t always provide a definitive answer, and is where the portable X-ray machine comes in. 

This photo is from fieldwork of a research project investigating survival rates for wild box turtle nests. Photos were taken in May 2026 at an undisclosed field site in rural Virginia. The team tracks box turtles using a GPS locator, a telemetry unit, with trackers gently fixed to the backs of the turtles’ shells. Julia Jones operates a portable X-ray machine to confirm if the turtles are carrying eggs. Image: Smithsonian/Joe Kolowski. Joe Kolowski

To make sure the turtle doesn’t move around, they place the reptile on top of an upside down cup as a veterinary technician captures an X-ray scan. If the scan reveals that the turtle is carrying eggs, the two researchers record it and then attach a spool to the turtle’s shell. They then return her to where she’d been discovered and tie the end of the thread to a small flag. 

The researchers are essentially the Ariadne to the turtle’s Theseus. The mothers-to-be pull the thread along like the Greek hero did as he wandered through the minotaur’s labyrinth. The researchers then return the next day, track down the turtles, and weigh them. If the turtle weighs less than before, it means that she’d laid her eggs in the vicinity. 

“At this point we’re usually bent over, following this thin piece of thread for hundreds of feet… we look kind of silly doing it,” Ketner said in the statement. 

Once a nest is discovered, Ketner and his field collaborator plant a small flag, take down some associated information, and set up a camera to keep an eye on it remotely. 

Eastern box turtle (Terrapene carolina carolina). NZCBI’s Turtle Conservation Ecology Lab is monitoring populations across landscapes with the goal to develop best management practices that private landowners can implement to support turtle conservation. Image: Smithsonian/Brooke McDonough. Brooke McDonough

Eastern box turtle eggs hatch after around two months,but not all of the 16 nests that the team identified made it. In fact, the eggs from 13 of those nests were quickly destroyed and eaten by predators. Box turtle nest predation may be up to 90 percent, according to the team.

“Nest predation adds a layer to turtle population decline that I don’t think many people are aware of,” Ketner explained. “It’s easy to picture a turtle’s biggest threat as a spray of pesticide or a car on a country road. But we’re seeing they’re in danger before they’ve even hatched.”

This racoon was caught eating a nest on our trail camera. You can see the turtle egg in its mouth. This image is from fieldwork of a research project investigating survival rates for wild box turtle nests. Photos were taken in May 2026 at an undisclosed field site in rural Virginia. Image: Smithsonian/Mark Ketner.
Mark Ketner

The data the team collected this season doesn’t change anything for these hatchlings, but it does shed light on the factors currently threatening this species, and the more scientists know about an animal, the better equipped they are to protect it. There’s still a lot to learn, however, and next year the Turtle Conservation Ecology Lab will be gathering further nest information. 

“Collecting all the right the data is a slow, steady process,” said Ketner, “but they’re turtles. They figured this out over 200 million years ago, and they know exactly what they need. Our goal is to figure that out too, but in less time.”

The post How do you find Eastern box turtle nests? You’ll need a spool of thread. appeared first on Popular Science.

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Many cosmic images don’t quite look like the nicknames astronomers bestow upon them. Case in point: the Crab Nebula. The Hubble Space Telescope’s portrait of the star factory looks more like an amorphous blob than a crustacean, and it’s still hard to envision a clawed creature in 19th century astronomer William Parsons’ early sketch of the nebula.

This isn’t always the case, though. The James Webb Space Telescope’s (JWST) recent glimpse at a region inside the Carina Nebula lives up to its nickname. Looking at the image taken using JWST’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam), it’s difficult to see anything other than a cosmic Treasure Chest.

The Treasure Chest’s unique shape is likely influenced by a massive nearby binary star. Credit: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. Reiter
Acknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, M. ReiterAcknowledgement: M. H. Özsaraç

Located about 7,500 light-years from Earth, the Treasure Chest is filled with metaphorical jewels instead of literal gold. The formation is a cometary globule—a distant cloud with a dense head and flowing tail composed of dust and gas that looks a bit like a comet. Many cometary globules may look a bit like their comet namesakes, but the Treasure Chest feels more appropriate in this case…that, or a large recliner chair.

Astronomers estimate around 70 young stars and nascent protostars reside in Carina’s cometary globule, one of which is an example of a rare O-type star that’s about 19 times more massive than the sun. Even at an estimated 1.3 million years old, the Treasure Chest houses stars so young that they are still encased in their gassy, dusty circumstellar discs(also known as protoplanetary discs).

The culprit responsible for the Treasure Chest’s unique shape is located 39 light-years away, outside the image’s field of vision. The stellar system Eta Carinae is the brightest object in the Carina Nebula. It technically includes two or more stars, and one of its stars is estimated to be 100 times more massive and five million times as luminous than the sun. Together with a nearby star cluster called Trumpler 16, the overall stellar radiation and winds from Eta Carinae and Trumpler 16 are likely influencing the Treasure Chest’s shape.

Astronomers theorize that the star cluster initially coalesced in a larger gas cloud before neighboring stars eradicated the less-dense materials. This left only the denser cometary globule and its recognizable structure. Beyond serving as an interstellar Rorschach test, analyzing subjects like the Treasure Chest helps researchers better understand how young stars amass and eject gas, and how these behaviors influence their local cosmic neighborhoods.

The post ‘Treasure Chest’ cosmic cloud glitters with dozens of young stars appeared first on Popular Science.

Just like some humans, animals can benefit from acupuncture, too. ZooTampa at Lowry Park in Tampa, Florida is using veterinary acupuncture to treat some of its animals with complex medical conditions. The patients that have received this treatment include a manatee (Trichechus manatus) named Sloth, a black-bellied whistling duck (Dendrocygna autumnalis) named Earl Grey, and a roseate spoonbill chick (Platalea ajaja).

According to the Mayo Clinic, acupuncture involves putting very thin needles through the skin at strategic points on your body, and is most commonly used to treat pain.

“Acupuncture has a wide range of applications that can be applied to some of our diverse animal cases here at the zoo,” Alex Mason, the staff veterinarian who is certified in veterinary acupuncture and leading the initiative, tells Popular Science. It “has been demonstrated to aid in healing responses by increasing blood flow and circulating stem cells, in addition to enhancing patient comfort through the body’s release of endogenous opioids like endorphins and serotonin, and can stimulate nerves to enhance function, in addition to other applications.”

The treatment provides an additional strategy in the face of potentially limited traditional treatment solutions, or when the team aims to increase the animal’s comfort, mobility and healing, Mason added in a statement emailed to Popular Science. Acupuncture is employed as a complementary therapy at ZooTampa, so it might be used in conjunction with standard veterinary medicine, physical therapy, and other treatments. 

Fourteen-year-old Earl Grey was treated with electroacupuncture after he had sudden weakness in his right leg. His caretakers were happy to see improvements after three sessions. The roseate spoonbill chick also received electroacupuncture for a leg injury, after which it regained normal limb function. 

Earl Grey began treatment after developing a weakness in his right leg. Image: ZooTampa.

Sloth the manatee, on the other hand, has facial nerve injury that impacts one of his nostrils and one of his eyes. He was treated with both acupuncture and electroacupuncture, with mild improvements. Chronic nerve injuries can be particularly hard to treat, and acupuncture provided a different course of action in the wake of limited traditional treatments. 

“Acupuncture uses thin needles placed into specific spots selected based on the intended treatment plan for the animal,” Mason says. “Electroacupuncture utilizes the same needles and points but connects the needles to an electrical current for stronger and longer lasting effects.”

The post Florida zoo treats a manatee, a duck, and a chick with acupuncture appeared first on Popular Science.

When people suggest that you “make peace with God”, they might mean:

1. God is very powerful, so you are unlikely to win fights with him,

2. His authority is legit, so you should be ashamed to fight him, and

3. Any value by which you might justify fighting him came from him, and he understands it better than you.

I now suggest that you “make peace with Darwin”. Instead of trying to fight Darwinian evolution, you should mostly work with it.

One reason is that while you may have the freedom and resources to pursue whatever goals you choose in the short run, in the long run Darwinian evolution, via both DNA and culture, is a very powerful force. So powerful that if you love something enough to want it to last and grow in the long run, your main way to achieve that is to mix practices which support that thing you love into a pretty adaptive overall cultural and DNA package. After all, cultures with less than adaptive packages go away.

My slogan here is “To Love Something, Mix It With Life”. And to implement this slogan you’ll have to have substantial influence over some cultural package that somehow becomes pretty adaptive. You must work not only to mix practices supporting the thing you love into that package, but also to help that package stay or become pretty adaptive. Which means trying to help it to win at Darwinian evolution.

Another reason to make peace with Darwin is that all of the processes inside you which you might recruit, and also the values that you might embrace, all in support of your opposition to Darwinian evolution, all of those resulted from such processes. Darwinian evolution is a search process that tries out different packages of internal processes and guiding values, to see which might win in the long run. Your existing now with some particular package of such things resulted from recent heuristics of this process picking your package as part of its current bets re which have the best chances of winning.

Now Darwinian evolution is blind in many ways, and so maybe you can see things that it cannot, about how your package is actually a worse bet than Darwinian evolution could see. But this process has also taken into account many things that you do not appreciate, and so your package might actually be a better bet than you realize. The actions that you take to promote your goals in supposed defiance of Darwinian evolution may well actually achieve adaption in complex ways you do not understand.

I actually think that we now live at a special time when our Darwinian evolution process is unusually broken, making conscious analysis unusually good at figuring out how to be more adaptive, relative to following the values and instincts that we inherited from our Darwinian history. Which offers unusual opportunities for promoting stuff you love, via improving the adaptiveness of key cultural packages.

Wacken Open Air is widely considered the world’s heaviest of heavy metal music festivals for good reason. The annual event in northern Germany has drawn metalheads from around the world to the otherwise quiet town since 1990, and regularly features hundreds of the genre’s biggest acts. With upwards of 85,000 headbangers in attendance, the hub of extreme music also occasionally draws another, smaller contingent of visitors—cognitive scientists.

“We knew that suppressed anger has the greatest effect on intensifying pain experiences in patients with chronic pain,” Lydia Schneider, a neuroscience researcher formerly at Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, said in a statement. “That’s why we wanted to investigate whether the experience of pain changes—especially with a genre of music like heavy metal, which expresses quite a lot of unpleasant emotions, particularly anger.”

Schneider and her colleague Tom Fritz visited Wacken Open Air to offer concertgoers a challenge: see how long they could endure dipping their hand and forearm into ice water. Prior to the cold plunge, volunteers also recorded their heart rate and heart rate variability using an ECG monitor. Schneider and Fritz ultimately tested  122 volunteers during the festival, then compared their results against a control group of attendees who arrived prior to any bands taking the stage. 

The results weren’t what researchers expected. According to their study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports, participants didn’t find the pain less unpleasant after thrashing at the festival—but they did report it became easier to withstand the pain.

“On the contrary—the festivalgoers were actually able to endure the cold-induced pain for longer than the control group,” explained Schneider.

Instead of adjusting their pain sensitivity, the experiment suggests a correlation between aggressive or angry-sounding music and improved pain tolerance. The researchers say that beyond simply boosting attendees’ mosh pit endurance levels, their findings may prove useful in clinical and therapeutic settings,especially for patients struggling to process chronic pain.

“Music is often used to trigger positive feelings and induce relaxation—but when it comes to letting out one’s anger, you don’t necessarily want to listen to relaxing music,” Fritz added.

Wacken Open Air 2022 headliner Slipknot can probably attest to the findings. The band’s 2004 hit single “Duality” is about their lead vocalist’s migraines.

The post Heavy metal fans may handle pain better than others appeared first on Popular Science.