A secret to a long, healthy life may lie in the diversity of gut viruses, which can supercharge bacterial metabolism and resist disease.
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What do the dark recesses of the early Universe and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom have in common? More than you could have ever hoped for.
Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.
How are we to deal with the quantization of spacetime and gravity?
Business acumen training can help everyone from individual contributors to directors learn how to seize opportunities for growth.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline relaunched last year with a new number, yet few Americans are aware of the helpline and its purpose.
There may be more energy in methane hydrates than in all the world’s oil, coal, and gas combined. It could be the perfect “bridge fuel” to a clean energy future.
Up until 2002, we thought that the heaviest stable element was bismuth: #83 on the periodic table. That’s absolutely no longer the case.
For linguists, the uniqueness of the Basque language represents an unsolved mystery. For its native speakers, long oppressed, it is a source of pride.
A series of charts shows how prevalent different mental illnesses are across the globe — but how we define them matters.
The brightest gamma-ray burst ever observed, GRB 221009A behaved in unexpected ways that might help us understand how they occur.
Descartes broke from the European philosophers who preceded him and devised a new way of considering humanity and the world.
Brain activity may be more like “ripples in a pond” rather than signals sent on a telecommunications network.
Sun-like stars live for around 10 billion years, but our Universe is only 13.8 billion years old. So what’s the maximum lifetime for a star?
A study found that older adults who cannot balance on one foot for ten seconds have an 84% higher risk of death than those who can.
Centuries ago, the typical British coffeehouse was more like a “school without a master” than a place to grab a quick boost of caffeine.
Neuroscientist and author Bobby Azarian explores the idea that the Universe is a self-organizing system that evolves and learns.
At the turn of the millennium, a physicist fooled the global scientific community with the greatest discovery that never existed.
June 12, 2023
A quote apocryphally attributed to Henry Ford goes, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Our crossword this week covers recent critical innovations and the debate as to whether they will be beneficial or detrimental to mankind’s survival.
With hundreds of billions of stars burning bright, some galaxies are already dead. Their inhabitants might not know it, but we’re certain.
The Foo Fighters are at the dead center of the map, so all the other bands are happier, sadder, angrier, or hornier.
There are 40 billion billion black holes in the universe. Here’s how our Solar System stacks up against ten of them.
“In witness whereof, the parties hereunto have set their hands to these presents as a deed on the day month and year hereinbefore mentioned.”
From gene expression to protein design, large language models are creating a suite of powerful genomic tools.
Mary Toft staged an elaborate hoax, but the pain was real.
You’ll be able to sleep through a war.
“Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 percent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself — and there isn’t one.”
Who’s afraid of utopia? AI doubters have cold feet. History can warm them.
Impossible standards and poor self-understanding are making us miserable.
We don’t know what causes Miyake events, but these great surges of energy can help us understand the past — while posing a threat to our future.