Video evidence and eyewitness accounts: The science behind why people see different things - Scientific American

Human memory is, at its core, an unreliable witness. More than 70 percent of all convictions of people who were exonerated with DNA evidence between 1989 and 2019 were cases of mistaken eyewitness identification. Meanwhile decades of research shows that memories can easily be warped each time they’re recalled—a truth that suggests eyewitness accounts should be taken with enormous grains of salt. But it might not be so simple: new studies are bringing nuance to whether and how eyewitness testimony should be used. Memory is malleable, and even worse, humans are terrible at knowing whether their memories are reliable. Nevertheless, memory can be reliable evidence: It is “like any other piece of forensic evidence,” says Laura Mickes, a memory researcher at the University of Bristol in England. “If it’s contaminated, it’s not going to be good.”Malleable MemoryOn supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.

Whether you are dressing up, or your child looks extra adorable or your home looks haunted, we want to see your photos.

The polar vortex, a swirling mass of cold air encircling the North Pole, is sometimes disrupted by sudden stratospheric warming (SSW) events, unleashing waves of frigid air that penetrate farther south than usual. Temperatures across North America and Europe drop precipitously when this happens, but such events remain hard to predict, meaning we can't easily warn people when SSW is imminent.

New results from the STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) provide strong evidence that smashing oxygen nuclei together at nearly the speed of light generates a quark-gluon plasma (QGP), a type of matter that existed just after the birth of the universe. The data, just published in Physical Review Letters, show that energetic jets of particles lose energy as they traverse the hot, dense matter left in the collision's wake.