science

Think about your breakfast this morning. Can you imagine the pattern on your coffee mug? The sheen of the jam on your half-eaten toast?

Most of us can call up such pictures in our minds. We can visualize the past and summon images of the future. But for an estimated 4% of people, this mental imagery is weak or absent. When researchers ask them to imagine something familiar, they might have a concept of what it is, and words and associations might come to mind, but they describe their mind’s eye as dark or even blank.

... the topic received a surge of attention when, a decade ago, an influential paper coined the term aphantasia to describe the experience of people with no mental imagery.

Much of the early work sought to describe the trait and assess how it affected behaviour. But over the past five years, studies have begun to explore what’s different about the brains of people with this form of inner life. The findings have led to a flurry of discussions about how mental imagery forms, what it is good for and what it might reveal about the puzzle of consciousness: researchers tend to define mental imagery as a conscious experience, and some are now excited to study aphantasia as a way to probe imagery’s potentially unconscious forms.

The article itself went into a lot of past and current research into aphantasia and is quite detailed, worth a read if you are interested (especially if you are also quite high on the aphantasia scale like OP)

Try this archive.org link if it is paywalled

Edit: some of you all should take the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVID). The article only gave an excerpt, there seem to be a few free ones floating on the internet

Nearly 40% of new cancer cases worldwide are potentially preventable, according to one of the first investigations of its kind, which analysed dozens of cancer types in almost 200 countries.

The study found that in 2022, roughly seven million cancer diagnoses were linked to modifiable risk factors — those that can be changed, controlled or managed to reduce the likelihood of developing the disease. Overall, tobacco smoking was the leading contributor to worldwide cancer cases, followed by infections and drinking alcohol. The findings suggest that avoiding such risk factors is “one of the most powerful ways that we can potentially reduce the future cancer burden”, says study co-author Hanna Fink, a cancer epidemiologist at the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer in Lyon, France.

From the research abstract:

In 2022, an estimated 7.1 million of 18.7 million new cancer cases (37.8%) were attributable to 30 modifiable risk factors—2.7 million (29.7%) in women and 4.3 million (45.4%) in men. The proportion of preventable cancers ranged from 24.6% to 38.2% in women and from 28.1% to 57.2% in men across regions. Smoking (15.1%), infections (10.2%) and alcohol consumption (3.2%) were the leading contributors to cancer burden. Lung, stomach and cervical cancers represented nearly half of preventable cancers.

The research article in question: Fink et al., Global and regional cancer burden attributable to modifiable risk factors to inform prevention. Nature Medicine (2026). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04219-7

A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand's North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago. The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago.

The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.

“This is a newly recognized avifauna for New Zealand, one that was replaced by the one humans encountered a million years later,” Trevor Worthy, lead study author and associate professor at Flinders University, said in a statement. “This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years.”

The team located the fossils between two layers of volcanic ash preserved in the cave, each from a different major eruption, the first 1.55 million years ago and the second 1 million years ago. Many of the species represented among the fossils had already gone extinct by the time humans arrived on the island. By extrapolation, the research team estimated that between 33 and 50 percent of all species on the island went extinct during the million years before humans arrived in New Zealand, likely thanks to rapid climate shifts and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions, said Paul Scofield, study co-author and Canterbury Museum senior curator of natural history.

The universe does not simply exist in time. Time is something the universe continuously writes into itself.

When there is a medical need to boost testosterone, the benefits are likely to outweigh the risks, but this might not necessarily be the case when taken to boost performance

About a decade ago, many media outlets—including WIRED—zeroed in on a weird trend at the intersection of mental health, drug science, and Silicon Valley biohacking: microdosing, or the practice of taking a small amount of a psychedelic drug seeking not full-blown hallucinatory revels but gentler, more stable effects. Typically using psilocybin mushrooms or LSD, the archetypal microdoser sought less melting walls and open-eye kaleidoscopic visuals than boosts in mood and energy, like a gentle spring breeze blowing through the mind.

Anecdotal reports pitched microdosing as a kind of psychedelic Swiss Army knife, providing everything from increased focus to a spiked libido and (perhaps most promisingly) lowered reported levels of depression. It was a miracle for many. Others remained wary. Could 5 percent of a dose of acid really do all that? A new, wide-ranging study by an Australian biopharma company suggests that microdosing’s benefits may indeed be drastically overstated—at least when it comes to addressing symptoms of clinical depression.

A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression.

A Phase 2B trial of 89 adult patients conducted by Melbourne-based MindBio Therapeutics, investigating the effects of microdosing LSD in the treatment of major depressive disorder, found that the psychedelic was actually outperformed by a placebo. Across an eight-week period, symptoms were gauged using the Montgomery-Åsberg Depression Rating Scale (MADRS), a widely recognized tool for the clinical evaluation of depression.

The study has not yet been published. But MindBio’s CEO Justin Hanka recently released the top-line results on his LinkedIn, eager to show that his company was “in front of the curve in microdosing research.”