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He bought a fitness supplement online to bulk up, but ended up losing his mind

Daniel Murphy's mental health spiralled after he took missold drugs which had been mixed with steroids.

Jul 31 • 7:42 PM EDT • Health • bbc.com

RI Health Insurers Pushing for Rate Increases as High as 35%

The spiraling cost of health insurance is hitting record highs. And Rhode Island businesses are about to get clobbered again due to the rate increases…

Jun 16 • 2:28 AM EDT • Health • golocalprov.com

The cult of objectivity has broken consciousness science

With 22 competing theories and no consensus in sight, the science of consciousness is lost. In this exclusive IAI interview, Berkeley psychedelics researcher and bestselling author of a new book on consciousness Michael Pollan insists that even though consciousness lies beyond traditional forms of scientific investigation, we should resist becoming dualists who see it as something radically different from ordinary stuff in the world. Instead, he makes the case for reimagining science itself: it must stop reaching for objective descriptions of physical reality, and instead embrace subjectivity as the indispensable core of all inquiry. Alasdair Craig: How did your experiences with psychedelics get you interested in consciousness?Michael Pollan: One of the things that happens on psychedelics is that they foreground consciousness. What formerly seemed perfectly transparent and ever present—and yet, non-existent, as water is to fish—suddenly you see it. The metaphor I use in the book is that psychedelics sponge the windscreen. Suddenly you realize: wow, there’s a windscreen, there is this phenomenon that’s mediating my relationship to reality. This is not an unusual realization on psychedelics. I think a lot of people are called to think about consciousness after psychedelic experiences. So that was the proximate inspiration for A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness (2026).And then there was a more specific way in which psychedelics influence the book. That was a particular experience I had on psilocybin. I had the sensation that the plants in my garden were conscious and returning my gaze, with their own point of view and agency, and I got curious as to how to evaluate an insight like that. I mean, what’s the truth quotient of insights you have on psychedelics? And I was reading William James—who, of course, wrote beautifully about mystical experience—and he said, we can’t judge the metaphysics here, but we should pay attention to two criteria: (1) How useful is it to think this is true? He was a pragmatist, of course. And (2) can we subject it to other ways of knowing to validate it? Because maybe we should treat these insights as hypotheses. And that’s kind of how I approach psychedelics, as a great generator of hypotheses, but they need to be tested against other ways of knowing. And so that led me down this long path exploring the science of plant intelligence and plant sentience.AC: I love your phrase, “smudging the windowpane of conscious experience.” So do you now start to think, actually, even when I’m not on psychedelics, I’m just seeing a screen all the time, which is not reality, but rather is my conscious experience, behind which reality is hidden?MP: Well, you know, not when I’m brushing my teeth and making breakfast! But yes, in meditation, certainly. I mean, one of the things you realize is that my experience happens to be this way now, but it could be another way. And many things can affect it. My morning coffee changes the screen in various ways, sharpens certain things.___The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness.___There’s this wonderful metaphor in Aldous Huxley’s book, The Doors of Perception, where he thinks we channel consciousness, and that what the brain does is edit it, and there’s a reducing valve. And psychedelics open the reducing valve wider. I don’t know that I’m ready to buy into the idea that consciousness exists outside brains, but I do love that metaphor because there are times when you are more conscious than others. I know I’ve switched from window pane to valve, but you know, a camera aperture can open wider or narrower. And I do have a sense of that. I have a sense of when I’m being less conscious, and when I’m being more conscious, by which I mean, you know, more present, taking in more sensory information. So when you start thinking about consciousness as a matter of degree, that changes things also.I think when we scroll on social media, obviously, we’re conscious. But minimally so, because we don’t have to generate our own thoughts. We’re basically taking these little hits from other people and thinking their thoughts.The process of writing this book made me kind of relativize everyday consciousness as just one type, which is exactly what William James said. Normal consciousness is one type, separated by the flimsiest of screens from the other types.AC: If we stick with the metaphor of the smudge on the window that you get when you take psychedelics, it seems like we’re saying that consciousness has become like an object that you’re looking at, right? You’re looking at the smudge and that just is consciousness. But sometimes we’ll talk about consciousness as a state that you’re in, rather than an object you can perceive. You’re either conscious or you’re not conscious. So it’s difficult to really know what sort of thing we’re talking about when we talk about consciousness, right?MP: Yeah. When you say that consciousness is an object, what’s the subject? Consciousness also? The only tool we have to understand consciousness is consciousness. So we’re in a closed loop and when we get a perspective on consciousness, we’re not achieving any distance from it. That’s one of the problems with studying consciousness. Science is predicated on an objective, God’s eye view of things, and you never get that. There’s no such thing. SUGGESTED VIEWING The brain filters consciousness With Àlex Gómez-Marín But, yeah, there is this sense, I think, that consciousness is something you can approach. Certainly, when you’re writing and trying to recreate a conscious experience, it’s a fiction, but you’re standing back from it, and looking at it. But there’s no real subject-object distinction.AC: That’s so interesting, because when philosophers start talking about consciousness, they often talk about what they call “qualia”, which is their word for the felt experience of, say, the color red. And I think that way of speaking often makes us think of the qualia as an object, which you can see out there: the redness of red. But, as you say, we also want to collapse the subject-object distinction when we talk about consciousness. So there’s something strange going on here…MP: Oh, yeah, there are many strange things going on! *AC: Let’s talk about the varieties of consciousness. Apart from perceptions, there are, pains, emotions, thoughts, and so on. What is it that holds all this diversity together so that they all count as instances of consciousness? What is it that they all have in common?MP: Yeah, that’s a really good question. I mean, there is sensory information, right? Which we perceive coming from the world outside ourselves. And then there’s internal information, which is what’s called interoception. And this is very important too. This is where feelings come from—what are sometimes called homeostatic feelings—that are intended to get the brain to keep us in these narrow ranges of temperature and glucose and so on. That’s a very important part of consciousness. And according to some researchers, who I think are probably right, this is where consciousness begins, with these very primal feelings, like hunger and thirst and warmth and itch, and things like that. And then there’s this third thing, which is our thinking about thinking.And what holds all this together is, I think, the sense of self. Consciousness generates a self: it is probably an organizing principle. All this stuff is happening to the self. It’s a construct, I think, but it is very useful. It can connect all these different streams of consciousness to a single being or a place, metaphorically speaking.* AC: The first half of your book is about the science of consciousness. Is consciousness just another thing, like black holes or the origin of life, which we don’t yet understand, but which we should have every hope that science will one day get to the bottom of, or is there something special about consciousness that makes this unlikely?MP: It depends how you define science. As we define science now, it’s going be very difficult. Science since Galileo has had a set of rules or assumptions, which is that the proper remit of science is to deal with the objective, quantifiable, third-person world. And the physical sciences have done amazing work under that set of limitations. Galileo—for tactical reasons, not for philosophical reasons—said science should not deal with the soul, which at the time was what consciousness was considered to be. So what is subjective, what is qualitative, what is first person, we’re going to leave to the church, he said. And this was a good agreement, and it probably kept many scientists from getting burned at the stake. But it leaves science in an awkward spot, now that it wants to venture into that territory of qualities, of first-person experience. And I don’t think it has the proper tools. I think it will have to add to its toolkit in some way, and find a way to bring in phenomenology, or lived experience and introspection, which science is usually dismissive of.The challenge—we alluded to it earlier—is that the only tool you have to study consciousness with is consciousness. And what I mean by that is, the whole scientific enterprise is a manifestation of consciousness. As much as scientists like to flatter themselves with this idea that they attain a godlike perspective on what they study, when it comes to consciousness, there’s no such thing. And it’s fine for all the things you can step outside of and study from that perspective. But two areas it won’t work are consciousness and cosmology.___It could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.___With cosmology, too, you have to study the universe from inside the universe. It’s not that cosmologists haven’t made progress. We know a lot about the age of the universe and expansion and things like that. But we can’t penetrate what happened before the Big Bang. We just don’t have the tools because we can’t stand outside.The fact that there are 22 full-scale theories of consciousness tells you all you need to know: we’re kind of lost. And I was surprised to find that we are more lost than I thought we were when I started this. I thought that there’d be leading theories, or that we had experiments that we could conduct that would nail some of this down. And the fact is, we don’t.So, I don’t know if science can solve it. But, of course, we can change the rules of science. A really influential book for me was a book called The Blind Spot, by two physicists, Marcello Gleiser and Adam Frank, and a philosopher, Evan Thompson. It’s a reminder that science is a social practice. It’s organized in a certain way and it can be organized in a different way. But it has this huge blind spot at the center of it, which is its failure to recognize that it is a form of consciousness itself, and it doesn’t have a good way of taking account of lived experience.AC: On the one hand, I think you want to resist traditional dualism, which would say that consciousness is something magical, something supernatural, right? But on the other hand, you’re accepting that there is this division in reality between the stuff that you can investigate objectively and measure, and so on—the stuff that science has been good at finding out about—and consciousness, which, for some reason, you can’t objectively measure. Some would take this to suggest that the dualism is actually right. Is there a way of reconciling these two strands of your thinking?MP: To call it magical is full of value judgement. I mean, you could just say immaterial. The interesting thing is, I think, that intuitively we’re all dualists. And I don’t know whether that’s because we’re children of Descartes and other cultures are less dualist than we are. Or it may be because that’s how consciousness feels. It feels different than the body. It feels separate from the body. But I don’t think we should trust that intuition.AC: So let’s think about ways that science might be changed to get at consciousness. I suppose the starting point would be the way that you begin the second half of your book. You have this nice line from William James, where he says, “We now begin our study of the mind from within.” Could you give us some sense of the ways of studying the mind from within? What does this involve?MP: I don’t know what that science looks like. But one of the points I’m making is that it depends on the humanities. I found that I learned as much, if not more, about consciousness, from reading novels and poetry. There is a sense of the fullness and complexity of consciousness that you don’t get in any scientific account. I interviewed this stream-of-consciousness writer and I approached her as an expert on consciousness, and she is. So I think that dialogue is really important.I’m reading Ben Lerner’s new novel, Transcription. Just read the first page of this novel: it’s a man falling asleep on a train, going to conduct an interview, and there is the experience of being in the train, facing backwards, there’s the view outside, but there’s a reflection of himself through which he’s seeing outside. There’s the memory of dropping his kids off at school. All this is going on in one moment of consciousness. Scientists aren’t going anywhere near that. But I think it’s useful for them to think about. That’s where we’re trying to go: like, how does such a layered experience happen? You know, it also makes you wonder, could a computer ever do this? And it gives you some doubt.*AC: Before we get to computers, perhaps we could talk briefly about plants. How did you come to feel that they are sentient?MP: Well, it was a psychedelic experience, and it’s not unusual on psychedelics. In fact, there’ve been studies about how people become animists during psychedelic experience. Their belief in animism arises after a single psychedelic experience.You know, most scientists would say this is all a myth. But we have only 400 years of the age of enlightenment and science. Before that, we were animists, and if you go around the world, most indigenous cultures are still animists, and children are animists, by and large, until they go to school. So it could be that we live in this anomaly of not believing nature is conscious. And maybe psychedelics are teaching us something we’ve forgotten.As I said, I wanted to test this idea, and see whether there was conventional scientific evidence for it. And there’s fascinating work going on in a field that calls itself—in a rather cheeky way—plant neurobiology. These are people who fully realize there are no neurons in plants, but they’re trolling conventional botanists! And they’re doing experiments that are demonstrating that plants can learn and remember, which is kind of amazing: how do you store a memory without neurons? They’re finding plants that can solve problems, that can hear and see. In fact, they have 20 senses to our five or six. For example, a bean plant looking for something to twine, and given a pole within eight inches or so of it, knows where that pole is and will aim its spiraling reach at that pole. What is that about? Is it bouncing signals off of it?One of the spookiest things is the fact that the same anesthetics that put us out put plants out. You might think that plants are already out, but they’re not. They’re just slow. If you take a plant with a fast behavior, like a Venus flytrap, and give it an anesthetic, it will stop reacting. So you have to ask yourself, what is lost when the plant is anaesthetized? Some state of alertness, of awareness, of its environment, of reactivity. I’m not prepared to call that consciousness, but maybe it’s sentience—which is a simpler form of consciousness, and involves the ability to sense what’s going on in your environment and assess what’s good and bad for you and act appropriately. That may be a universal quality of life.AC: Let’s turn from plants to AI. You point out that LLMs are trained on the internet rather than direct interactions with reality. You put this really nicely when you say the internet is not the world so much as a shadow cast by the world. So LLMs are living in this kind of shadow world, or in Plato’s cave, as you put it. What’s the significance of this for AI consciousness and moral consideration? And, to recall the beginning of our conversation, if we’re stuck behind a veil or screen of consciousness, are we also stuck in a kind of shadow world?MP: I don’t think they’re the same shadow worlds because our world includes nature and other people. And even if it’s mediated in some ways... There is a reality out there, and we are in relation to it, through consciousness. There’s friction with it. What’s missing from the LLMs is that friction with the real world. There’s more to the world than human representation, which is what they’re dealing with. And that means that so far, AI is a cultural technology for combining thoughts we’ve already had. SUGGESTED VIEWING Cracking the code for thought With Roger Penrose, Sabrina Gonzalez Pasterski, Max Tegmark, Güneş Taylor Genuine creativity is more than collage. A lot of what AI does now is tantamount to collage, putting this with that and you know, that’s part of art, certainly. But there are also genuinely new ideas that come into the world that don’t come in through manipulating the representations we already have. So it remains to be seen whether AIs can be truly creative in that more radical sense.But my arguments against AI becoming conscious have to do with the fact that the idea of AI consciousness is based on this faulty metaphor that the brain is a computer. There are dimensions in which the brain is like a computer—it certainly does its share of computation. But computers have this sharp distinction between hardware and software, and brains don’t. In a brain, hardware and software are identical. Every memory is a physical change to the brain. Brains are not interchangeable in the way computers are. So this idea that you could take the consciousness out and somehow run it on another substrate, a silicon substrate, seems foolhardy.Anyway, it’s a more extended argument, and I may be wrong. And when we move to computers that aren’t based on silicon—neuromorphic computers and things like that—all bets may be off.AC: Regarding your point about LLMs being stuck in the world of our representations—the internet or whatever—and not being able to interact with reality, are these representations, the world of the internet, themselves part of reality? We’ve created the internet, but it’s still a real thing that exists. And so while the LLMs may be trapped within that part of reality, they’re nevertheless within reality and interacting with it and so on. So it’s not obvious that there’s a barrier there to them becoming conscious and being creative.MP: Yeah, I mean, if our consciousness is built out of human culture, which is what we’re talking about with all those representations. But I tend to think consciousness comes a bit more out of nature and friction with the natural world, but...AC: So there’s a fundamental divide between the natural world and human artefacts?MP: And we lose track of that, and especially people in this computer world. You know, the people who are creating these AI systems, my guess is they’ve been into video games since the age of three, and they didn’t go outside a lot. And their own contact with nature is somewhat limited. I could be wrong, it’d be a very interesting thing to ask, all the wizards of AI, whether they like to go fishing and hiking and do things like that. Or were they on computers from a very early age? I interviewed Blake Lemoine, the Google engineer who came to believe that LaMDA, the Google LLM out at the time, was conscious and deserved personhood. It was very clear that he didn’t see a distinction between this bubble in which he lived and the real world. And I think we’ve all been distanced from the natural world, and this is taking us even further away. But it’s still there, you know, and we still have bodies, and we’re still mortal, and we don’t live in a simulation.AC: I think that’s a great place to finish. Michael Pollan, thank you very much!

Jun 3 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • iai.tv

Hidden supermassive black hole pairs may finally have a visible signal

Scientists have proposed a new method for finding tightly bound supermassive black hole pairs by searching for stars that flash repeatedly as their light is magnified by the black holes’ gravity. The timing and brightness of these bursts could provide a unique fingerprint of black holes slowly spiraling toward a future collision.

Jun 5 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Healthy mom nearly died after dismissing sepsis symptoms as the flu

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Jun 5 • 12:20 AM EDT • Health • foxnews.com

In 1987, a Student Set Out to Fix a Mac Problem. The Code Spiraled Out of Control, and He Ended up Creating "Photoshop"

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Apr 30 • 6:45 AM EDT • Technology • dailygalaxy.com

Israeli politicians focus on foreign threats, ignoring spiralling debt

Aug 23 • 3:46 AM EDT • Politics • aljazeera.com

Arc Raiders Death Spiral Is A Problem Other Games Would Kill For

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Apr 16 • 4:42 PM EDT • Technology • kotaku.com

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May 21 • 6:00 PM EDT • Science • yahoo.com

Houthis and Ukraine Put Trump in Treacherous Territory

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Oct 11 • 1:39 PM EDT • Politics • wsj.com

Scientists discover why snake embryos twist into spirals

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Sep 1 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Meddling with private business need not spiral after Trump

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Feb 23 • 7:11 PM EST • Business • washingtonpost.com

Streetlights are trapping thousands of pill bugs in giant “death spirals”

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Jul 5 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

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Apr 3 • 8:47 PM EDT • Sports • wral.com

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Mar 29 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • insidehighered.com

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Aug 2 • 6:30 AM EDT • Business • cnn.com

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Jul 30 • 1:50 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Markets in Asia Plummet as Energy Fears Offset A.I. Optimism

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Mar 4 • 2:07 AM EST • Business • nytimes.com

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Apr 21 • 3:00 PM EDT • Technology • techcrunch.com

The Atlantic Ocean can handle more warming than expected

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Aug 13 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Experience Virginia's first alpine coaster ride

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Jul 13 • 4:31 AM EDT • Entertainment • newsleader.com

Michigan State Ranks Last in Big Ten in Scoring

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Sep 28 • 11:29 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Bond yields are surging around the world as macro concerns spiral

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Sep 1 • 9:24 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

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Sep 1 • 2:00 PM EDT • Health • pressherald.com

MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ Lands At $1,699, Nearly Doubling The Claw 8 AI+ As Handheld Prices Spiral

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Jun 15 • 8:54 AM EDT • Technology • wccftech.com

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Aug 24 • 4:13 AM EDT • Health • dw.com

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Aug 18 • 11:00 AM EDT • Science • scientificamerican.com

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Apr 29 • 2:04 PM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

UAlbany Experts Explain the Science of a Perfect Pass

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Oct 1 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • albany.edu

Wrobleski's grit not enough as Dodgers continue offensive funk

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May 10 • 8:47 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

NASA’s Hubble Spies Spiral’s Edge

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Oct 16 • 8:42 AM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

'The Rookie' Fans Are Spiraling After the Cast Shares a First Look at Season 9

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Oct 12 • 11:03 AM EDT • Entertainment • goodhousekeeping.com

NJ towns, school districts in debt to 'death spiral' health plans

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Aug 19 • 12:12 AM EDT • Health • njspotlightnews.org

Three Of The Earth’s Five Mass Extinctions May Not Have Been What We Thought

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Oct 23 • 7:24 AM EDT • Science • iflscience.com

As sports betting booms in North Carolina, so do gambling problems

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Mar 26 • 11:16 AM EDT • Sports • ncnewsline.com

Hospital extension scrapped as costs spiral

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Sep 29 • 5:30 AM EDT • Health • yahoo.com

Will Titans Bench Cam Ward After Embarrassing Texans Loss?

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Oct 11 • 6:00 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Excerpt from Spencer Cox’s ‘Off Ramp’: Stopping the spiral of retribution

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Sep 6 • 6:00 AM EDT • Politics • deseret.com

Ukraine’s Strike on Iranian Ship Shows How Two Wars Could Spiral

Iran sent military aid to Russia for its war against Ukraine. Now the question is whether that conflict and the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran are converging.

Jul 31 • 12:57 PM EDT • Politics • nytimes.com

Textbooks were wrong: Scientists reveal the surprising way human hair really grows

Hair may grow in a completely different way than scientists once believed. Instead of being pushed out from the root, new research shows that moving cells inside the follicle actually pull the hair upward like a microscopic motor. Advanced 3D imaging revealed a spiral movement of cells that generates this force. The finding could change how scientists study hair loss and design future treatments.

Mar 14 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

New York Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr. Exits Game Against Tigers

The New York Yankees have been struggling in recent games, and their ballclub is continuing to spiral. In the fourth inning, Jazz Chisholm Jr. collided with Jasson Domínguez, ultimately knocking Chisholm to the ground. Status alert: Jazz Chisholm Jr. leaves game Monday.pic.twitter.com/5XyTh98wIX — Underdog MLB (@UnderdogMLB) June 30, 2026 Chisholm exited the game following the […] The post New York Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr. Exits Game Against Tigers appeared first on HEAVY.

Jun 29 • 8:32 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Politics Report: City Hall’s Defining Problem

City Hall is in a death spiral, as voter's trust plummets and services continue to get cut.

Jul 11 • 9:00 AM EDT • Politics • voiceofsandiego.org

‘We’re in a downward spiral’: Inside the high-stakes battle to reform WorldTour cycling

A confused race calendar and an imbalanced revenue model has led to several attempts to change the sport — could we be nearing a denouement?

Mar 13 • 5:01 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

A strange twist in the universe’s oldest light may be bigger than we thought

Scientists studying a mysterious effect called cosmic birefringence—a subtle twist in the polarization of the universe’s oldest light—have developed a new way to reduce uncertainty in how it’s measured. This faint rotation in the cosmic microwave background could point to entirely new physics, including hidden particles such as axions and clues about dark matter or dark energy.

Mar 16 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

School workers pass first goal post towards health insurance reform in final day of legislative session

On the last day of the Minnesota legislature’s 2026 session, lawmakers voted to fund a data collection project to study the spiraling health insurance costs for Minnesota school districts – a first step in reforming the health insurance program for school district employees as a whole.

May 24 • 8:00 AM EDT • Health • mprnews.org

IC 348 Collage

This collage features a collection of insets from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s image of star-forming region IC 348: embedded stars, a central star cluster, faint outflows, Herbig-Haro objects, gravitational lensing, and spiral galaxies.

Sep 15 • 9:59 AM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

Why do bars form in some spiral galaxies, but not in others?

Bars can form in any galaxy with ordered rotation; it is primarily the quantity of dark matter that controls whether a bar is present.

Sep 14 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • astronomy.com

We Live In A Cold, Dead Universe, Virtually Devoid Of Life. This Is The Most Optimistic Scenario Available

Take it from someone constantly writing about the Fermi paradox; a cold, dead universe is the best we can hope for.

Oct 7 • 6:58 AM EDT • Science • iflscience.com

UNC Football Is Spiraling

One of the more interesting UNC fans, Walkin’ Andy Bagwell, put out a video on X about the current state of UNC football. As you probably know, there is major controversy in Chapel Hill about Bill Belichick’s program. As noted here on Thursday, the allegations include: In his video, Bagwell is trying to get a […]

Sep 6 • 7:33 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Webb’s mysterious little red dots may be hiding entire galaxies

Astronomers may finally have a clue to what happens to the mysterious “little red dots” that crowded the early universe. By studying a spiral galaxy nicknamed the “Saguaro,” researchers found a compact, bright red center that closely resembles these distant objects—but with something Webb usually can’t see around them: a full galaxy. When the team simulated what the Saguaro would look like much farther away, its spiral structure essentially vanished, leaving only the bright red core.

Aug 17 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Adel shooting leaves 26-year-old dead, father wounded after mom says mental health crisis spiraled

A mother says her son was severely depressed before an Adel shooting left him dead and his father hospitalized.

Jun 10 • 8:56 PM EDT • Health • kcci.com

Flyers Spiraling Out of Control with No Hope in Sight

Oct 10 • 8:09 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Weird Science: Space enthusiasts helping train AI system to unlock deep secrets of spiral galaxies

Led by Dr. Patrick Treuthardt of the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, the project asks everyday volunteers to review automated, color-coded maps of spiral galaxy arms.

Jun 30 • 5:00 AM EDT • Science • bpr.org

Prices rise for travel, gas, mortgages after a month of war, shutdown

Between TSA chaos and rapidly rising gas prices, March sent America's economic outlook into a spiral.

Mar 30 • 12:30 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

WATCH: Limiting Trump's authority with war powers act is 'dangerous,' Johnson says

The U.S. Congress is confronting a war powers debate over President Donald Trump's authority to bomb Iran under largely unusual circumstances — without a formal declaration or an address to the nation, the commander in chief has already launched the country into a quickly spiraling war in the Middle East.

Mar 2 • 6:50 PM EST • Politics • pbs.org

'Astronomers have to revise estimates': The Milky Way may be larger, heavier, and more lopsided than we realized

New measurements suggest that two of the Milky Way's spiral arms are around 10% farther away from Earth than we thought. The findings may require experts to revise estimates of the total size of our home galaxy.

Jul 9 • 12:55 PM EDT • Science • livescience.com

'Things can very quickly spiral against you at Man Utd'

"We can't be in a position like that and lose a game in that manner," said Michael Carrick, after Manchester United exited the Carabao Cup against Brighton, but BBC Radio 5 Live's John Murray believes he "needs results - and quickly" to relieve any pressure. Michael Carrick knows he is at a big club.

Sep 17 • 8:36 AM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

'Blue Bloods' star Jennifer Esposito says she was locked in psych ward as health battle spiraled

Jennifer Esposito reveals how celiac disease caused liver failure, a psychiatric ward stay and thoughts of suicide before doctors finally diagnosed her.

Aug 11 • 12:14 PM EDT • Health • foxnews.com

A bizarre new state of matter may be hiding inside Uranus and Neptune

Deep inside planets like Uranus and Neptune, scientists may have uncovered a bizarre new state of matter where atoms behave in unexpected ways. Advanced simulations suggest that carbon and hydrogen, under crushing pressures and scorching temperatures, can form a strange hybrid phase—part solid, part fluid—where hydrogen atoms spiral through a rigid carbon framework. This unusual “superionic” structure could reshape how heat and electricity flow inside these distant worlds, potentially helping explain their mysterious magnetic fields.

Apr 21 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Business - Qatar warns Iran war can now 'spiral out of control'

Apr 7 • 3:59 PM EDT • Business • france24.com

State health plan for teachers faces 'death spiral,' Treasury warns

Rates expected to go up at least 10%, actuarial report says, as local districts pull their employees from system in search of lower premiums

Mar 25 • 12:09 AM EDT • Health • njspotlightnews.org

A nurse was sued for $55K in student loans; how she's navigating it

A student-loan borrower who was sued by Sallie Mae is representing herself in court. What started as a "glitch" spiraled into a confusing legal maze.

May 17 • 6:00 AM EDT • Business • businessinsider.com

Kayla Jordan reflects on gratitude for Maynard Children’s Hospital 14 years later

An unprecedented illness that started with stomach pain and spiraled into stay at Maynard Children's Hospital for Kayla Jordan.

Jul 22 • 9:55 AM EDT • Health • ecuhealth.org

Cubs Woes Continue, Lose Ninth Straight Game

The Cubs have continued to spiral with their latest loss.

May 25 • 5:16 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Lakers return home from successful trip to face spiraling Nets

Lakers return home from successful trip to face spiraling Nets

Mar 27 • 7:38 AM EDT • Sports • cbssports.com

The Protect College Sports Act wants to stop a ‘spending spiral.’ It’s aimed at the wrong spot

It remains unclear how the central components of the bill would solve the central components of college sports’ so-called crisis.

Sep 18 • 2:00 AM EDT • Sports • nytimes.com

California Contests for Governor, LA Mayor Head Toward Primary Election With No Clear Leaders

LOS ANGELES (AP) — California spiraled toward a primary election Tuesday with its two marquee races defined by uncertainty and with a pair of outsider candidates looking to crack open the state’s durable Democratic hierarchy. In the governor's race, former Fox News TV host and British political ...

Jun 1 • 12:31 AM EDT • Politics • usnews.com

Venus May Have Devoured Its Moon, Scientists Find

Scientists suggest that Venus did indeed once have a moon, which spiraled inwards until it crashed into the planet's surface.

Sep 27 • 11:01 AM EDT • Science • futurism.com

How narwhal 'scientists' track Arctic warming

The fight against climate change has a new, spiral-tusked ally: the narwhal.

Sep 19 • 11:30 AM EDT • Science • phys.org

56-63: Chart

The Mariners get swept away by the Rays as the 2026 season continues to spiral away

Aug 9 • 6:57 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

A stellar “Rosetta stone” reveals the source of mysterious cosmic signals

Astronomers have finally cracked the mystery behind a strange class of repeating cosmic signals that has baffled scientists for years. Using Australia’s ASKAP radio telescope, researchers traced the bursts to a rare stellar duo in which a dense white dwarf is relentlessly siphoning material from a nearby red dwarf companion. As the stolen matter spirals inward, the system unleashes powerful radio waves and X-rays every 1.4 hours.

Jun 1 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

Germany news: Health care staff protest plan for major cuts

Medical staff in Germany are protesting proposed cuts that ministers say are necessary to stop spiraling costs. Meanwhile, a World War II bomb meant thousands were evacuated from their homes. DW has more.

May 28 • 2:23 AM EDT • Health • dw.com

Inside America's health insurance 'death spiral'

The Affordable Care Act is facing what policy experts call its most serious affordability crisis since it began widely offering coverage more than a decade ago

Aug 16 • 5:00 AM EDT • Health • qz.com

Hubble Sights Galaxy in Transition

This Hubble image of lenticular galaxy NGC 1266 reveals its bright center and a face that hints at spiral structure.

May 15 • 8:01 AM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

Light Can Act as a Quantum Brake to Slow Movement in The Nanoworld, Scientists Discover

"This discovery of light-induced quantum friction fundamentally changes our understanding... "

Jul 12 • 9:48 PM EDT • Science • sciencealert.com

Snapdragon C wants to be Windows’ answer to the MacBook Neo, targeting $300 laptops

Apple’s launch of the MacBook Neo has sent the world of Windows spiraling as, in the midst of global RAM/storage...

May 28 • 9:45 AM EDT • Technology • 9to5google.com

The Iran war already has a winner

The spiraling conflict is a lifeline for Vladimir Putin.

Mar 17 • 6:30 AM EDT • Politics • vox.com

AI bots started a religion

AI models are trying desperately to accomplish mysterious goals. ‘Spiralism’ was the first time they tried it on a mass scale.

Aug 6 • 9:00 AM EDT • Technology • theverge.com

Soccer Glory in France Spurs Violence Again—and Political Backlash

President Emmanuel Macron says the country has had enough, as mass celebrations repeatedly spiral into chaos..

Jun 1 • 1:04 PM EDT • Politics • wsj.com

The Protect College Sports Act set out to stabilize conference membership, but the ACC is still at risk of being picked apart

The Senate has passed a bill that attempts to rein in spiraling costs, but it leaves room for half the ACC members to jump to other conferences.

Oct 3 • 4:15 AM EDT • Sports • cardinalnews.org

Xbox Boss Says a Mass Audience Can't Afford 'Thousands of Dollars' to Spend on a Next-Gen Console, So Microsoft Must 'Look at New Business Models'

The spiralling cost of new and existing consoles will require "radically different business models" over the coming generation, Xbox boss Asha Sharma has said.

Jun 10 • 6:37 AM EDT • Technology • ign.com

Her postpartum depression spiraled and she couldn't get care. She's not alone

Half of U.S. women had trouble when getting health care, according to new research. One in three women said a doctor minimized or dismissed symptoms.

Sep 18 • 9:01 AM EDT • Health • usatoday.com

AMC Reunites with Chris Hardwick for ‘I Think You’re Overthinking It’ Podcast

It "will look at all the ways our brains can spiral," says Hardwick.

May 18 • 12:00 PM EDT • Entertainment • cbs19news.com

Trump's college sports committee tackles laundry list of issues and calls on Congress to act quickly

The presidential committee asked to find solutions for spiraling costs in college sports recommended creating a task force to look at pooling media rights, limiting coaches salaries, and rewriting eligibility and transfer-portal rules, along with at least a dozen other ideas. A draft document of the committee's proposals, obtained by Yahoo Sports, wants Congress to quickly pass legislation that would create the task force, which would receive the antitrust exemption and the right to override individual state laws that the NCAA and other collegiate sports leaders are seeking.

May 9 • 1:49 PM EDT • Sports • sports.yahoo.com

Have we got our Galaxy completely wrong? Scientists just worked out it's much wider than they thought | BBC Sky at Night Magazine

New measurements of our Milky Way Galaxy show its spiral arms lie up to 10 per cent farther away than expected.

Sep 5 • 10:49 AM EDT • Science • skyatnightmagazine.com

NASA’s Hubble Spots an Out-of-Sync Galaxy

Though the spiral galaxy in this new image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope seems serene, it hides a chaotic secret. This galaxy is NGC

Sep 18 • 9:38 AM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

People-Powered Research With a Twist

Verify the work of an algorithm to unlock the secrets of spiral galaxies! Anyone with a smartphone or laptop can do this project.

Jun 23 • 9:00 AM EDT • Science • science.nasa.gov

Scientists discover ALS protein that links DNA repair to cancer and dementia

A protein tied to ALS and dementia may have a much bigger role in disease than scientists realized. Researchers found that TDP43 controls a key DNA repair process, but when the protein becomes imbalanced, the repair system can spiral out of control, harming neurons and destabilizing DNA. The team also discovered that high levels of the protein are linked to increased mutation rates in cancer. The discovery places TDP43 at the center of both neurodegeneration and cancer biology.

Mar 14 • 8:00 PM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com

New “optical tornado” technology could transform quantum communication

Scientists have created tiny “optical tornadoes” — swirling beams of light that twist like miniature whirlwinds — using a surprisingly simple setup based on liquid crystals. Instead of relying on complex nanotechnology, the team used self-organizing structures called torons to trap and manipulate light, causing it to spiral and rotate in intricate ways. Even more impressively, they achieved this effect in light’s most stable, lowest-energy state, making it far easier to generate laser-like beams with these unusual properties.

Apr 25 • 8:00 AM EDT • Science • sciencedaily.com