Latest

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A person making medical breakthroughs by looking through a microscope.
Ethicist and doctor Simon Whitney argues that society's overly cautious approach to medical research is blocking breakthroughs.
Raisin bread expanding Universe
Two fundamentally different ways of measuring the expanding Universe disagree. What's the root cause of this Hubble tension?
A woman reading news with a cup of coffee.
We can no longer approach the news as passive consumers.
A group of silver balls resembling mercury surrounding a statue of a man influenced by Maya culture.
Today, many Maya sites are polluted with toxic levels of mercury. The contamination likely originated from cinnabar paints and art.
Ice harvesters once made a living from frozen lakes and ponds, but the work was strenuous and dangerous. Then refrigeration changed everything.
An image of a plant with green leaves on it.
Researchers estimate there may be as many as ten million trillion trillion phages on Earth — that's 10 with 30 zeros after it.
A sparkler with the word orgasm on it.
11mins
The best orgasms come when you learn how to unlock a sexual “flow state.” Emily Nagoski, a sex educator, shares a meditation to help you get started.
An image of the earth resonating in space.
The Schumann resonances are the background hum of the entire planet. But they don't affect humans in any way.
Are fools happy and geniuses disorganized — or is that a mistaken stereotype?
Gamma rays in the milky way.
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery… consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
A set of colorful file folders arranged using the para method on a white background.
How we organize all our digital stuff — from work research to side hustles to family photos — is key to our productivity.
A metal railing supporting a white basket.
LK-99, almost certainly, isn't a room-temperature superconductor. The underlying physics of the phenomenon helps us understand why.
Sleep in brown's office - anti-psychiatry stance.
A brief look at the six-decade challenge to psychiatry.
An ancient map depicting the independence of the United States.
The global extent of the Revolutionary War surprises many Americans today — but it was crucial to independence.
Two mirrored human faces with dotted lines and patterns radiating outward, set against a solid blue background, suggesting connectivity or symmetry.
6mins
Scientists can't define spirituality. But we can study its healing effects, says this Columbia psychologist.
atom quantum
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.