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This year marks 2,000 years since the birth of the Roman author of the first natural encyclopedia.

From succubi to aliens, stories of abductions or other unsettling encounters have been with us for millennia. What explains them?

Any dataset that can be quantified over time can be turned into a contest that is both exciting and (a little bit) enlightening.

People around the world, mostly Generation Z, are obsessed with the look and feel of gothic, elitist universities. Why?

Nearly 200 orbital launches are scheduled for 2022.

The microscopic tardigrades are an elusive species. Fossils are rare, but each new find adds a piece to their unsolved evolutionary puzzle. 

Learning styles are supposed to help learners take ownership of their education, but research doesn’t back up this well-intentioned myth.

We should not romanticize ancient Egyptian culture.

The Kazungula Bridge connects Zambia and Botswana, barely missing Namibia and Zimbabwe.

Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.

The gospels imply that Jesus became famous as much for his exorcisms as his ministry.

Brands manufacture meaning through consensus; people must strive to create their own.

We bring multifaceted selves to our interactions, and in these interactions co-create each other again and again. 

Dennis Klatt developed trailblazing text-to-speech systems before losing his own voice to cancer.

In a world without “bullshit jobs,” we would have more hours available to us to learn new skills and to unleash our creative side.

Roughly the size of a thumbnail, this newly discovered toadlet has some anatomical surprises.

If computers can beat us at chess, maybe they could beat us at math, too.

From “shell shock” to “combat fatigue,” the wars of the past century have violently illuminated the power trauma can wield over the mind and body.

The Chegg cheating scandal reveals a critical need to rethink the student experience in post-COVID education.

Spirals, ellipticals, and irregulars are all more common than ring galaxies. At last, we know how these ultra-rare objects are made.

For some reason, the charges on the electron and proton are equal and opposite, and their numbers are equal, too. But why?

Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York is the kind of film that makes you laugh and cry at the same time.

The world isn’t ending! But we are likely at the beginning of a profound transformation.

Ingenuity is remarkable. But these 5 exploration ideas are revolutionary. Telescopes are our initial tools for revealing and studying foreign worlds. Hubble images of Mars, particularly around the regions with […]

The scientists, not the fossil fuel industry, were right all along. Back in 1990, the world’s top climate scientists convened to put together a report on the state of Earth’s climate. […]

The number of PhDs has been exceeding the available academic positions since as early as the mid-1990s.

In 1990, we only knew of the planets in our own Solar System. Today, the exoplanet count is more than 5000. Here’s what we’ve learned.

Famished, not famous: retrace Orwell’s hunger days, when he was one of the city’s legion of poor foreigners.

Neptune holds records in our Solar System, but the Universe gets even faster. Here on Earth, extreme weather events can cause dramatic wind speed spikes. When hurricanes are at their most […]

Psychologists point to specific reasons that make it hard for us to admit our wrongdoing.