Science

Between wakefulness and sleep is a fascinating, hallucinogenic state of consciousness that you’ve likely experienced even if you didn’t know it had a name. It’s called hypnagogia, and during this brief transition you may feel unusual sensations, see splashes of color, streaks of light or other visions. Or perhaps come to a brand of existential insight normally left to acid trips. It's a perplexing state, one that has inspired creativity and confusion to equal measure. And it can lead to some of our most unique thoughts.

Most of the time, a year is made up of 365 days. But this year, just like 2012, and the year four years before that, has 366. And that vital extra day, a leap day, is (partly) what keeps our calendars in working order.

“ ...Older women ... admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed.” Titus 2:3-5

Business Insider has produced this fascinating graph detailing the amount of time various legal and illegal drugs remain detectable in your blood. Most drugs are no longer detectable after a couple of days. The giant exception is marijuana, which remains detectable for two whole weeks.

Asking whether there are sex differences in the human brain is a bit like asking whether coffee is good for you – scientists can’t seem to make up their minds about the answer. In 2013, for example, news stories proclaimed differences in the brain so dramatic that men and women “might almost be separate species.” Then in 2015, headlines announced that there are in fact no sex differences in the brain at all. Even as I write this, more findings of differences are coming out.

The oceans have heaved up and down as world temperatures have waxed and waned, but as new research tracking the past 2,800 years shows, never during that time did the seas rise as sharply or as suddenly as has been the case during the last century.

Thought-controlled prosthetic limbs, wheelchairs and computers may be available within a decade, say Australian scientists who are planning to conduct human trials next year on a high-tech implant that can pick up and transmit signals from the brain.

DNA coaxed out of a 12,000-year-old fossil from Argentina is providing unique insight into one of the strangest Ice Age giants: a tank-like mammal the size of a small car with a bulbous bony shell and a spiky, club-shaped tail.

NASA has made public a recording of strange "music" that astronauts reported hearing in 1969 while on the far side of the Moon, out of radio contact with the Earth.

Paula Kover, University of Bath

Following Justice Antonin Scalia’s death on February 13, a former criminal investigator for Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department named William O. Ritchie took to Facebook.

Imagine time running backwards. People would grow younger instead of older and, after a long life of gradual rejuvenation – unlearning everything they know – they would end as a twinkle in their parents' eyes. That’s time as represented in a novel by science fiction writer Philip K Dick but, surprisingly, time’s direction is also an issue that cosmologists are grappling with.