Economics & Markets

Listening to a lithium-ion battery with ultrasound can give you a 15-minute warning before it explodes.

Argentina's pharmaceutical system only detects a catastrophic failure in the supply chain once a cluster of deaths reaches a lethal threshold.

Countries with languages that use strong future-tense markers have stock markets that are more efficient at pricing information.

Investors who lost money in the 2020 crash are now three times more likely to panic over bad news than they are to celebrate good news.

African regions that suffered the highest levels of slave extraction centuries ago have companies that are significantly less likely to innovate today.

The tendency for business owners to start their companies in the town where they were born has effectively disappeared since 1970.

Destructive shockwaves from an impact can be trapped in one spot and harvested as usable electricity.

Living brain organoids are being used as bio-processors to help deaf people hear by translating sound into neural code.

A Polish government policy that promised free fire trucks to towns with the highest voter turnout successfully swayed a national presidential election.

Certain healthy antioxidants found in tea and cocoa actually trick the body into a state of high stress fight or flight.

Shaping catalysts into tiny cones allows them to use concentrated electric fields to turn CO2 into alcohol.

Dengue fever isn't actually climbing into the high mountains of Nepal as fast as everyone thought.

A common amino acid used by the human body can be turned into a crystal that outperforms the high-tech materials in your phone.

Ants prevent massive traffic jams by communicating with each other to deposit less scent when their trails get too crowded.

High-stakes CEO bonuses might actually be a rational insurance premium rather than a symptom of corporate greed.

A brain oxygen level below 46% during CPR marks a physiological point of no return where resuscitation is no longer possible.

A graphene based membrane uses simple pH changes as a light switch to pull lithium out of old batteries with perfect accuracy.

Corrupt organizations are often filled with rational people who are making the most logical decision for their own careers.

High frequency magnetic fields can weave liquid hydrogels into complex, organized tissue structures inside a living body.

A bird's respiratory system is partially powered by the metabolic heat rising from the bacteria in its gut.

A new chemical reactor cheats the laws of thermodynamics to produce carbon monoxide at temperatures once thought impossible.

A simple ring resembling a basketball hoop placed on a trash bin creates a physical urge to throw paper that is almost impossible to ignore.

Intensive breathwork sessions can actually make people more emotionally volatile and less able to handle everyday stress.

A 30-year-old giant clam shell contains a day-by-day record of how the Great Barrier Reef reacted to a global Little Ice Age.

Mice that eat mealworms contaminated with PVC microplastics develop permanent anxiety and hyperactive brain behavior.

A cluster of reactive neural circuits in the subcortical brain is replacing the old idea of a hidden mental storehouse for repressed memories.

Insiders in mainland China are pretending to be foreign investors to trade their own stocks without being caught by regulators.

Ice blocks placed in a steady stream of water will start to vibrate back and forth just because they are melting.

Stock market crashes follow the exact same mathematical laws as the way magnets change their physical properties.

An AI agent named LM-Tree can out-calculate human editors by 40% when deciding exactly how much a news article is worth to a search engine.

Regions of the world with the highest historical risk of deadly diseases produce people with the most positive views about the future of humanity.

A new recycling process can turn common biodegradable plastic waste into a more valuable, high-performance material.

A new biosensor made of high entropy alloys is more sensitive than a PCR test at detecting ovarian cancer.

Donald Trump's social media posts can trigger abnormal financial returns for $TRUMP tokens, but only when he talks about specific policies.

Batteries and supercapacitors don't actually need a huge surface area to store massive amounts of energy.

Confusion over government policy can actually protect the economy by stopping risky investment bubbles before they grow too large.

A tiny trace of yttrium can force a metal alloy to grow its own three-layer shield against extreme heat.

Scientists have created a white algae that tastes like a neutral food ingredient rather than a muddy pond.

A mineral supplement made of gypsum can protect the lungs from viral pneumonia by triggering a hidden circuit between the gut and the brain.

A simple coin toss is better described by the math of subatomic quantum signals than by the laws of motion.

Small-scale hydropower projects get built faster when developers spend money on local mini-projects rather than promising cheap electricity to the town.

A stable, traversable wormhole can be held open by the simple geometry of a spiral without needing any exotic negative energy.

A single mathematical framework describes how everything from subatomic protons to human neural circuits moves through time and space.

Financial crises have a distinct geometric shape that appears in the data before any traditional economic indicator starts to drop.

Bitcoin acts like a risky tech stock during normal times, but it transforms into digital gold during a major oil crisis.

Domestic violence against women spikes after they have kids because mothers can no longer run away easily.

Nineteenth-century coal towns produced a massive surplus of world-class scientists and engineers.

Financial markets collapse using the exact same math patterns as a dying coral reef.

Ethiopian women saw their business profits jump after their husbands took a training class that changed nothing about the men.

Amazon product ratings dropped globally during the pandemic because customers were simply in a bad mood.