About 74,000 years ago on the island of Sumatra, Indonesia, the largest volcanic event over the last two million years, 5,000 times larger than the Mount St. Helen's eruption in the 1980s, ushered in a worldwide "volcanic winter" that lasted up to ten years followed by a 1,000 year-long cooling of the Earth's surface.

While how close humanity got to extinction is unknown, surviving Homo sapiens in Africa were said to have survived by developing new strategies that eventually enabled them to re-expand and populate Asia 60,000 years ago in a single, rapid wave along the Indian Ocean coastline.

In recent years the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have manufactured a lot of concerns they then ask Congress for money to help solve - Zika, Prediabetes, vaping in kids are all examples of where they hyped concern or even defy the international consensus to worry the American public.

Hopefully there is one thing they can feel comfortable eliminating - telling adults to get diphtheria and tetanus booster shots every 10 years. A new study found that if adults were fully vaccinated as kids, booster shots are just increasing health case costs while subsidizing manufacturers.

Edgar Allan Poe, The author, poet, editor, and literary critic, died in 1849 at age 40 in Maryland. He was chronically depressed, he had even tried to commit suicide using laudanum a year before his death.

But when he went to the hospital for the last time, having been found delirious and wearing a stranger's clothes, he hadn't been committing suicide, according to a heuristic look at his writing.

Merge is a controversial belief by some that human language faculty arose in humans through a single gene mutation, rather the evolving gradually.

This human burst of genetic exceptionalism is embraced by some linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, but the science community has doubts. The basis for Merge is that humans are genetically equipped with a unique cognitive capacity that specifically allows us to implement computations over hierarchically structured symbolic representations.

Sildenafil (viagra) is used to treat erectile dysfunction and is safe, with known side effects, but a few people have experienced light sensitivity and color vision impairment at the highest recommended dose.

That doesn't mean men who need it should stop taking it, the psychological consequences of erectile dysfunction are of more concern than side effects, which can include headache and blurred vision that disappear quickly. These occur because sildenafil was originally developed as a treatment for high blood pressure, and it also dilates blood vessels and relaxes smooth muscle in the penis, making it easier to achieve and maintain an erection. 

A recent study identified the coronavirus responsible for the pneumonia epidemic in the Hubei province of China and finds the bat-origin virus is related to other known pathogenic coronaviruses.

The 2019 coronavirus (CoV) causes fatal pneumonia that has claimed over 1,300 lives, with more than 52,000 confirmed cases of infection by mid-February, along with various impacts to the lives of the scholars who revealed the virus against the wishes of the Chinese government.