What's the Least Useful Body Part?
We’re all familiar with the flashy, big-ticket organs: the heart, the brain, the lungs. Their celebrity often obscures…
Giz Asks
In this Gizmodo series, we ask questions about everything from space to butts and get answers from a variety of experts.
Why Do People Believe in Pseudoscience?
It’s difficult to change someone’s mind if they have anything like a strong opinion on the risks of vaccination, or the…
Do Dogs Get Headaches?
From the outside a dog’s life can seem close to ideal, at least at those moments when your desire to do nothing runs up…
What's at the Edge of the Universe?
It is a routine emotion in 2019 to urgently wish, four or five times in a day, to be launched not simply into space but…
How Fast Can You Travel Before It Kills You?
The human body can withstand a lot before giving up and dying: falls from second-story windows, years of fevered…
Is Permatripping Real?
For decades, every town had its spin on the story: the distant cousin or friend of a friend who took a bunch of acid…
What's the Worst Planet?
The best planet is Earth, objectively, and I only say that because I live there. Other than Earth, you might find fans…
Why Do We Forget?
To live is to forget—account numbers, names, the precise locations of keys and wallets, friends from childhood,…
What's the Loudest Sound in the Universe?
The human tolerance for sound is, on a galactic level, puny. Volcano eruptions, jackhammer-intensive construction work,…
What's the Worst Pain?
Some people say that life is pain. Those people are optimistic: life isn’t pain, it’s pains, plural—tooth pain, back…
What's the Newest Animal?
Bears. Donkeys. Fat, friendly dogs. These animals—animals, generally—have been around for an extremely long time, long…
What's the Most Dangerous Food of All Time?
Surveying the whole scope of human history vis-à -vis food, a couple of themes emerge. One is that humans like their…
What Happens When Two Black Holes Collide?
On September 14, 2015, signals from one of the Universe’s most mind-boggling, powerful events produced the tiniest…
What's the Smartest Plant?
Compared to even the dumbest human being, your average tulip is a moron. But you’d have to be dumber than a tulip to…
How Will We Know the World Is Ending?
Visions of the end of the world tend to extremes—the planet fatally fracked, flooded, hurricaned, nuke-cratered. No…
How Much Human Skin Does a Person Ingest Over the Course of Their Lifetime?
The average American eats almost a ton of food a year. This breaks down to roughly 630 of milk, cheese and ice cream,…
Will Cryogenically Frozen People Ever Be Revived?
Corpse-freezing hasn’t exactly gone mainstream, but most people are now familiar with the concept: you lay out a ton…
Why Do We Remember Some Dreams but Not Others?
If you’ve ever woken up on the brink of a heart attack, drenched in sweat and convinced you’ll never live down the…
Would a BDSM Sex Robot Violate Asimov's First Law of Robotics?
The sex robot community—the people who make the sex robots, and the people who want to have sex with the sex…