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Benjamin Franklin’s lightning rod saved countless lives, but some religious leaders denounced his invention.

Who needs steroids when you have the placebo effect?

To do more, it sometimes pays to do nothing at all.

Researchers have discovered 830-million-year-old microbes living inside a salt rock on Earth. Could the same occur on Mars?

Most male mammals have little or nothing to do with their kids. Why is our own species different?

With sea levels rising, the Dutch are pondering floating cities — while also exporting their engineering know-how to turn a tidy profit.

It’s like radar, but with light. Distributed acoustic sensing — DAS — picks up tremors from volcanoes, quaking ice and deep-sea faults, as well as traffic rumbles and whale calls.

For some reason, when we talk about the age of stars, galaxies, and the Universe, we use “years” to measure time. Can we do better?

Deep underwater, temperatures are close to freezing and the pressure is 1,000 times higher than at sea level.

Back in 1970, Sister Mary Jucunda wrote NASA, decrying large investments in science. A former Nazi’s legendary response is still relevant.

Philosophers and scientists spent millennia arguing about the nature of light. It turned out to be stranger than anyone imagined.

From the present day all the way to less than 400 million years after the Big Bang, we’re seeing how the Universe grew up like never before.

Its apples taste bad, but institutions all over the world want a descendant or clone of the tree, anyway.

Massive objects like black holes, stars, and rogue planets routinely pass near our Solar System. An ensuing comet storm could destroy us.

Whether or not life exists elsewhere in the Universe, we can be assured of one thing: We are the only human beings in the cosmos.

Pain makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. What’s puzzling is why so many of us choose to seek out painful experiences.

Shoving platelet-rich plasma up your nose might restore your sense of smell after COVID. But whether it actually works still needs to be sniffed out.

This storm rained electrons, shifted energy from the sun’s rays to the magnetosphere, and went unnoticed for a long time.

Yorkicystis lived during the “Cambrian explosion,” 539 million to 485 million years ago – hundreds of million years before the dinosaurs.

It’s not for climate science and condensed matter physics. It’s for advancing our understanding beyond spherical cows.

An artificial island in the North Sea is the biggest building project ever in Danish history – and could pave the way for many more.

If you think you know how an astronomical nova works, buckle up. You’re in for a ride like you never expected.

There’s an entire Universe out there. So, with all that space, all those planets, and all those chances at life, why do we all live here?

Our Sun will continue to grow, becoming a red giant and then a planetary nebula. Here’s how large it will get.

Many contrarians dispute that cosmic inflation occurred. The evidence says otherwise.

The Standard Model of elementary particles has three nearly identical copies of particles: generations. And nobody knows why.

Scientists have discovered enzymes from several plastic-eating bacteria. So, why are our oceans still full of plastic pollution?

We can describe what we see happening, but we don’t understand why. Despite our vast cosmic knowledge, enormous unknowns remain. The quantum fluctuations inherent to space, stretched across the Universe […]

Just 12 million light-years away, the galaxies Messier 81 and 82 offer a nearby preview of the Milky Way-Andromeda merger.

Rich data on the global state of our feathered friends presents plenty of bad news — but also some bright spots.