A genetic study of more than a million people linked over 1,000 variants to the Big Five traits — and showed how little any single one of them decides.
Your Genes Influence Your Personality—But They Do Not Write Your Destiny Read More »
A genetic study of more than a million people linked over 1,000 variants to the Big Five traits — and showed how little any single one of them decides.
WORLD IN A DAY · THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 3, 2026 Six stories worth five minutes: Nvidia makes its biggest acquisition ever, a UN report concedes the world’s flagship climate target will likely be missed, and a Bronze Age Egyptian official’s tomb resurfaces after four thousand years underground. Technology Nvidia to Buy Hugging Face for $12.9 Billion
The ground is supposed to be the one thing that does not move. So when it suddenly does, violently and without warning, it is natural to wonder what is actually happening far below your feet. What causes earthquakes? The short answer is stress: massive slabs of Earth’s crust are constantly pushing against each other, and
Tectonic plates grind against each other for decades before a fault snaps — here is the geology behind every earthquake.
Rain, rivers, and lakes are fresh. Tears and sweat taste salty, but only faintly. Then there is the ocean, salty enough that a mouthful makes most people gag. Why is the ocean salty in the first place, when the water that feeds it is not? The answer is not a single event but a slow,
Rivers are fresh and rain is fresh, yet the sea is briny — billions of years of rock weathering and undersea vents explain the difference.
In 2019, astronomers released the first-ever photograph of something that, by definition, cannot be photographed: a black hole itself. What the world actually saw was a glowing ring of superheated gas circling a dark, perfectly round shadow. So what is a black hole, exactly? It is a region of space where gravity has become so
Nothing, not even light, can escape a black hole — here is how these extreme objects form and why astronomers can detect what they cannot see.
Every night, without any conscious effort, your brain conjures entire worlds: impossible landscapes, conversations with people who are not there, anxieties replayed in strange disguises. Then you wake up and most of it evaporates within minutes. Why do we dream at all? Scientists do not have one single, settled answer, but decades of sleep research
Every night your brain builds vivid, illogical worlds out of nowhere — here is what sleep science says dreaming is actually for.
A patient takes a pill with no active ingredient and reports genuine pain relief. A person receiving a fake injection in a clinical trial feels their anxiety ease. This is not imagination or trickery working alone. So what is the placebo effect, really? It is a measurable phenomenon in which expectation and belief trigger real
Fake pills and sham treatments can trigger very real relief — the placebo effect is one of the strangest, best-documented phenomena in medicine.
Look up on a clear night and the Moon might be a slender silver sliver, a perfect glowing circle, or gone entirely. It is easy to assume the Moon itself is somehow shifting shape, but that is not what is happening at all. Why does the Moon change shape from night to night? The answer
The Moon looks different every night, but it is not the Moon that is changing — it is our view of the sunlight falling on it.
Lightning is one of the most familiar sights in nature and, remarkably, still not fully understood by the scientists who study it. Every year it strikes the United States millions of times, and every strike is a brief, violent transfer of electricity between a cloud and the ground — or between two parts of a
A storm cloud builds a massive electrical charge, and thunder is just the sound of air heated to five times the temperature of the sun's surface.
A purring cat seems like the simplest thing in the world to explain: it’s happy. But researchers who actually study the sound have found something stranger — cats purr when they’re injured, giving birth, and even dying, not just when they’re curled up in a lap. The mechanism behind that rumble turns out to be
A 2023 study upended a 50-year-old theory about how cats produce that rumble — and purring may do more than signal contentment.