Being alone has its benefits - a psychologist flips the script on the 'loneliness epidemic'

Over the past few years, experts have been sounding the alarm over how much time Americans spend alone. 

Statistics show that we’re choosing to be solitary for more of our waking hours than ever before, tucked away at home rather than mingling in public. Increasing numbers of us are dining alone and traveling solo, and rates of living alone have nearly doubled in the past 50 years. 

23andMe is potentially selling more than just genetic data... 

As soon as the genetic testing company 23andMe filed for bankruptcy on March 23, 2025, concerns about what would happen to the personal information contained in its massive genetic and health information database were swift and widespread. A few days after, a U.S. judge ruled that the company could sell its consumer data as part of the bankruptcy. 

When customers originally signed up for 23andMe, they agreed...

The 2021 Nobel Prize for medicine helps unravel mysteries about how the body senses temperature and pressure

The Nobel Committee has awarded this year’s prize in medicine to two scientists who have advanced our understanding of this detection process for “somatosensation,” the sense responsible for the perceptions of touch, temperature, vibration, pain and proprioception – the body’s ability to sense its own movements and position in space.

On Oct. 4, 2021, David Julius, a professor of physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, and Ardem Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Scripps Research, were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their pioneering work identifying proteins that the body uses to detect temperature and pressure.

The work of Julius and Patapoutian has greatly expanded scientists’ views of how the nervous system deciphers the external and internal world by introducing us to entirely new classes of sensory receptors.