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121 articles · page 6 of 7

Psychology6 min readMar 29, 2026

Your Stress Response Has a Social Setting

Holding someone's hand during a brain scan literally changes your neural threat response. The biology of stress was never designed to be handled alone.

Cover image for You Can Train Your Stress Response Like a Muscle

Psychology

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8 min read

Mar 29, 2026

You Can Train Your Stress Response Like a Muscle

Navy SEALs, Olympic athletes, and emergency surgeons all share a secret: they don't eliminate stress. They practice it. Controlled exposure to manageable stress builds tolerance for the real thing.

Science6 min readMar 28, 2026

There Are No Pain Receptors

Your body doesn't have pain receptors. It has danger detectors. The difference between those two things explains almost everything about chronic pain, phantom limbs, and why a soldier can take a bullet and feel nothing.

Science7 min readMar 28, 2026

Three-Quarters of Soldiers With Major Wounds Didn't Want Morphine

In 1946, an Army doctor discovered that soldiers with devastating injuries reported less pain than civilians with minor surgeries. The reason rewrites everything you think you know about how pain works.

Science6 min readMar 28, 2026

The Limb That Isn't There Still Hurts

80% of amputees feel a limb that no longer exists. 50-80% feel pain in it. Phantom limb research is the clearest proof that pain is built by the brain, not reported by the body.

Science6 min readMar 28, 2026

A Ten-Dollar Mirror That Cured Phantom Pain

V.S. Ramachandran placed a mirror on a table and tricked the brain into releasing a fist that didn't exist. What happened next rewrote our understanding of how pain works.

Philosophy4 min readMar 27, 2026

The Underground Network Nobody Told You About

There is a network running under every forest you have ever walked through. You cannot see it. You cannot hear it. But it is moving carbon, water, nitrogen, and chemical signals between trees right now, while you are reading this.\n\nIt is not the internet. But it solves some of the same problems.

Science5 min readMar 27, 2026

Suzanne and the Forest's Hidden Hubs

Suzanne Simard's 1997 experiment changed how ecologists think about trees. Not because forests are sharing economies. Because they have hubs.

Science4 min readMar 27, 2026

Why Forest Networks and the Internet Have the Same Shape

Nodes, edges, hubs, redundancy, adaptive routing. Both systems evolved the same architecture independently. That's not a metaphor. That's convergent engineering.

Science4 min readMar 27, 2026

Trees Don't Actually Talk... Or Do They?

Plants exchange defense signals, carbon, and possibly electrical spikes through shared fungal networks. It's not language. But it's not nothing either.

Science4 min readMar 27, 2026

Different Species, Same Network

Birch and Douglas-fir share the same fungal infrastructure despite being different species. The carbon flows between them like load balancing, not charity.

Science5 min readMar 27, 2026

A Marketplace - Not a Charity, The Reality of Nature

The wood wide web story got away from the science. Forests have cooperation and competition. Fungi are economic actors. Kin effects are real but small. Here's what the data actually says.

Science4 min readMar 27, 2026

The Network That Predates Trees

Mycorrhizal symbiosis is 400 million years old. It may have helped plants colonize land in the first place. Humans built something similar in about 50 years.

Science4 min readMar 27, 2026

Is a Forest Smart? It Depends What You Mean by Smart.

Forests sense, adapt, and produce coordinated behavior without a central brain. That's not consciousness. But it might be a form of distributed computation worth taking seriously.

Science5 min readMar 27, 2026

Science Caught Up to Something Many Cultures Already Knew

Western ecology is excited about forest networks. Many Indigenous knowledge systems never needed the metaphor. They've been describing relational ecology for a long time.

Science5 min readMar 27, 2026

Climate Change Has a Target Underground

Mycorrhizal networks are infrastructure. Climate change is stressing them in four distinct ways. The consequences reach all the way to how forests store carbon.

Science4 min readMar 27, 2026

Someone Is Building Computers out of Mushrooms

Researchers are using living fungal networks as sensing and computing substrates. They've already steered robots with mycelium. Here's what the frontier actually looks like.

Science5 min readMar 27, 2026

Where the Wood Wide Web Analogy Holds and Where It Falls Apart

The forest-as-internet comparison is useful and overused. Here's a precise breakdown of which parts are accurate, which are misleading, and what the comparison actually adds.