The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
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Nature may not allow us full access to the weirdness of quantum mechanics.
Ethicist and doctor Simon Whitney argues that society’s overly cautious approach to medical research is blocking breakthroughs.
In many ways, it was worse than Chernobyl.
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What’s the root cause of this Hubble tension?
We can no longer approach the news as passive consumers.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
Ice harvesters once made a living from frozen lakes and ponds, but the work was strenuous and dangerous. Then refrigeration changed everything.
Researchers estimate there may be as many as ten million trillion trillion phages on Earth — that’s 10 with 30 zeros after it.
The Schumann resonances are the background hum of the entire planet. But they don’t affect humans in any way.
Don’t argue with science. Just do it.
Are fools happy and geniuses disorganized — or is that a mistaken stereotype?
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery… consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
How we organize all our digital stuff — from work research to side hustles to family photos — is key to our productivity.
LK-99, almost certainly, isn’t a room-temperature superconductor. The underlying physics of the phenomenon helps us understand why.
The arsons were no accident, archaeological evidence suggests.
A brief look at the six-decade challenge to psychiatry.
The global extent of the Revolutionary War surprises many Americans today — but it was crucial to independence.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we’ve probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
Only Caesar lived to tell the tale.
It could cut the time needed to reach Mars in half.
You could send your potential paramour a perfume bottle, a cigar cutter, travel plans — or maybe some cocaine.
It could explain why so many people don’t respond to common antidepressants.
How scientists are hearing the gravitational background “hum” of the Universe for the very first time.
These landscapes — of geographical differences in head shapes — have vanished from acceptable science (and cartography).
Someday, scientists could use stem cells to guide the development of synthetic organs for patients awaiting transplants.
Philosophy can focus on some dull topics. Luckily, some thinkers have spent lots of time on the philosophy of sex
Grief never ends. There is no closure, but there are things we can do to mitigate the feeling of loss.
Einstein’s laws of gravity have been challenged many times, but have always emerged victorious. Could wide binary stars change all that?
A company in England has made a test that picks out the compounds from breath that reveal if people have liver disease.