Who knew that a method that could be considered something that is primordial or archaic may actually benefit us all the more? The way we move our bowels may help improve our digestive system, especially the colon.

For their 27th wedding anniversary, the Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston gave his wife, Robin, a gift that promises “to give you the best poop of your life, guaranteed”.

The Squatty Potty is a wildly popular seven-inch-high plastic stool, designed by a devout Mormon and her son, which curves around the base of your loo. By propping your feet on it while you crap, you raise your knees above your hips.

From this semi-squat position, the centuries-old seated toilet is transformed into something more primordial, like a hole in the ground. The family that makes the Squatty Potty says this posture unfurls your colon and gives your faecal matter a clear run from your gut to the bowl, reducing bloating, constipation and the straining that causes haemorrhoids.

Read more on The Guardian.

(Image credit: Squatty Potty)

Scientists have found out that a volcano had erupted on Deception Island in Antarctica over 4,000 years ago. This could be useful to know what the situation was back then and may give us an idea of what would happen in the future of Antarctica.

The island, an active volcano, got its unusual shape during a long-ago eruption that ejected massive amounts of rock and magma to form a bowl-shaped depression called a caldera. Now, researchers know that the massive eruption happened around 4,050 years ago.

Read more about it on Live Science.

(Image credit: Antonio Alvarez Valero)

The question as to why there are certain laws of nature that exist in the universe has led people to quite a debate about how it came into existence and whether these laws are simply arbitrary.

Some scientists try to explain it through the multiverse theory saying that our universe is only one of many and it exhibits the laws as such and it is possible that other universes may have their own arbitrary laws. But perhaps, we may have been myopic in our perspective of the universe.

Noson Yanofsky in his article suggests that maybe we have only been looking into the predictable aspects of our universe, neglecting or leaving out the rest of the chaotic parts.

There is another, more interesting, explanation for the structure of the laws of nature. Rather than saying that the universe is very structured, say that the universe is mostly chaotic and for the most part lacks structure. The reason why we see the structure we do is that scientists act like a sieve and focus only on those phenomena that have structure and are predictable. They do not take into account all phenomena; rather, they select those phenomena they can deal with.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Earth stands between Venus and Mars, and though the three planets could be compared to each other side by side, Earth is the only one with confirmed sign of life, we still have yet to find evidence of life on Mars while Venus is completely uninhabitable.

Much of the appeal of Venus comes from the fact that despite its horrifying modern appearance, it's actually really similar to Earth. "Picture a planet that's just like Earth but it's a little hotter because it's a little closer to the sun — and that would be Venus," David Grinspoon, a planetary scientist and astrobiologist at the Planetary Science Institute, told Space.com.

Along with Mars, these planets form a trio of worlds that began with comparable sizes, materials and temperatures — until suddenly, they were very different. Once upon a time, Venus, like Earth today, was covered in water, perhaps even habitable. Then, gradually, something fell out of whack.

Learn more about it on Meghan Bartels' article at Space.com.

(Image credit: Goddard Space Flight Center/NASA)

When things get rough in a crowd or a demonstration, or when altercations occur in high tension situations, the best non-lethal way to defuse the chaos would be to use tear gas. But what exactly does tear gas do that makes it effective?

Before the tearing, the choking and the pouring mucus, tear gas burns. It causes searing pain in the eyes, skin, lungs and mouth—or anywhere it touches. “It can be overwhelming and incapacitating. You can be forced to shut your eyes and cannot open them,” says Sven-Eric Jordt, an anesthesiologist at Duke University. And then comes the coughing and the nausea and the vomiting.

“I think of tear gas as a pain gas,” he says. “Because it directly activates pain-sensing receptors.” Weapons like sarin gas cause muscle paralysis that can lead to suffocation. These are designed to kill, while tear gas’ purpose is to repel crowds through maximum misery.

Read more about the chemical components of tear gas in an article by Angus Chen on Scientific American.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Whenever we accidentally make a mistake that causes physical harm on other people, we feel a deep sense of conviction no matter how small or big the damage was done.

None of us intentionally want to hurt other people, except for those who have premeditated motives to do such acts. But, in general, we don't mean to hurt others by our actions.

If say we hit someone on the face in a spur of excitement, while flailing our arms in the air, we would humbly apologize. And when our apology was not accepted or if we feel we have not been absolved completely, guilt lingers.

David Peters, a CADI himself, recounts the story of when he accidentally injured and killed someone, and the agony that came over him after it. He also shares some other anecdotes of people who bravely and willingly told their stories as well.

(Image credit: Benedicte Mueller)

How much wood would a woodchuck chuck? Though we are not really talking about the groundhog, we are however, interested in what their cousins, the beaver are doing.

Beavers are usually known for building dams. And they are doing so in some of the most interesting places.

People who live near beaver habitat complain of downed trees and flooded land. But in areas populated mostly by critters, the effects can be positive. Beaver dams broaden and deepen small streams, forming new ponds and warming up local waters. Those beaver-built enhancements create or expand habitats hospitable to many other species — one of the main reasons that researchers refer to beavers as ecosystem engineers.

Learn more about it on Science News.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Perhaps you have seen it in movies like Armaggedon or The Martian but training to become an astronaut is physically demanding, emotionally draining, and mentally exhausting. And that's just the beginning.

Here are some photos from the training that Tim Peake and his teammates underwent at the European Space Agency:

Check out more photos on the Guardian.

(Images credit: Vittorio Crobu/ESA)

It's not just Mars that people suspect might have some form of life in it but even one of Saturn's moons, Enceladus, the ocean moon.

It looks like NASA will offer billionaire entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner help on the first private deep-space mission: a journey designed to detect life, if it exists, on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, according to documents acquired by New Scientist.

Will it turn up with something or will it be a bust? Ryan Mandelbaum reports this story on Gizmodo. - via EarthSky

(Image credit: NASA JPL)

Vincent van Gogh has always been camera shy. When someone had claimed that there was a photo of a much younger Vincent, it turned out that it was actually of Theo, after an investigation by the Van Gogh Museum was launched when experts expressed doubts about the photo.

The photo in the middle was once thought to be Vincent at the age of 13. Read more about it on RTE.

(Image credit: Van Gogh Museum)

In our search for alien life or any other kind of extraterrestrial creatures, nothing has come up as of yet but scientists do not discount the possibility that there is life in other planets or perhaps even in other galaxies. For a group of astrobiologists, their search starts in Earth's oldest desert, the Atacama.

Ahead of my silver SUV, I saw a rolling Martian world of sand-colored rock spread beneath a blazing blue sky. No mosquitoes buzzed near our ears; no birds flew overhead. Wilhelm walked a few dozen feet away from the convoy, stopped, and stooped. Then everyone saw it.

A pebble field roughly the area of a two-car garage was dappled with chartreuse flakes: lichen. The first life we’d seen in days. Wilhelm crouched in the heat and squinted, flashing her hot-pink eyeshadow. She scooped some rocks into a sterile canister.

In many places in the Atacama, such hardy creatures are the only life forms, and Wilhelm and other scientists think that they might be similar to the last surviving life on Mars—if Martian life ever existed.

If we don't see any extraterrestrial life form now, maybe they visited us long ago and remnants from that visit could give us some clues that would enlighten us.

(Image credit: Zoe van Dijk)

To think that the reason why MSG is so vehemently opposed by a lot of people might be rooted in racism, would blow anyone's mind. I mean, experts say that it is bad for our health, right?

MSG is not bad for you.

Despite food scientists like Harold McGee sticking up for MSG, and the blizzard of food writers extolling its magical powers of deliciousness, the perception that it is somehow uniquely dangerous persists.

Enough said. Check out Annaliese Griffin's article on Quartz to know more.

(Image credit: dbreen/Pixabay)

If you imagine what an underwater scenery is like, you would probably see hues of blue and green with some light peeking through, various plants and animals filled with color and life, and the soothing sounds of the sea. But, amidst all of that, we have the tiny organisms called algae which also photosynthesize.

Underwater, that process of converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into energy and oxygen sends tiny bubbles spiraling toward the surface. And according to new research, when each bubble detaches from the seaweed, it goes ping. The scientists behind the discovery suggest that, like a heartbeat heard through a stethoscope, measuring that unique sound could be a new way to monitor the health of a coral reef.

Listen to the faint sound of the bubble produced by photosynthesis on Sarah Keartes' article at Hakai Magazine.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Space is just as mysterious as the ocean's depths. We know very little of the vast expanse of either and as we go farther and deeper, we discover more amazing things than what our imaginations can fathom.

What is a quasar? To put it simply, it is a massive object of hot gas and dust being sucked in by a black hole that emits powerful amounts of energy.

A quasar can produce more energy than the entire galaxy in which it resides. Although the basic mechanism that powers a quasar is known, the anatomy of the supermassive black hole and its surroundings is not well understood. Where does the gas that feeds the black hole come from? And what effect does the resulting intense radiation have on the environment around the black hole? The findings of the GRAVITY Collaboration provide a way to answer these fundamental questions.

Learn more about it with Erin Kara's article on Nature.

(Image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Can a thousand days pass by without even a second elapsing? Such a thing may be difficult to comprehend but time is a relative concept. Moreover, gravity can also affect the way we perceive time. But, it seems scientists have been able to build an atomic clock that can measure changes in space-time itself.

We don’t all experience time passing equally—time passes more slowly closer to something massive’s gravitational pull, as famously theorized by Albert Einstein. And since gravity is typically interpreted as the way mass warps space itself, that means a precise-enough atomic clock could serve as a scientific tool for measuring how objects change the shape of their surrounding space.

“We’ve reported measurements of two clocks that in principle exceed our ability to account for [this effect] across the surface of the Earth,” Andrew Ludlow, physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, told Gizmodo.

Still though, no matter how precise we can measure the time, we are limited by it. We do not have the power to control time. One can only imagine being able to bend time at will or probably see such feats in science fiction films and shows. But who knows? Perhaps one day it may become a possibility.

(Image credit: N. Phillips/National Institute of Standards and Technology)