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"Tristram Shandy" trolled its way to fame.
All American and European eels originate in the same place.
Now that technology allows more people to work pretty much anywhere and at any time, what does that mean for 21st-century city planners and urban designers?
Only two authenticated images of Emily Dickinson exist: one a painting of her (and her siblings) as a child, the other an iconic photograph of her as a teenager. In […]
Seawater is raising salt levels in coastal woodlands along the entire Atlantic Coastal Plain, from Maine to Florida.
Hugo-winning author Ken Liu explores what early cinema and Chinese poetry can teach us about AI's potential as a new artistic medium.
When AI eats its own product, it gets sick.
Nicole has been dating someone for a while but it's not working out from her point of view. Is sudden radio silence an ethical option?
From "The Castle of Otranto" to "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, these books changed the literary landscape.
The flavor is "simultaneously fascinating and... abusive."
Can two planets stably share the same orbit? Conventional wisdom says no, but a look at Saturn's moons might tell a different story.
Some classic books, like Mark Twain’s "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," remain controversial to this day.
Art criticism is inherently subjective. Still, many critics have tried to make a case for why some of the world’s most celebrated books are in fact terribly written.
Red dwarf stars were supposed to be inhospitable. But TOI-700, now with at least two potentially habitable worlds, is quite the exception.
From Aristotle's lazy cosmology to Immanuel Kant's "scientific" racism, great minds are not immune to very bad ideas.
It turns out it's hard to make work at an Amazon warehouse fun.
Fire-breathing dragons may represent chaos and the human impulse to conquer that threat.
Here's your gateway to enjoying the best of literature.
Discussions of human evolution are usually backward looking, as if the greatest triumphs and challenges were in the distant past.
Society incorrectly blamed a "population bomb” for problems that had other causes. A wrong diagnosis produces ineffective solutions.
The stars, planets, and many moons are extremely round. Why don't they take other shapes?
In 2006, Pluto was demoted in a very controversial decision. Unless you ignore nearly all of planetary science, it'll never be one again.
The largest moon in our Solar System, often overlooked, is a water-rich world. Does that mean life? Here on Earth, life took hold very early on in our planet’s history, and […]
The dream of zero resistance is closer than you may think. One of the biggest physical problems in modern society is resistance. Not political or social resistance, mind you, but electrical […]
The new record-holder opens up a literal Universe full of possibilities. Someday, even our own Sun will eventually run out of hydrogen fuel in its core, bringing a tremendous set […]
Watch the plasma slide down the prominence like a roller coaster! Our Sun, despite it’s outward appearance as a perfectly hot sphere, is anything but uniform. When take a closer look […]
What happens when simulation theory becomes more than a fascinating thought experiment?
What is human dignity? Here's a primer, told through 200 years of great essays, lectures, and novels.
Institute for Humane Studies
In 2006, the IAU demoted Pluto. Here’s what we know today. In 2006, the last planet in our Solar System suffered an unforgettable insult, as Pluto — known for generations as our ninth […]
Early reading experiences play an important role in brain development.