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And that’s the good news, because the percentage found in your tap water is much higher.

A new study published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters provides even more reason to think Ross 128 b, the second closest exoplanet to Earth, could harbor life.

A single, complete view of half the world was enough to teach us how these distant, frozen bodies work. On July 14, 2015, NASA’s New Horizons flew by Pluto. Pluto’s atmosphere, […]

The world’s getting hotter, and it’s getting more volatile. We need to start thinking about how climate change encourages conflict.

Once the permafrost thaws, it’s the beginning of the end for the aquatic food chain.

A groundbreaking new study shows that octopuses seemed to exhibit uncharacteristically social behavior when given MDMA, the psychedelic drug commonly known as ecstasy.

From billions of miles away, a faint, single pixel shows us how precious and alone Earth truly is. There are people alive today who can remember a time where no human-made […]

New insights into the role of water vapor may help researchers predict how the planet will respond to warming.

Gravity and time are so different from what you’d expect. Here’s how it all would end. If you could only know the answer to one question about the Universe, what would […]

South Africa is no longer the only place on the continent that has urban wealth clusters

The Trump administration is quietly bringing an end to NASA’s Carbon Monitoring System, which builds high-resolution maps of the world’s carbon flow.

If the Breakthrough Starshot initiative, promoted by Stephen Hawking, works exactly as planned, it could lead to disaster. Imagine yourself on a world not so different from Earth, orbiting a […]

Stephen Hawking’s final paper is all about the multiverse, quantum relativity, string theory, relativity and more.

Quantum particles are mysterious and difficult to track down, but neutrinos may be the most elusive quantum particles yet. The facilities designed to observe neutrinos are feats of engineering, and what they hope to uncover is profound.

Culture determines how mental illness or aberrant mental behavior is viewed and dealt with.

Could the Universe loop around on itself? And, if so, might an intergalactic journey bring you back to your home planet? Back when people thought the Earth was flat, it was […]

Experts caution about the dangers of the current technological revolution at the annual gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft taught us more than we ever imagined about Saturn. Could we do something similar for Uranus and Neptune? From where we are in the Solar System, looking out […]

Rates of centenarians are going to increase eightfold in the next three decades.

Our existence is finite, but that’s no reason for despair. Here’s a version of the story we all should hear at least once. This world, and for that matter, the entire […]

Earth is old enough to have been home to other industrialized civilizations so far back in the past we have no idea they were there. What we’ll leave behind may offer clues of what we could look for as evidence.

The first planets were only gas. The second included rocky ones, but life wasn’t possible. Here’s how we finally got there. Here in the Universe today, potentially habitable planets are practically […]

CFC-11 was banned worldwide in 1987 by the Montreal Protocol, but scientists have found increasing levels of the ozone-depleting chemical in the atmosphere since 2013.

Cephalopods like the octopus could have originated from outside of our solar system, possibly coming to Earth as hitchhikers frozen inside comets and meteors.

Scientists are investigating whether it’s possible to give modern elephants an ancient boost by reviving woolly mammoth DNA—all to curb climate change.

Fortunately, there are a few things you can do to help stop the flow of plastics into our oceans.

It will be the most extreme test of Einstein’s General Relativity ever. And we already have the data. With every year that goes by, the total amount of knowledge that humanity […]

If the multiverse is real, why hasn’t our Universe, in a sea of infinite possibilities, run into another one at least once? The Universe we inhabit is vast, full of matter […]

MIT researchers find that 1–2 percent of Earth’s oldest mantle rocks are made from diamond. rnrn

Now is a good time to brush up on who’s on the ballot.