A black swan event is rare but disruptive — and might be predictable.
A recent study sheds light on the evolutionary history of rhinoceroses and their remarkably low levels of genetic diversity.
Deepfakes featuring your digital double could replace emails and zoom presentations.
Water is vital for life. Luckily for spacefaring humans, the solar system is full of it.
How did the troughs form?
Discovered in 1900, the Saint-Bélec slab languished unrecognized in a castle basement for over a century.
Unreasonable burdens prevent people from thriving. Eliminate them.
It happened more than once, and needed to. Here’s why. If there’s one thing you can be certain about when it comes to outer space, it’s that it’s transparent, not opaque, […]
Bitcoin is often derided as volatile, but a new report suggests there is a method to the madness.
Augustine’s theology came to define Christianity, but there was a rival theology.
Researchers hypothesize that these exoplanets could support the development of alien life.
Delaying or refusing vaccines for non-medical reasons is literally a killer choice. When it comes to issues at the intersection of science and society, there are all sorts of things that […]
Scientists track down a puzzling early burst of oxygen on Earth.
Philosophers and scientists spent millennia arguing about the nature of light. It turned out to be stranger than anyone imagined.
Starting just about now, leaves start changing color from north to south, high to low, light to dark.
If it wasn’t a singularity, how small could it have been? Today, when you look out in any direction as far as the laws of physics allow us to see, the […]
Paradoxically, we lose wars because the world is peaceful and the U.S. is powerful.
Longevity gets a new motto: location, location, location.
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes is often labeled a quintessential Spanish artist, but his allegiance may well have lied with the French Enlightenment instead.
Coherentism accepts that circular reasoning is probably the best any of us can do.
Both made monumental contributions that were far ahead of their time. It’s hard to believe, but the idea that the Universe was dominated not by normal matter but rather by dark […]
A 2020 study has revived a longstanding controversy over Christopher Columbus’ claims of marauding cannibals in the Caribbean.
A strange philosophical thought experiment forces us to ask if the world can be completely described in physical terms.
This freshly unearthed image drastically alters the meaning of one of the artist’s most celebrated works.
Hubble, our greatest space-based observatory today, is just the beginning. The Hubble Space Telescope has been astronomy’s most revolutionary observatory in history. The stars and galaxies we see today didn’t […]
It could analyze a photo of the Martian surface in just five seconds. NASA scientists need 40 minutes.
A new model addresses a longstanding problem: where do quasars get the fuel they need to outshine entire galaxies?
It walked enough miles to nearly circle the Earth twice.
A puzzling — and huge — break in the geological record finally might be explained.
Medical science can save lives, but should it do so at the cost of quality of life?