Science journalism is hard. The job entails reading complex papers on unfamiliar, often arcane topics, and quickly becoming expert enough to succinctly explain those topics to your fellow laypeople. But on another level, the job is very straightforward: Find facts, and report them.
When you hear something is chock-full of antioxidants, the mental conclusion is often: That’s it—that’s the elixir of life, I have to eat a lot of that. But why do we all assume that loading up on anti-oxidants will somehow be the key to infinite youth?
As you may have heard, California is recovering after a rash of deadly wildfires that forced a state of emergency in Los Angeles County last month and killed dozens up north. But with tragedy comes hoaxes. And though a jaw-dropping image of men golfing near an inferno in Washington last month was real, claims that the…
If you agitate cream enough, you will make whipped cream. Continue agitating it and skim off the liquid, and you will make butter. Put that in your coffee, and you have now wasted a lot of energy to put cream into your coffee.
You might have seen claims around the internet today that Chadwick Boseman would be getting a slightly updated new costume in the Black Panther solo film. However, the images floating around are not from a Marvel Movie—they’re the subtle, but fun, work of a toy customizer.
NASA did not just rewrite the zodiac chart. But here’s why so many people are convinced that the agency did—and the real story behind the rumor.
With Episode VIII a year and a half away, leaks and spoilers are all we’re going to hear about for awhile. Naturally, that leads to a lot of fake nonsense floating around the internet in an attempt to capture the avid attention of Star Wars fans jonesing for an info fix. Case in point: the supposed subtitle of the…
The internet was all abuzz today over newly-declassified tape of Apollo 10 astronauts catching a broadcast of alien music on the Moon. Except the tape was not classified, not alien, and not music. Settle in and take a listen for yourself.
Hey, did you know that you can revive a spoiled wine by just dropping a penny into your glass? Well, at least according to the internet. The truth, though, is much more complicated.
The companies that market so-called “natural” sexual health supplements make a lot of promises, especially when they’re pitching more frequent and harder erections. But do the herbs they put in those pills actually, y’know... work?
For fifteen days in November, the Earth will be blanketed in darkness during an astronomical blackout like nothing you’ve seen before! Except it won’t, because what the fuck is an “astronomical blackout”? Isn’t the universe cool enough without making shit up?
There are many possible explanations for hauntings, not least that humans are highly suggestible creatures, especially when we want to believe. But some ghost sightings might actually be the result of sounds — sound waves that vibrate just below our range of hearing, dubbed the “fear frequency.”
There’s a rumor flying around the internet about a Hawaiian mushroom whose scent gives women orgasms. I’m sorry to disappoint, but there’s absolutely no credible evidence to support that claim.
Et tu, BBC? That absolutely gorgeous footage of the eruption in the BBC documentary Patagonia: Earth’s Secret Paradise isn’t real: it’s a composite blending eruptions from two nearby volcanoes filmed four years apart. I don’t know if I’ll ever trust again.
Sometimes it feels like half of the internet is just fake photos. Whether it’s Elvis cutting Johnny Cash’s hair (FAKE), Hillary Clinton posing next to someone in an ‘I’m With Stupid’ t-shirt (FAKE) or John Lennon on a skateboard (FAKE FAKE FAKE), we’re breaking down the latest fakes swirling around the internet.
More experiments on the much-overhyped EMDrive continue to prove absolutely nothing except that it’s easy to create ambiguous results if you’re sufficiently sloppy with your experimental design.
Last year, a paper published in Science made waves with the stunning claim that the human nose can detect a whopping one trillion different odors. But if you feel like your nose can’t detect a trillion smells, you may be on to something. It’s possible that none of us can.
One of the many pieces of popular lore attributed to Shakespeare (and there are a lot) is that he invented up to 1,700 of the words we use today. But can he really claim all of those words, or is something else going on here?
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