All posts tagged: Skull

Skull vibrations could be your next password

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Modern life requires lots of logging into apps and websites. Even with a password manager, remembering all of that log in information can be difficult. Using a fingerprint, eye, or other biometrics can introduce privacy concerns. A new security system might solve that password problem by using vibrations—in our skulls. The newly designed software program called VitalID uses the tiny vibrations generated by heartbeats and breathing that move through the skull. Like our fingerprints, these patterns are unique to an individual’s facial tissue and bone structure. VitalID is designed for use in extended reality settings and was presented at the 2025 ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. What is XR? Extended reality (XR) includes virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality technologies that mix digital content with the physical world. XR systems including Viture, MetaQuest, and Oculus Rift are best known in the gaming world. However, this technology is expanding into finance, medicine, education, and remote work. As …

Good Samaritan left with smashed skull after she went to help screaming woman

Published by Sam Flores

A woman who stumbled into a grisly scene as Douglas Rogers battered his girlfriend in the street was then subject to his vicious blows after she called police. The victim said she heard screams and came across a terrified woman with blood on her face. As she dialled 999, Rogers punched her before cracking her skull with a hammer four times. She told the court she thought she was “going to die” in the brutal attack and was “screaming for my life”, reports Chronicle Live. As Rogers was jailed for nine years and branded dangerous, she told how the attack in Sunderland has left her traumatised and scarred. In a victim impact statement which she read in court, the woman said: “I went to help her because I heard her screaming. I was acting as a Good Samaritan and I never thought by helping her I would be in danger. “I was viciously attacked and I thought I was going to die. I ended up being taken to hospital by ambulance with serious injuries to …

A Tyrannosaurus tooth embedded in dinosaur skull tells a violent story

Published by Jenni Sidey

Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. A rare dinosaur fossil on display at the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, tells a gory story. The skull from a large plant-eating Edmontosaurus has a tooth lodged into it, indicating that it may have met its final moments as a meal. The tooth in question belongs to one of the most famous dinosaurs on earth—Tyrannosaurus. Montana was once home to Tyrannosaurus rex, the most famous of several known members of the fearsome Tyrannosauridae family. This apex predator stomped around until the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, roughly 66 million years ago. It lived alongside large plant-eaters like Triceratops and the duck-billed Edmontosaurus. In 2005, paleontologists found a nearly complete Edmontosaurus skull in the fossil-rich Hell Creek Formation in eastern Montana. Now on display at the museum, a reexamination of the skull revealed one striking detail: a Tyrannosaurus tooth stuck inside its face. The findings are detailed in a study published today in the journal PeerJ. …

A Skull Cap Beanie Is the Better Way to Protect Your Noggin

Published by Jenni Sidey

Despite the think pieces, take-downs, and skewering memes, the itty-bitty cuffed beanie persists. You know the one I’m talking about—it is, after all, an otherwise regular beanie, save for the fact that the end of it has been rolled upward, leaving its wearer’s ears uncovered. Don’t get me wrong: a cuffed beanie can look cool when done right (we see you, Keanu Reeves, and we salute your efforts). At its most cringe, though, it can also reduce your entire outfit to cursed starter-pack fodder. We haven’t quite reached the point where cuffed beanies feel as stale as cuffed jeans, but we’re getting close. Luckily, the remedy is simple: unfurl your beanies, bros of the world, and opt for a cuffless toque or a skull cap beanie instead. Thurston Power Wool Beanie Lady White Co. Ambrosia Beanie Skull caps, for example, feature a slimmer profile than the chunky watch caps ubiquitous in third-wave cafes and on stubbly workwear buffs. They’re also more malleable, and easier to shape, crush, and obsessively mold to your will—and noggin. Unlike …

Fossil skull discovery reveals when land animals first learned to eat plants

Published by Jenni Sidey

Life began in the sea, and it took a long time to move onto land. Plants started creeping ashore about 475 million years ago. Roughly 100 million years later, the first backboned animals followed. For tens of millions of years, those early land animals mainly ate other animals. Now a fossil from Nova Scotia is changing that timeline. Scientists at the Field Museum in Chicago, the University of Toronto, Carleton University and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History report a 307-million-year-old skull from one of the earliest known land vertebrates that could handle plants. The study appears in Nature Ecology and Evolution. “This is one of the oldest known four-legged animals to eat its veggies,” says Arjan Mann, assistant curator of fossil fishes and early tetrapods at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-lead author of the study. “It shows that experimentation with herbivory goes all the way back to the earliest terrestrial tetrapods—the ancient relatives of all land vertebrates, including us.” A reconstruction of Tyrannoroter heberti, eating a fern. (CREDIT: Hannah Fredd) “The …

Immigrant whose skull was broken during ICE arrest says beating was unprovoked : NPR

Published by Sam Flores

Alberto Castañeda Mondragón poses for a portrait at an apartment on Feb. 4, 2026, in St. Paul, Minn. Mark Vancleave/AP hide caption toggle caption Mark Vancleave/AP MINNEAPOLIS — Alberto Castañeda Mondragón says his memory was so jumbled after a beating by immigration officers that he initially could not remember he had a daughter and still struggles to recall treasured moments like the night he taught her to dance. But the violence he endured last month in Minnesota while being detained is seared into his battered brain. He remembers Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents pulling him from a friend’s car on Jan. 8 outside a St. Paul shopping center and throwing him to the ground, handcuffing him, then punching him and striking his head with a steel baton. He remembers being dragged into an SUV and taken to a detention facility, where he said he was beaten again. He also remembers the emergency room and the intense pain from eight skull fractures and five life-threatening brain hemorrhages. “They started beating me right away when they arrested …

How the Incas Performed Skull Surgery More Successfully Than U.S. Civil War Doctors

Published by José Betancourt

Granted access to a time machine, few of us would presumably opt first for the experience of skull surgery by the Incas. Yet our chances of survival would be better than if we underwent the same procedure 400 years later, at least if it took place on a Civil War battlefield. In both fifteenth-century Peru and the nineteenth-century United States, surgeons were performing a lot of trepanation, or removal of a portion of the skull. Since the Neolithic period, individuals had been trepanned for a variety of reasons, some of which now sound more medically compelling than others, but the Incan civilization took it to another level of frequency, and indeed sophistication. Anyone with an interest in the history of technology would do well to study the Incas, who were remarkable in both what they developed and what they didn’t. Though there was no Incan alphabet, there was khipu, (or quipu), previously featured here on Open Culture, a system of record-keeping that used nothing but knotted cords. The Incas may not have had wheeled vehicles or …

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All posts tagged: Skull

Skull vibrations could be your next password

Good Samaritan left with smashed skull after she went to help screaming woman

A Tyrannosaurus tooth embedded in dinosaur skull tells a violent story

A Skull Cap Beanie Is the Better Way to Protect Your Noggin

Fossil skull discovery reveals when land animals first learned to eat plants

Immigrant whose skull was broken during ICE arrest says beating was unprovoked : NPR

How the Incas Performed Skull Surgery More Successfully Than U.S. Civil War Doctors