Hearing a baby cry can trigger a range of responses in adults, such as sympathy, anxiety and a strong urge to help. However, new research suggests that a deeper physical reaction is also occurring. A baby’s cry, particularly if it is in pain or distress, makes our faces physically warmer.

Since they can’t speak yet, babies cry to communicate their needs, whether they’re in pain or want some attention. When a baby is in distress, they forcefully contract their ribcage, which produces high-pressure air that causes their vocal cords to vibrate chaotically. This produces complex disharmonious sounds known as nonlinear phenomena (NLP).

To study how adults respond to crying babies, scientists played 23 different recordings to 41 men and women with little to no experience with young infants. At the same time, a thermal infrared imaging camera measured subtle changes to their facial temperatures. A rise in temperature in this part of the body is governed by the autonomic nervous system, a network of nerves that controls unconscious processes such as breathing and digestion. After each cry, the participants rated whether the baby was in discomfort or in pain.

Engineered pathway lets carbon be plugged directly into key metabolic pathways.

Atomic-scale detail is now possible with photons, thanks to a cooled-down silver tip and a clever use of plasmonics.

The Endangered night parrot (Pezoporus occidentalis) is one of the rarest birds in Australia, with fewer than 20 known alive today.

The South Atlantic Anomaly (SAA) is an area of scientific fascination and concern. This region, characterized by a weakened magnetic field over South America

H. Stenger, S. Gabler, On the Completeness of the Class of Fixed Size Sampling Strategies, The Annals of Statistics, Vol. 9, No. 1 (Jan., 1981), pp. 229–232

Apple warned French users of spyware on Sept 3, 2025, marking its fourth alert this year.

Describing and understanding personality structure is fundamental to predict and explain human behavior. Recent research calls for large personality item pools to be analyzed from the bottom-up, as item-level analysis may reveal meaningful differences often obscured by aggregation. This study introduces and applies Taxonomic Graph Analysis (TGA), a comprehensive network psychometrics framework aimed at identifying hierarchical structures in personality from the bottom-up, to an open-source 300-item IPIP-NEO dataset (N = 149,337). This framework addresses key methodological challenges that have hindered accurate recovery of hierarchical structures, including local independence violations, wording effects, dimensionality assessment, and structural robustness.

Whether or not you think humans *should* be announcing our presence to the cosmos, we’re doing it, anyway. Both intentionally, and not. And if aliens really…