13.8 billion years ago, the hot Big Bang gave rise to the Universe we know. Here's why the reverse, a Big Crunch, isn't how it'll end.

The answer may lie in the particular way sand forms on Titan.

Bernini created art for 8 different popes. In the process, he helped reinforce and redefine Christianity’s visual culture.

Now they're pointing the way to future battery technologies.

Human sacrifice appears to be as old as humanity itself. Still, experts disagree on how and where the practice first originated.

It's not just the language of love.

Atomic clocks keep time accurately to within 1 second every 33 billion years. Nuclear clocks could blow them all away.

Pseudoscience is science’s shadow.

But does Amazon know when you're tired or hungry?

What you need to know about this smallpox cousin.

Will nature or nurture win out?

Did traditional Chinese thought pave the way for the philosophy of Maoism?

In all of human history, only 5 spacecraft have had the right trajectory to exit the Solar System. Will they ever catch Voyager 1?

Data from the Zhurong rover suggests the Red Planet was wet more recently than we thought.

A happiness expert explains why.

Searching for truth in unorthodox ways can be a valuable exercise. But Anatoly Fomenko's alternate world history is just plain weird.

The site will be the first working example of a geological disposal facility.

Shame is a powerful tool that must be used with care.

One form of domestic abuse involves a parent breaking their child’s connection with the other parent.

Geopolitics is not a magic 8-ball. But making financial decisions — such as those regarding retirement — in a multipolar world without geopolitics is akin to flying blind in a storm.

Signals from the environment, such as those detected by your sense organs, have no inherent psychological meaning. Your brain creates the meaning.

Crystallization is an entirely random process, so scientists have developed clever ways to investigate it at a molecular level.

The high pitches from the flute and the harp would reach your ears before the notes from the tuba and the cello.

He wear no shoeshine, he got toe-jam football...

Everything is made of matter, not antimatter, including black holes. If antimatter black holes existed, what would they do?

When faced with too many choices, many of us freeze — a phenomenon known as "analysis paralysis." Why? Isn't choice a good thing?

In 100 years, perhaps this map showing humanity clustering around the equator will seem “so 21st century.”

Understanding these links could bring us closer to a cure.

Do the laws of physics place a hard limit on how far technology can advance, or can we re-write those laws?

These astounding inventions show that civilizations of the past were a lot more advanced than we might have thought.