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A new study finds that by having a plan B, we may unintentionally sabotage our initial plan.  

Christmas may be Jesus’ “birthday,” but, as any mother will tell you, his mother Mary really deserves the applause. Providing the humanity half to join with Christ’s divine side, Mary volunteered to play a part from the Incarnation to the Crucifixion to the Resurrection as everything from an active participant to an interested bystander, depending on your interpretation of Christian scripture. 

Without Étienne-Joseph-Théophile Thoré, the genius of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer would have been lost to time.

Passing chunks of ice can fertilize ocean waters and play a role in the planet’s carbon cycle.

The popular game has a backstory rife with segregation, inequality, intellectual theft, and outlandish political theories.

Progress got derailed somewhere between indoor plumbing and the flying car. Why?

No. No no no. Just... no. The JWST has truly blown our scientific minds, but it's a pure crackpot idea that the Big Bang is now disproven.

Horses pranced around the western hemisphere until they went extinct in the late Holocene. They were reintroduced by European colonists — though where, when, and how has remained unclear.

When you're a genius, how do you make ends meet?

Here's your gateway to enjoying the best of literature.

Now they're pointing the way to future battery technologies.

What you need to know about this smallpox cousin.

These astounding inventions show that civilizations of the past were a lot more advanced than we might have thought.

Frank Slater’s book "Practical Portrait Painting" reveals the secrets of masters old and new, from Leonardo da Vinci to Augustus John. 

If we are wreaking havoc on ourselves and the world, it is because we have become mesmerized by a mechanistic, reductionist way of thinking.

60% of all potentially dangerous asteroids remain undetected.

Historians have been able to piece together a clear picture of how the average Roman citizen spent their waking hours.

Bears, chimps, or humans? A track of five poorly preserved footsteps at Laetoli has puzzled paleontologists for decades. Now, a research paper from Nature claims to have solved the mystery.

1700s economic principles predicted Uber. A Nobel Prize-winning economist explains why.

Did the Milky Way form by slowly accreting matter or by devouring its neighboring galaxies? At last, we're uncovering our own history.

Based on the atoms that they're made out of, the innermost planet should always be the densest. Here's why Earth beats Mercury, hands down.

Discover the history of homemade sugar skulls, home altars, and fantastical spirit animals.

In 1966, Disney announced his intention to build Epcot, an acronym for “Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow.”

This map shows that the territories discovered by Europeans add up to an area no bigger than Utah.

But the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope compels us to add, “so far.” Beginning with its 1990 launch, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope revolutionized our conception of the Universe. This photo of […]

The peasant turned czarist advisor has come to be known and feared as the devil incarnate, but was he really as demonic as we have been led to believe?

Galaxies can have regions both hotter and colder than the background radiation of the Universe. When we talk about the depths of space, we get this picture in our heads […]

Long before Alexandria became the center of Egyptian trade, there was Thônis-Heracleion. But then it sank.

A new government report describes 144 sightings of unidentified aerial phenomena.

Gain-of-function mutation research may help predict the next pandemic — or, critics argue, cause one.