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Keurig is making a genuine play to change how you think about pod coffee. The new Alta Brewer, reviewed this week by Wired, pairs fresh hardware with a redesigned AltaRounds format, and the results apparently surprised even skeptics. It's a rare case of an established brand rethinking its core product rather than just refreshing the packaging.
Connecting to that broader conversation about technology and human behavior, new research out this week argues that smartphone adoption — specifically the iPhone rollout — correlates with a measurable drop in United States birth rates. It's a provocative claim, and the methodology will face scrutiny, but it lands at an interesting moment, because a separate study suggests global fertility may have fallen below replacement level for the very first time in recorded history. Two data points that, taken together, frame one of the defining demographic questions of our era.
And on a stranger scientific frontier, researchers are revisiting a notorious nineteen sixties experiment in which planarian flatworms appeared to transfer memories by consuming one another. That finding was eventually discredited, but a new team wants to know whether something real was buried in the noise. Science, at its best, refuses to let uncomfortable questions stay closed.
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