Sam Wong

Leading the high life

Wong discusses how people are increasingly increasingly taking small amounts of psychedelic drugs to up their game. He said for over a year, Janet Chang took magic mushrooms a few times a week before going to work. She says it made her happier, reduced her social anxiety and helped her build relationships. He added that you would be forgiven for thinking your work performance might suffer under the influence of mind-warping illegal drugs. The extent of microdosing is unclear, but James Fadiman, who popularized the idea in his 2011 book The Psychedelic Explorers Guide, speculates that its more than 100,000 people worldwide.

Reopen your mind

Mental illness has reached crisis proportions, yet we still have no clear links between psychiatric diagnoses and whats going on in the brain--and no effective new classes of drugs. Theres one group of compounds that shows promise. They seem to be capable of alleviating symptoms for long periods, in some cases with just a single dose. The catch is that these substances, known as psychedelics, have been outlawed for decades. Wong investigates how psychedelic drugs are transforming the way we think about mental illness.

Pay up or your medical records will be toast

Even data can be held hostage. Last week a California hospital paid out

Blue planet? It's a dark, deep-ocean world

17,000 to hackers who had taken over its computers. Its the most high-profile case yet of cyber extortion using ransomware. Ransomware is malware that typically encrypts all the files stored on a system and then demands payment to unlock them.

Black hole sun

Jon Copley dived deep for Blue Planet II. He tells Sam Wong about life in this extreme environment, the peris of plastic and, inevitably, the one that got away.

Bees understand concept of zero

Wong relates Chris McCaws unusual way to document the sun. Like a magnifying glass, the camera lens focused the suns rays so intensely that it scorched the film. After experimenting with different media, Mccaw began loading vintage gelatin silver photographic paper into the camera instead of film, creating a paper negative that turns positive with solarization.

Sibling saviours of the maternity ward

With their tiny brains, bees may seem an unlikely candidate to join the zero club. But they have surprisingly well-developed number skills: a previous study found that they can count to 4. To see whether honeybees are able to understand zero, Scarlett Howard at RMIT University in Melbourne and her colleagues first trained bees to differentiate between two numbers.

Mice shared our homes even before farming

When Shiranee Sriskandan rescued a box of 80-year-old infection samples from the wrecking ball, she rediscovered pioneers of the dawn of antibiotics, Leonard and Dora Colebrook

Chimp tool use spreads like a family tradition

The close relationship between house mice and humans began in the earliest settlements about 15,000 years ago--before the advent of farming that made the cops such a draw for the rodents. Lior Weissbrod at the University of Haifa, Israel and his team collected 272 mouse teeth from 14 archaeological sites in Israel dating from 200,000 to 10,000 years ago. From these, they identified two species: the house mouse and its short-tailed relative, the Macedonian mouse. The house mouse first appears in the homes they looked at about 15,000 years ago, displacing the short-tailed mouse. At that time, people called the Natufians started to settle in fixed locations, living in stone houses with hearths and burying their dead.

Porpoise aims its sonar by twisting physics laws

Six years ago, a chimpanzee had the bright idea to use moss to soak up water, then drink from it, and seven others soon learned the trick. Three years later, researchers returned to the site in Budongo Forest, Uganda, to see if the practice had persisted. They found the technique has spread, and it has mostly been learned by relatives of the original moss-spongers.