Why the Arctic is Super-Polluted with MicroplasticsGarbage is garbage, and we need to find something to do with it that's better than just letting it fill up the environment. We thought making plastics degradable would be a good start, but degraded plastic just turns to microplastics, with is tiny bits of plastic that can go completely unnoticed as they poison the environment and the creatures that depend on that environment. What's surprising is how many microplastics that end up in the Arctic, far from cities or industrial facilities. SciShow brings us up to speed on this problem, and what we might be able to do about it.
We Are Wrapping Up the Golden Age of Solar EclipsesYou've heard of a total eclipse and a partial eclipse, but have you heard of an annular eclipse? Maybe that's because they aren't much of a deal and we might miss them altogether. We're about to learn about them, and a lot more about solar eclipses, from MinutePhysics. They say that solar eclipses are stranger and more beautiful now than ever before, and that in the future, they will be rarer and harder to see. However, this "golden age" includes the totality of human history and will last for a few more million years. But in the grand scale of the solar system, that's a small period of time. This video is only about solar eclipses, but once you learn the reason, you can imagine that in the far future, lunar eclipses will also become much less spectacular sky shows. The next total solar eclipse in North America will be on April 8, 2024. If you don't already have a hotel or a campsite booked, you may have trouble finding accommodations in the area of totality. -via Laughing Squid
The Bumpy Circle IllusionThe "bumpy circle illusion" is a plain and descriptive name for the circles you see above. These circles look like they aren't really circles, but more like irregular polygons of a sort. Japanese filmmaker Masaya Ishikawa stumbled upon this effect as he was working with Adobe Illustrator. He thought he may have been hallucinating from long hours of work, but other people see the bumpy circles, too. The black circles are perfectly round. What we are seeing is a trick your brain pulls to make sense of what the eye sees. Ishikawa teamed up with Shuichiro Taya of Keio University to explore and explain the illusion. The result was a paper published in the Journal of Illusion. The illusion depends on the difference between the shades of the circles and the checkered background. The corner effect is also involved. The same picture will lose the bumpy circle illusion if the circles are a different shade or color, as you can see in a writeup at Real Clear Science.​(Image credit: Masaya Ishikawa)
The Heaviest Piece of ISS Trash Will Crash to Earth FridayA pallet of used batteries attached to the International Space Station was flung off into space in March of 2021. It became just another piece of space debris in orbit, albeit a large piece weighing 2.9 tons. That orbit has been gradually decaying for three years now, and the garbage module is expected to fall to the earth sometimes between 7:30 AM on March 8 and 3:00 AM on March 9. While most pieces of space debris burn completely on re-entry, that won't be the case for this massive pallet. About half of the module and its contents will crash land, and no one knows where that will happen.Why did such a large pallet get discarded in this way? The story goes back to 2018, when a failed Soyuz launch backed up scheduled missions and led to two astronauts making an emergency landing in Kazakhstan, and a backup of the spacewalk schedule led to a Japanese mission leaving the ISS without taking its garbage with it. The whole saga is better explained at Gizmodo. But meanwhile, keep your eyes out for falling debris on Friday. (Image credit: NASA)
Study Shows Daily Fiber Supplements Help Older People's Brain FunctionPeople spend a lot of money on dietary supplements, often spending a lot of money on the latest fad vitamins and minerals. But a recent study used a very inexpensive type of supplement and showed significant results in people over age 65. Just an ordinary fiber supplement, once a day, improved cognitive abilities in contrast to those taking a placebo. The study enlisted 36 pairs of twins over age 65. Each person took one pill a day, one of each twin set taking either inulin or FOS, both commercially-available fiber supplements, while the other twin took a placebo. None of the subjects knew if they were taking the fiber or the placebo. After only 12 weeks, the twin taking the fiber supplement showed a significant drop in errors in taking tests that measure cognition and memory. Analysis of stool samples showed that their gut bacteria had changed by taking the supplements. The research is one more step in finding a link between our gut biome and brain function. Read more about these findings at the Conversation. -via Damn Interesting​(Image credit: formulatehealth) 
Disappearing Anuses, or the Art of Losing Your ButtWe are thankful that this video on disappearing anuses has nothing to do with humans. It's all those other weird species that suffer butt loss. SciShow starts with lizards and scorpions, who can shed their tails to avoid predators in an emergency. But that means losing their anuses, and then they can't poop. Logic tells us that when you remove a hole, you still have a hole, especially in a system that goes through the whole body. Apparently that doesn't mean anything to an anus-less scorpion, who must hurry up and have sex because they are going to die of constipation. But that's just the beginning of a parade of animals losing their butts. There are sea spiders, jellyfish, annelid worms, and cicadas. In the latter case, a fungus causes the cicada's butts to fall off, but they don't care because the fungus gives them drugs. The human equivalent would be "I got so high I laughed my ass off." Nature is brutal, after all.