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If atoms are mostly empty space, then why can’t two objects made of atoms simply pass through each other? Quantum physics explains why.

Michio Kaku predicts, among other things, how we’ll build cities on Mars and why cancer will one day be like the common cold.

We are generally taught that there is an arc of history — an inevitable path of progress that leads to modern society. Maybe it isn’t true.

It can sometimes feel like career progress is beyond your control. This can be especially acute if you are a young professional or entering a new industry. You’re too inexperienced, […]

Researchers at the University of Illinois Chicago find that death triggers increased activity in certain brain cells.

Skilled hunters adapted to the changing landscape and left tantalizing clues to who they were.

New machine-learning algorithms from Columbia University detect cognitive impairment in older drivers.

JWST has seen more distant galaxies than any other observatory, ever. But many candidates for “most distant of all” are likely impostors.

The placebo effect is not the “power of positive thinking.” The fact that it is getting stronger is not a good development.

In theory, the fabric of space could have been curved in any way imaginable. So why is the Universe flat when we measure it?

Glueballs are an unusual, unconfirmed Standard Model prediction, suggesting bound states of gluons alone exist. We just found our first one.

The last 70 years have taken us farther than the previous 70,000. But can we accomplish more than creating a record saying, “We were here?”

These 5 research-backed tips can turn bad habits into financial gain.

The science fiction dream of a traversable wormhole is no closer to reality, despite a quantum computer’s suggestive simulation.

At a fundamental level, only a few particles and forces govern all of reality. How do their combinations create human consciousness?

What qualifies someone for the top position in American government?

“It doesn’t erase what happened to you. It just changes the impact it has on your life.” 

Finding it at all was a happy accident. Examining it further may help unlock the secrets hiding within the earliest galaxies of all.

Be famous within five miles.

There is nothing more important to science than its ability to prove ideas wrong.

An emerging field studies parasites that take over the nervous system of a host.

Malignant discrimination remains a problem in society, but it’s one we’ve improved upon compared to its historic highs—or, rather, lows. Interracial marriage, to pick one example of progress, used to […]

When the mutual relatives of two royal families died, the countries were likelier to go to war.

The brain is highly plastic — the more we do a particular action, the more we change its makeup. Money is a great motivator for habit-forming actions.

Smoke taint from wildfires is gross, even to wine amateurs.

Figuring out the answer involved a prism, a pail of water, and a 50 year effort by the most famous father-son astronomer duo ever.

The anthropic principle has fascinating scientific uses, where the simple fact of our existence holds deep physical lessons. Don’t abuse it!

Arguments are a normal and often healthy part of a relationship. It all depends on picking the right kind of arguments, though.

The mass that gravitates and the mass that resists motion are, somehow, the same mass. But even Einstein didn’t know why this is so.

Regardless of political ideology, one of the few things that many people seem to have in common is a moral hypocrisy that arises from a fundamental lack of self-reflection.