Many of us know only one side of the story of psychedelic therapy. In the 1950s and early 1960s, psychiatrists gave LSD and mescaline to patients struggling with depression, anxiety, and addiction. They hoped to create a powerful spiritual experience that would produce lasting change.

Among the celebrities who vouched for this new method of treatment were movie star Cary Grant, writer Anaïs Nin, and Bill W., founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

But after LSD spread into the larger culture, the U.S. government imposed strict restrictions on it (Dyck, 2008). By 1966, it became very difficult for researchers to conduct experiments with LSD. Today’s psychedelic therapists see themselves as heirs to this earlier tradition.

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has detected organic molecules on Mars, including chemicals widely considered building blocks for the origin of life on Earth.

Five of the seven molecules identified in a dried lakebed near the equator had never previously been observed on the red planet. The analysis performed by the robotic rover cannot establish whether the organic compounds are linked to potential ancient life on Mars or were delivered by meteorites or formed through geological processes. However, the finding implies that if microbial life once thrived on Mars, chemical fingerprints should remain there today.

“We think we’re looking at organic matter that’s been preserved on Mars for 3.5bn years,” said Prof Amy Williams, an astrogeologist at the University of Florida and a Curiosity mission scientist, who led the experiment. “Is it life? We can’t tell, based on this information.”

As with many of these terms that appear on social media or the rest of the Internet, it's not clear who specifically originated the "seagulling" term. But it is clearer why people have been giving this dating practice the bird, so to speak. It's similar to the tendency of seagulls to grab food whether or not they are hungry simply because they don't want others to get the food.

President Donald Trump appears to have endorsed eugenics during a call in to “The Brian Kilmeade Show” on Friday, telling the Fox News host he believed the country has people in it who are “bad” because “there’s something wrong [with their] genetics.”

“A lot of them were let in here; they shouldn’t have been let in,” Trump said, referring to the perpetrators of a spate of recent attacks, including two men who brought explosives to a far-right protest outside New York City’s mayoral mansion earlier this month.

“Others, they’re just bad, they go bad. Something wrong,” he continued. “There’s something wrong. Their genetics are not exactly… they’re not exactly your genetic. It’s one of those problems, Brian. It’s a terrible thing. And it happens.”

The idea that aliens assisted the builders of ancient monuments was promoted by the Swiss author Erich von Däniken in his bestselling book Chariot of the Gods – published in 1968. Von Däniken died in January 2026, but his vision of ancient astronauts still captivates millions.

The author had pointed to ancient structures such as the pyramids, along with enigmatic ancient artefacts, as supposed evidence that beings from beyond Earth shaped the civilisations of the past.

Though these ideas have been repeatedly debunked, television shows such as the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens continue to air similar narratives.

Bad-news fatigue is real for library advocates who feel like every year is more hostile than the one before it. Since about 2021, coordinated groups of parents and elected officials, with support from well-funded networks, have increasingly pushed to outsource librarians’ curatorial authority through parental consent policies and external review boards, all to exert greater control over what books are available on library shelves. It’s a lot to take in.

But in 2025, there were notable examples of voters, courts, and candidates across the country affirming the profession’s core values of intellectual freedom and inclusive access. Below we highlight five recent victories for libraries, library workers, and their communities.

Iceberg A-23A has been one of the most volatile Antarctic icebergs. It calved decades ago, remained trapped in the Weddell Sea for years, eventually drifted north, circulated within an ocean vortex, and nearly collided with an island in 2025.

Now in 2026, it’s pulled off one more trick: as it broke up and melted in warmer waters, it appears to have helped trigger a large phytoplankton bloom around the drifting iceberg.

The Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) diagnosis was originally introduced in DSM-III as a new category separated from the other “borderline” condition of schizotypal personality disorder. Until this point, the “borderline” concept had served as a metaphor for conditions on the border to schizophrenia and mood disorders. The “borderline” concept was, thus far, a well-established severity indicator for any marked character disorder, which was now turned into a distinct category or syndrome including diverse symptoms such as mood and identity problems, self-mutilating behavior, feelings of emptiness, and episodic aggression. In a 2016 interview, "the father" of BPD, John Gunderson, offered a candid reflection about the initial conception (and perhaps vagueness) of the BPD diagnosis:

“A group of patients that didn’t have a diagnosis, but which drove everybody crazy.”

In contrast to the unspecific borderline continuum, it became possible to use specific diagnostic criteria to recruit patients for research and treatment programs as done with other specified disease entities.

Beyond the world of AI-generated cat memes, podcast clips, and protein-rich recipes—or whatever your algorithm usually feeds you—lies another side of Instagram. Here, young influencers from dominant castes such as Brahmins and Rajputs make high-engagement reels centred on caste pride and superiority, using trending audios, cinematic edits, and aspirational aesthetics.

The Quint analysed over a 100 reels from more than 30 Instagram accounts posting caste-themed content with high engagement. Together, they show how dominant-caste superiority is being repackaged for the algorithm age under the label of “pride”

Canadian police ​boosted security around U.S. and Israeli diplomatic buildings on Tuesday after shots were fired ‌at the U.S. consulate in Toronto, in what Prime Minister Mark Carney called a "reprehensible act."

Police say they were called to the consulate around 5:30 a.m. (0930 GMT), where they found spent shell casings and damage to the ​building. No one was injured.

Harvey Phillip Pratt (April 13, 1941 – December 2025) was an American forensic artist and Native American artist, who worked for over 40 years in law enforcement, completing thousands of composite drawings and hundreds of soft tissue postmortem reconstructions. To this end, his work has assisted in thousands of arrests and hundreds of identification of unidentified human remains throughout America. His expertise in witness description drawing, skull reconstruction, skull tracing, age progression, soft tissue postmortem drawing and restoration of photographs and videos have aided law enforcement agencies both nationally and internationally. Pratt also assists investigations through training classes, besides lecturing before universities, colleges, schools and civic groups. In the early 2000s Pratt teamed up with David Paulides in researching Bigfoot on the Hoopa Reservation in California, as well as in his home state of Oklahoma.

No paywall link: https://archive.fo/20260310121835/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2518526-mathematics-is-undergoing-the-biggest-change-in-its-history/

In March 2025, mathematician Daniel Litt made a bet. Despite the march of progress of artificial intelligence in many fields, he believed his subject was safe, wagering with a colleague that there was only a 25 per cent chance an AI could write a mathematical paper at the level of the best human mathematicians by 2030. Only a year later, he thinks he was wrong. “I now expect to lose this bet,” he declared on his blog.

Mathematicians have been taken aback by the speed of improvements in AI’s ability to solve problems and produce proofs. “A couple of years ago, they were basically useless for even solving high school math problems, and now they can sometimes solve problems that really appear in the research life of a mathematician,” says Litt, who is at the University of Toronto.

Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth has warned that Tuesday would be the “most intense” day of US strikes yet, even as he blamed Iran for civilian casualties by claiming its forces were firing missiles from schools and hospitals.

Speaking alongside Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, Hegseth alleged Iran was deliberately firing missiles from schools and hospitals, describing the country’s leadership as “desperate and scrambling like the terrorist cowards they are”.

“Iran stands alone, and they are badly losing,” he added.

The findings come from a survey of 23,000 people across 29 countries.

The study was conducted by Ipsos in the UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London to mark International Women’s Day 2026.

The results point to a clear generational split among men. In the survey, 31% of Gen Z men agreed that a wife should always obey her husband, while 33% said a husband should have the final word on important decisions.

Among Baby Boomer men, those numbers dropped to 13% and 17%.

Women were also less likely to agree with those ideas. Just 18% of Gen Z women said a wife should always obey her husband, and only 6% of Baby Boomer women agreed.

Three months after Australia launched a landmark ban on teen social media accounts, regulators across Europe, in Brazil and in a handful of U.S. states are moving to emulate it. California Governor Gavin Newsom - seen as a likely Democratic candidate for president in 2028 - joined the ‌call, opens new tab last month, while Republican President Donald Trump is also reportedly “taking an interest”, opens new tab in age limits, according to his daughter-in-law.

Building on previous research viewing morality as comprising several different domains, researchers from the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois investigated the “weight given to various moral acts and how social judgments may differ as a function of social domain.” In other words, they wanted to find out whether or not all categories of “moral” behavior are created equal.

Dividing the moral landscape into seven different domains—family, reciprocity, bravery, hierarchy, equality, property, and unity & communal sharing—the research team presented a group of participants with seven positive and seven negative behaviors for each domain, attributing each behavior to a different “social target” (i.e., hypothetical person). In the family domain, for example, participants were presented with the behavior statements, “Mark helped a member of his family” and “Dave failed to help a member of his family,” and in the hierarchy domain, they were presented with the statements, “Phil honored the rules of his superiors” and “Jake failed to honor the rules of his superiors.”

Presented with these moral actions, participants were asked to give their responses to the social target on three points: (1) whether or not the person was “principled, ethical, and morally upstanding,” (2) whether the described behavior was due to something about the person’s character or the result of the situation the person was in, and (3) whether or not they would be willing to cooperate with the social target.

Archive link: https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/the-public-fires-kristi-noem

Donald Trump today announced his decision to remove Kristi Noem as Secretary of Homeland Security, the first cabinet level official firing of his second term.

The media will credit her fall to some shady no-bid contract she was behind, her use of a private jet, or administration rivals like Stephen Miller and whatever boring DC drama. But the real reason is obvious: public activism.

"The US and Israel have total control over information regarding the war," said Talmiz Ahmad, former Indian Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Oman, and the UAE, as the conflict between the US and Iran entered the fourth day on Tuesday, 3 March.

Last summer, the Trump administration abruptly halted billions of dollars in grants for the “Solar for All” program, which was designed to help low-income communities reduce their energy costs. In response, affected organizations and states quickly mounted legal challenges to protect their funding, arguing that the Trump administration’s actions were unlawful.

Why do some ideas, products, news stories, and trends spread like wildfire, while others disappear? Jonah Berger, PhD, discusses the science of what catches on; the psychological forces that drive word of mouth, including social currency and high-arousal emotions like awe and anger; whether online and offline sharing differ; and what his research can tell us about the spread of misinformation.

Was there ever a time before we read the stars? From astronomy to astrology, humankind has been turning to heavenly bodies to make meaning for as long as we’ve been in existence. For Melissa Anderson, lead film critic at 4Columns and former senior film critic at the Village Voice, reading the stars has a different, though still crucial, valence. Her celestial bodies don’t inhabit the night sky, but rather the silver screen—and yet, reading them has become as necessary in 2026 as observing the Milky Way was to Galileo in the 1600s.

A self-described “acteurist,” Anderson’s first collected work, The Hunger: Film Writing 2012 – 2024, out from Film Desk at the end of last year, charts a gimlet-eyed attention to the movie star, one of cinema’s sui generis elements. (The term, borrowed from curator and critic Dave Kehr, designates stars as “vehicles of meaning in their movies.”)

Such attention opens onto Anderson’s frisky engagement with the motive force of cinephilia. That is: desire. Anderson never shies away from the pleasure that makes movie-watching a proper love affair. Better yet, she centers a lesbian attraction that renders her tastes and their articulations a splendid archive of queer spectatorship, right up there with Boyd McDonald’s legendary Cruising the Movies, which Anderson cites as “a model critical text” in her collected 2016 review.

The killing of a young activist in France - cast by some as the country's "Charlie Kirk moment" - has galvanised Europe's far right, sparking coordinated rallies across the continent that highlight how local groups are building cross-border networks.

Quentin Deranque, ​a 23-year-old far-right activist, died after being beaten during a fight with far-left activists in Lyon on February 14, drawing comparisons with last year's shooting of the U.S. conservative activist Kirk

Archive link: https://archive.ph/20260302091151/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2517389-human-brain-cells-on-a-chip-learned-to-play-doom-in-a-week/

A clump of human brain cells can play the classic computer game Doom. While its performance is not up to par with humans, experts say it brings biological computers a step closer to useful real-world applications, like controlling robot arms.

In 2021, the Australian company Cortical Labs used its neuron-powered computer chips to play Pong. The chips consisted of clumps of more than 800,000 living brain cells grown on top of microelectrode arrays that can both send and receive electrical signals. Researchers had to carefully train the chips to control the paddles on either side of the screen.

I came to Dubai with my husband on 24 February for what was meant to be a short vacation. Instead, we found ourselves watching missile interceptions from our Airbnb balcony and scrambling to figure out how to get home. This vacation has left us anxious, amid the rising tensions in the region, as the military strikes continue.

We were supposed to fly back from Sharjah to Mumbai on 1 March, but we received a notification that our flight had been cancelled as the airspace across the UAE has been shut.