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Asked to think of an apple, most people will “see” an apple in their minds. They are said to be using their “mind’s eye.” But a small percentage of humans don’t visualize objects or events that they’re thinking of. Scientists are trying to find out why.

The inability to visualize images in the brain is called aphantasia. Scientists estimate that between 1 and 4 percent of people have aphantasia. It’s not clear why some people can use their mind’s eye and others can’t.

The Experiment

To learn more, scientists studied 14 people with aphantasia and 18 people without. During the study, the scientists flashed two striped patterns in front of all the participants’ eyes. One pattern had red horizontal lines, and the other had green vertical lines. As the participants viewed the images, the scientists monitored their brain activity.

The scientists were interested in the primary visual cortex. This is the part of the brain that processes visual information—the things people take in with their eyes. The scientists found that looking at the images caused activity in the primary visual cortex of all the participants, whether they had aphantasia or not. But there was slightly less brain activity in the people with aphantasia.

But what about when the participants were asked to imagine those images? Again, all participants showed activity in their primary visual cortex when they tried to imagine the images. In the people without aphantasia, the brain activity was similar to when they were actually looking at the images. But the brain activity observed in the people with aphantasia was different.

The Results

Scientists say the results of the study suggest that people with aphantasia have different wiring in their brains than people who can imagine images.

There’s still an unanswered question. If people with aphantasia use their primary visual cortex when they try to imagine an image, why doesn’t a picture form in their brains? Scientists hope further study will help them unravel this mystery.

Some inventions use simple solutions to solve big problems. When middle school student Tina Jin learned that billions of people around the world do not have access to clean drinking water, she was inspired to help.

“When I was watching the news after dinner, I was shocked to see children drinking dirty murky brown water,” Jin told the Society for Science, a nonprofit organization that promotes scientific research. “While I was picking which type of water to drink, some people couldn’t even have clean water.”

Drinking contaminated and unfiltered water means risking water-borne illnesses like diarrhea or cholera. However, many people don’t have filtration systems that can clean contaminated water.

This led Jin to wonder, is there a common natural material that could also act as a water filter? That’s when she thought about using animal bones.

Jin says she got the idea while eating with her family. The beef bones in her meal reminded her of a type of human-made filter material called polymer membranes. Since meat is a part of many diets around the world, animal bones are an accessible material nearly everywhere. This inspired her to study the ability of beef bones to filter dirty water.

The bones Jin saw in her meal are called trabecular bones. The inside of a trabecular bone has many small holes, making it look like a sponge. These bones can be found in humans and animals in the spine, at the base of the skull, and at the ends of leg bones like the femur. Jin decided to test whether the trabecular bones could trap impurities when water flows through them.

To make the filter, Jin cleaned trabecular beef bones and sliced them into cross sections. She then tested the bone slices’ ability to filter “dirty” water by pouring black tea, rose tea, water with microplastics, and stream water through the slices. Jin recorded which pore sizes from the bones filtered the water best. Her results showed that the smaller the pore sizes on the bone, the better it was at cleaning water.

A water company in Jin’s hometown of San Jose, California, tested her results and confirmed that her bone-filtered water was drinkable and safe.

“I created this whole method, using 100 percent natural, easily accessible materials and household supplies so that anyone from any part of the world can filter their own dirty water into clean water,” said Jin.

Do aliens exist? A new study raises the possibility that intelligent life is much more common than scientists previously thought!

Scientists have long thought that the existence of humans (Earth’s intelligent life-forms) came about due to a rare and lucky set of conditions and events. This is based on a 1983 theory by a scientist named Brandon Carter. Carter started with the fact that Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, but humans did not exist until about 200,000 years ago. This led him to believe that humans could develop only after a few key conditions were met. And even after that, Carter believed, it took a long time for humans to appear. 

Carter believed that it takes so long for intelligent life to evolve that on most planets, the host star, which is needed for life, would have burned out before that could happen.  Luckily for us, we evolved while our Sun was still young—only a few billion years old.

But a team of scientists at Penn State University say they don’t believe it takes a long time for intelligent life to evolve once a planet is able to support it. In fact, they believe that if conditions are right, intelligent life will evolve. And that means it’s possible that intelligent life exists on any planet where conditions are right.

Rocky planets that are Earth sized are most likely to be able to support life. Scientists believe there are about 1 billion Earth-sized planets in our galaxy alone, and many of them are likely to be rocky. That doesn’t mean intelligent aliens are living on every one of those planets. But if the Penn State study is correct, it’s possible we’re not alone.

March is Women’s History Month in the United States. Farther down on this page, you can follow a link to learn about hundreds of notable women in science, the arts, government, and more. Some women risked their personal safety to help others. Here is the story of one of those women.

In 1942, Marion Pritchard witnessed Nazi officers putting Jewish children onto a truck bound for concentration camps. Then and there, she decided to become a rescuer. For the rest of World War II, Pritchard would help protect Jewish families from the Nazis.

Born in 1920 in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Pritchard was a student in 1939, when Germany, led by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi government, invaded Poland. Eventually, much of Europe would surrender to Germany. Once the Nazis gained control of an area, they would force Jewish people and other minorities into concentration camps where they subjected them to forced labor and eventually killed them. More than 6 million people died in this mass murder, which is known as the Holocaust. 

The Nazi invasion of Poland led to World War II, between the Axis powers (Germany, Japan, and Italy) and the Allied powers (led by the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and, eventually, the United States). But the start of the war did not stop Germany from invading its neighbors.

The Netherlands, where Pritchard lived, surrendered to Germany in 1940. Even under Nazi control, there were Dutch resisters—people who engaged in secret activities meant to weaken the Nazis and protect people who were under threat. But acting against the German government was dangerous. In 1941, Pritchard was arrested with a group of student resisters who were meeting at a friend’s house, where she was studying. She spent seven months in jail. It wasn’t long after her release that she saw the Nazis taking Jewish children to concentration camps.

“I was shocked and in tears,” Pritchard told the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Risking her own life, Pritchard began bringing food and clothing to Jewish people who were hiding from the Nazis. In 1942, she was asked to help a 2-year-old who was in danger of being taken to a concentration camp. She first brought the child to her parents’ home and then found a family who lived at a safer location. Throughout the war, she would go on to help save about 150 Jewish children from the Nazis.

Between 1942 and the end of the war in 1945, Pritchard protected a Jewish father and his three young children, hiding them in a home many miles away from Amsterdam. Pritchard moved into the home and helped care for the children. One night, a Dutch police officer who was loyal to the Nazis came to the home to do a search. Pritchard secured the family in a preplanned hiding place. Later, when the officer returned without warning, Pritchard had to act quickly to defend the family. Although it was against her beliefs, she used physical violence to stop the officer. Her action saved four lives, but the events of that night would never leave her mind.

In 1945, Germany surrendered to the Allies, and Pritchard went to work helping people who had been displaced by the war. She eventually married an American soldier and settled in the United States. She died in 2016.

In 1984, Pritchard was interviewed by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Asked if she had advice for her children and grandchildren, she said, “Do the right thing if you can find out what the right thing is.”

Two canyons on the far side of the Moon are somewhat similar to the Grand Canyon in Arizona. But while Earth’s Grand Canyon was carved out by water over millions of years, new research shows that the canyons on the Moon formed in about 10 minutes. 

The lunar canyons are long and narrow, extending out from a huge crater in straight lines. Hoping to learn how the canyons formed, scientists mapped them using data from a lunar orbiter. They learned that, about 3.8 billion years ago, an asteroid or comet hit the Moon, creating the crater and sending rocky debris flying at up to 2,200 miles per hour (3,600 kilometers per hour). A curtain of rocks fell back down and hit the Moon several times, creating rows of small craters that lined up to form the two canyons. 

“Those clusters of rock in that curtain hit the lunar surface in just a staccato series of impacts—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang,” David Kring of the Lunar and Planetary Institute of the Universities Space Research Association told National Public Radio.

Researchers calculated that all this took only about 10 minutes. 

The two lunar canyons are smaller than the Grand Canyon but still quite large. One of them, called Vallis Planck, is about 174 miles (280 km) long and 2.2 miles (3.5 km) deep. The other canyon, called Vallis Schrödinger, is about 168 miles (270 km) long and 1.7 miles (2.7 km) deep. The asteroid that started it all was larger than the asteroid that led to the end of the dinosaur age 66 million years ago. 

Since they’re on the Moon’s far side, we can’t see Vallis Planck or Vallis Schrödinger from Earth. But other lunar canyons are visible to us when the sky is clear. They look like white lines radiating out from a crater.

When Innocent James was in college, he bought a mobile library cart and began lending books to school-age children in Tanzania, where he lives. He was bothered when he realized that kids were returning the books without having read them because their homes were too dark at night. So James came up with a solution: a solar-powered backpack that can provide the light students need to read and study.

James knew why kids needed more light because he had faced the same problem as a kid. Less than half of Tanzania’s population has access to electricity. Families light their homes with oil-burning kerosene lamps. But the oil is expensive, and many people cannot afford to have their homes lit all evening.

Apparently fish can get lonely for the company of…people. An ocean sunfish at an aquarium in Japan was so affected by the absence of human visitors that it stopped eating. Then caretakers came up with a novel solution.

The sunfish has its own enclosure at the Kaikyokan aquarium (the Shimonoseki Marine Science Museum in Shimonoseki, Japan). This makes sense since ocean sunfish live alone in the wild. Still, while its species (also known as mola) is known for being solitary, the Kaikyokan sunfish seemed curious about other living things and often swam to the front of its tank to investigate human visitors.

But when the aquarium closed for renovations, there were no visitors. The sunfish stopped eating.

Caretakers struggled to figure out what was wrong. Thinking the fish had digestive issues, caretakers reduced its food portions. There was also the possibility that the construction sounds were a source of stress, so caretakers stopped by to offer comfort to the sunfish. Nothing worked.

Then one staff member came up with an unusual idea—one that might trick the sunfish into thinking the visitors had returned.

“We were skeptical but decided to do anything we could,” aquarist Moe Miyazawa told the Associated Press. 

Caretakers dressed human-shaped cutouts in their uniforms and placed the cutouts where visitors normally stand. The next morning, the sunfish ate for the first time in a week.

“I knew [the sunfish] was looking at us when we were placing [the cutouts], but I never thought it would start eating the next day,” Miyazawa said.

Staff member Mai Kato says she hopes the sunfish will get plenty of attention when the aquarium reopens.

“When the renovation work is finished, I’d like visitors to wave to it in front of the tank,” Kato told the Mainichi, a newspaper in Japan.

History books tell the story of Brown v. Board of Education, the court case that made school segregation illegal. But the fight to end school segregation is a lot older than that. For Black History Month, we’re telling a story that isn’t always included in the history books.

In 1850, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled on a school segregation case called Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston. This decision would affect the lives of Americans for decades to come.

Massachusetts Schools

Let’s set the scene. In the 1840s, slavery was still legal in the southern United States. Like other northern states, Massachusetts no longer permitted slavery. But the state’s public schools were racially segregated. And the schools set aside for Black students were often not as well funded as the “white” schools.

In Boston, Massachusetts, many Black parents noted that the schools for Black children were in disrepair. They filed several petitions (formal complaints) with the Boston Primary School Committee. In 1846, they wrote to the committee that “the establishment of exclusive schools for our children…deprives us of those equal privileges and advantages in the public schools to which we are entitled as citizens. These separate schools cost more and do less for the children than other schools.”

Benjamin Roberts Goes to Court

In 1848, Boston resident Benjamin Roberts tried to send his 5-year-old daughter, Sarah, to the school closest to his home. But since this school was exclusively for white students, Roberts’s request was denied. He decided to sue the city of Boston.

Roberts hired Robert Morris, the first Black attorney in Massachusetts, who teamed up with abolitionist (anti-slavery activist) Charles Sumner. The pair argued the case before the Massachusetts Supreme Court on November 1, 1849. During the hearing, Sumner pointed out that the Massachusetts state constitution says that “all men, without distinction of color or race, are equal before the law.” In other words, school segregation was unconstitutional, meaning that it went against what the constitution says.

The court ruled against Roberts anyway.

After the Case

Roberts lost Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston, but the story isn’t over. Black and white activists in Boston continued the battle together for years. Working with Sumner, Roberts took his anti-segregation argument to the Massachusetts legislature. In 1855, lawmakers banned segregation statewide.

But Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston had another long-lasting effect—and not a good one. In the future, other courts would use the Sarah C. Roberts v. The City of Boston decision as proof that segregation was constitutional.

In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court heard a case called Plessy v. Ferguson. The court ruled that it was legal and acceptable for schools, restrooms, and other facilities to be “separate but equal.” In other words, segregation was okay as long as facilities for Black and white Americans were the same. In reality, facilities for Black Americans were often much worse.

If great poetry comes from the heart, it makes sense to assume that artificial intelligence (AI) can’t write a decent poem. But in a recent study, many participants preferred AI-generated poetry to verses written by even the world’s greatest human poets.

The study used the AI chatbot known as ChatGPT. Created by a company called OpenAI, ChatGPT analyzes content and then learns to create its own content. For example, it can learn to write poetry by analyzing poems written by humans and then mimicking the poets’ writing styles.

In the study, researchers asked ChatGPT to generate poems in the style of some of the world’s best English-language writers. These included Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, and Allen Ginsberg. Then the researchers asked 1,634 study participants to read 10 poems. Five of the poems were written by a human poet, and the other five were written by ChatGPT in the same style as that human poet.

The researchers asked the participants which poems were written by humans, and only 46 percent of the responses were correct.

Next, the researchers gathered 696 new participants and asked them to read 14 poems and rate each one. Some of these poems had been written by humans, and others had been created by AI. But the participants weren’t told this. Instead, one-third of the participants were told that a chatbot had generated all the poems. Another third were told a human had written them. The remaining third were not told anything about who created the poems.

The participants who thought the poems were written by humans rated them more highly than the group who thought the chatbot was the author. Researchers expected this to be the case.

What researchers did not expect had to do with the group that didn’t know who or what had written the poems. These participants gave higher ratings to the poems that had been written by the chatbot!

Even though ChatGPT is good at copying writers’ styles, it turns out that AI-generated poetry just isn’t the same as poems written by talented humans. Researchers say that among the poems they used in their study, the AI poetry was simpler and more straightforward than the human poetry. That may be why some study participants seemed to like it better.

Running one marathon is challenging enough for most people—but Hilde Dosogne isn’t most people. The Belgian runner ran a marathon every single day of 2024.

Beginning on January 1, 2024, Dosogne, 55, ran a marathon length (26.2 miles or 42.2 kilometers) every day for 366 days (2024 was a leap year). She took on the challenge to raise money for breast cancer. By the end of the year, she had collected about 65,000 euros (more than 67,000 dollars) in donations for the charity BIG Against Breast Cancer.

Dosogne is an experienced runner. In 2022 and 2023, she ran the 153-mile (246-kilometer) race called the Spartathlon in Greece. Even so, daily marathons posed a special challenge. On top of going to work and caring for her kids, Dosogne had to be ready to run a long distance every day, no matter what the weather brought or how she was feeling.

And she wasn’t always feeling great. During the year, Dosogne suffered from COVID-19, the flu, and blisters. One day, she fell and dislocated her finger after running 17 miles (27 kilometers). After a trip to the emergency room, she returned home and started the day’s run all over again. Despite all this, Dosogne said the hardest part was convincing herself to keep going.

“The mental strain is harder than the physical. Of course, physically, everything has to be okay. Otherwise, you can’t run for four hours every day,” Dosogne told the Associated Press. “But it was more [mentally difficult] to be there at the start-line every day.”

Dosogne tried to make each marathon as “easy” as possible by running on a flat (not hilly) loop near her home and inviting friends to run with her. The friends also served as witnesses who could prove that Dosogne was covering the full distance every day.

Dosogne has plenty of evidence that she ran all those marathons, and she plans to send it along with an application to Guinness World Records. Dosogne’s feat was a first—no woman had ever before run a marathon every day in a single year.