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A synchrotron has just unlocked the writing inside ancient Herculaneum’s incinerated scrolls.

Elon Musk has a pretty ambitious plan to get humans to live on Mars in 40 years. Here’s the tech that’ll make that happen. 

Could the secret to understanding gravity be held in reducing, not increasing, the number of dimensions? This article is written by Sabine Hossenfelder. Sabine is a theoretical physicist specialized in […]

A mysterious, unidentifed, low-frequency hum as been baffling people for years.

A new study reports that political language is becoming more partisan and polarized. How is this new and what effects might this have on our republic? 

It might have puzzled Einstein right up until his death, but that doesn’t mean you can’t understand it! “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are […]

Our picture of life is going through a major shift. Ed Yong’s book I Contain Multitudes reveals that a genome generally doesn’t contain all the genes an organism needs. Symbiosis isn’t rare, it’s the rule. And we’re just the icing on life’s vast microbial cake. 

Sponsored by the Hope & Optimism Initiative

In 1998, cosmologists got the surprise of a lifetime. Here’s how our Universe would’ve looked without cosmic acceleration. “We’ve known for a long time that the universe is expanding. But […]

The FAA has issued a mysterious advisory telling pilots not to trust their GPS for several days this June.

Apple’s removal of the iPhones 3.4 mm headphone jack is causing an uproar as part of technology’s inexorable march forward.

Looking into the great, dark unknown was a mystery for thousands of years. No longer! “Science cannot tell theology how to construct a doctrine of creation, but you can’t construct a […]

There are some who feel that cemeteries should be treated as sacred places and should be exempt from the Pokemon experience. There are others who feel that they want to catch a Pokemon right now.

Imagination Institute’s Scott Barry Kaufman talks brain networks – daydreaming, how to have better ideas, and the left-brained vs. right-brained myth.

Authorities in France and Scotland are taking very different approaches to Islamic dress in their societies.

“I cook with wine. Sometimes I even add it to the food.” — W. C. Fields

The LUX experiment just set the tightest bounds ever on dark matter, and may lead us down a different path entirely. “For me the best answer is not in words […]

Self-compassion is a better strategy for feeling good about yourself than the promotion of self-esteem. 

Scientists have been able to render echolocation data to show what a dolphin sees.

With gift ideas from as little as $11, there might be something to tickle anyone’s fancy. “It is worthy of notice that in Table VI the brighter variables have the longer […]

A group of German researchers are developing a way for robots to process pain. This “artificial robot nervous system” is designed to allow the robots to “feel” and avoid further unwanted stimulus.

Out of those hundreds of friends on Facebook, you’d only count four of them as “true friends.”

Rumors of a terrorist gunman escalated at LAX. A panicked crowd trampled an old woman, snapping her femur. In our best Dick Cheney voice: “If you allow blind fear to disrupt society, the terrorists have already won.”

Cooking indoors with solid fuels can lead to a variety of respiratory illnesses, and even death.

A group of expert geologists declared that a new epoch influenced by human impact has begun.

If perfected, Gene therapy promises to heal in one shot, without complications or side effects.   

Adam Smith hated greed. He’d likely be horrified to see how his name is now used. And any Smith fans who believe selfishness is a virtue distort what Smith called his best work.

13.8 billion years is a great number. But how sure are we of this, and how did we get there? “Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We […]

Researchers present what they’ve learned now that they can read the tiny text inside the Antikythera mechanism.

Casual sex isn’t as mindless as it seems, with people actually looking for love, and influenced by brain chemistry and genes.