Do any folk stories remember the Neanderthals

Homo sapiens and Neanderthals overlapped in Europe and western Asia for somewhere between 2,600 and 5,400 years, depending on which dating you trust. During that period they shared space, interbred occasionally, and presumably had some kind of contact. Then the Neanderthals disappeared. What I keep wondering is whether any trace of that encounter survived into oral tradition (not literal historical memory, obviously, but the kind of cultural residue that shows up in monster stories, cautionary tales about the forest, figures that are almost-human-but-wrong). There's a small literature on this, mostly speculative, but I've never seen a systematic attempt to cross-reference archaic oral traditions from areas of known Neanderthal habitation with the timing of their disappearance. Whether that's even methodologically possible seems like a real question worth asking.

The reason we dream is still completely unknown and that's insane to me

We spend about a third of our lives unconscious. A significant portion of that, we're having vivid, narratively structured experiences involving people we know, places that don't exist, and emotional arcs that feel completely real until the moment we wake up and they dissolve. The memory consolidation theory doesn't explain the narrative. The threat simulation theory doesn't explain why we dream about mundane things. The activation-synthesis model basically says it's noise, which feels like giving up. I'm not satisfied with any of these and I don't think the field is either.

Does the universe have a center, and if so, where is it?

The evidence for dark matter is everywhere but we've never actually detected it directly. Should we be more worried about that

Therapy culture is making people worse, not better

What does space actually smell like

Astronauts who've done spacewalks describe it consistently - burnt metal, a little like rum, sometimes raspberries. That's not nothing. There has to be a chemical explanation for why a vacuum produces a detectable smell on a suit. I've never seen a satisfying answer to this.

Quantifying the nocebo effect: how much of surgical recovery outcome is determined by patient expectation?

The nocebo effect - negative outcomes driven by negative expectation - is substantially less studied than its placebo counterpart, particularly in surgical contexts. This proposal aims to quantify its magnitude across elective procedures and assess whether structured pre-surgical psychological preparation can meaningfully improve recovery outcomes. If the effect size is large enough, the implications for how surgeons communicate risk to patients are significant.