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Consider the octopus: a creature, researchers say, unlike anything here on Earth.

Starches may have played a key role in our ancestors’ diets, helping humans to develop the big brains we have today.

Many issues stand against a mission to Mars: fuel, landing, and sustaining life on the red planet are just a few. But scientists say that the astronauts that depart will not be the same — the structure of their brains will change.

Journalist Fareed Zakaria discusses the true cost of American higher education and the structural changes that must take place to correct an unsustainable trend.

A tour de force article by The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz details a catastrophic earthquake and tsunami that could leave a region home to millions of people in absolute ruins.

In Munich last week, physicists and philosophers debate what makes for a scientific theory. Surprisingly, no one agrees. This piece was written by Sabine Hossenfelder. Sabine is a theoretical physicist specialized […]

Is the time we experience in our day-to-day lives real? Theoretical physicist Brian Greene explores the potential particles of time and why we could, in theory, travel forward in time but not back.

If all the random motions of the molecules inside aligned, how far and fast would it go? “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.”-Bernard […]

There’s no such thing as absolute time, but after 13.8 billion years, is anything relatively different? “The total number of people who understand relativistic time, even after eighty years since […]

Philosopher and social critic Slavoj Žižek dislikes the sense of self-commodification and self-manipulation innate in online dating.

A “speculative” theory no more; it’s had four of them confirmed. “Scientific ideas should be simple, explanatory, predictive. The inflationary multiverse as currently understood appears to have none of those […]

New robot seeks to bring convenience to your life, and can master new tasks on the fly.

The gender-wage gap is more complex than we may think, as researchers find female managers are not the solution to the wage issues.

Research shows evidence that we can alter our brains to enhance our creative thinking — all through the power of art.

An incredible art project creates a new, tiny world every day. “I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book.”–Mohsin Hamid As small as it is […]

Open borders would lead to a massive wave of immigration and probably the collapse of American constitutional democracy… though one economist says that’s not a bad thing.

The final building to rise in place of the original WTC will be the work of star architect Bjark Ingels, who famously designed Google’s new headquarters in California. 

Dan Price, CEO of Seattle-based Gravity Payments, made headlines last week with his announcement of a bold new salary structure that will see all of his staffers make at least $70,000 annually in the next three years.

Is “nudge theory” Big Brother running our lives, or just the medicine we need? 

Information Theory explicitly ignores meaning. Its focus on messages makes it uninformative about their effects. And limits the usefulness of its way of quantifying information. 

Bees produce honey, beeswax and… maps? Yes they do, if they’re one of Ren Ri’s swarms.

Our observable Universe is finite, and so is the amount of information in it. Here’s what we may never know. “Despite its name, the big bang theory is not really […]

America has a big problem mistaking courage for cowardice and it stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of bullies, according to The Baffler’s David Graeber.

The pope laments the state of the environment, but he also decries the naive central environmentalist belief that humans are separate from nature and the villain in a simple myth of US (humans) against True Nature.

“Teamwork is the signature adaptation of” humanity, says David Sloan Wilson. And our ancestors evolved ruthlessly cooperative means of ensuring productive social coordination. 

NASA’s great observatories combine to give us a unique view of a sight no human ever saw the first time around. “And no one showed us to the landAnd no […]

Spiral galaxies have a skeleton-like structure that supports them. See the Milky Way’s first discovered bone! “The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached […]

The always-entertaining Ruby Wax explains the structure of the brain and how a natural hormone addiction — particularly to dopamine — keeps us in a perpetual state of wanting.

There are lots of wrong reasons out there, but only one that matters. “The scientist does not study nature because it is useful; he studies it because he delights in […]

Why is the word such a wet blanket? Scientists investigate.