If David Lynch designed a planet, it would be Uranus. Much like every episode of Twin Peaks: The Return, Uranus is fiercely unique and weirdly endearing, even though it makes no fucking sense. The planet’s spin axis is 98 degrees, so it essentially rotates on its side—and while we have some idea as to what could have…
Fucking is good. What else can you say? We’re a species that gets to actually enjoy sexual activity. It makes babies. When consenting adults do sex-making, it is good.
Claiming that evolution is “debatable, controversial, and too complicated for students,” Turkey’s board of education has decided to stop teaching Darwinian natural selection in its schools. The move has infuriated the country’s secular opposition, but it could embolden other countries to do the same.
Hey, sailors! Welcome back to Animals Are Good: Cephalopod Week edition. Cephalopods, in case you’re wondering, are a class of mollusks to which octopus, squid, and cuttlefish belong. As the week comes to a close, we’d like to give a much-deserved shoutout to one of the cutest tentacle-babies out there: the dumbo…
Over the last few months, SpaceX has out-SpaceX-ed itself in the best way possible: it’s launched an already used rocket into orbit (and landed it), ferried up a spy satellite, and even flown a recycled Dragon spacecraft. But this weekend, the aerospace company will tackle a new challenge: two launches within 48…
Hutchinson, Kansas isn’t the kind of place you’d wind up if you weren’t looking to. The placid prairie town sits a solid hour’s drive south of I-70, the interstate that most travelers use to blow across 425 miles of Kansas cornfield and cattle pasture as quickly as possible. But as soon as I entered the silver-roofed…
Bad news if you were hoping to beat a drug test by blaming it on your breakfast. A British company called FDL, a “global supplier of speciality ingredients,” is claiming to have developed a new type of poppy seed with reduced levels of morphine that won’t produce a false positive result on a drug test.
There are lots of secret fans of particle physics. My favorite tweets of all time, for example, are ex-baseball player and steroid user Jose Canseco’s incredible opinions on the Higgs boson.
Investigators in Chile have released thousands of declassified documents dating back to the Second World War, revealing the extent to which Nazi spies had infiltrated the country. Among the more shocking revelations is the discovery of a Nazi plot to destroy the Panama Canal—an act that would have changed “the history…
We’re all clamoring to get into space these days, but lost in our excitement to fly to the Moon and colonize Mars is a brutal truth: the final frontier is a cold, inhospitable wasteland that’ll kill you at the first opportunity it gets. Astronauts already know this, but for the rest of us, here are just a few of the…
Coconut oil has had quite the week! The supposed health food has turned into a pariah thanks to the American Heart Association reviewing existing evidence and deciding it advises against the oil’s use.
Lots of people have an opinion on supplements. But when you go to the store to buy one, you’d expect the amount of the active ingredient to be consistent, right? Apparently, that doesn’t seem to be happening.
Thousands of years ago, indigenous people living in the California Channel Islands relied on a manufacturing process that exposed them to dangerous chemicals that likely compromised their health. The discovery shows that toxic substances of our own making have been around for a lot longer than we realized.
It’s been about 11 years since Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet status, leaving a 1,473 mile (2,370 kilometers)-size void in our hearts. Since then, the hunt for Planet X—aptly renamed Planet 9—has grown into an international movement to find such an object in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune’s orbit. Now, scientists …
If you know science, you know it’s not perfect. Outside eyes review papers their peers wrote before those papers get published, results must be reproduced to establish truths, and even then, stuff can still contain mistakes.
The vast majority of infectious human diseases come from animals, yet we know surprisingly little about which animals pose the greatest risk. A new study helps resolve this shortcoming, ranking the mammals that are most likely to spread infectious diseases to humans.
Some of life’s simplest questions get swept under the rug for a long time—after all, the most widespread phenomena often require the most data to understand. Take the shape of the boring egg, for example. You probably thought eggs are was shaped the way they are so they won’t roll out of the nest or something. But a…
Where there are landfills there are seagulls. An estimated 1.4 million of these opportunistic feathered critters feed on these vast tracts of waste across North America. And as a new study from Duke University shows, the voluminous amounts of poop from these gulls is compromising the water-quality of nearby lakes and…
We’ve all seen the grade school science experiment where sticking a couple of electrodes into a potato produces enough current to power a small light bulb. But engineer Marek Baczynski took that experiment several steps further, building what could be the world’s first autonomous potato—and the ultimate housepet.
Humans are pretty jaded these days. We can write most of the strange phenomena we see off as science (or we honestly don’t care). But when Roman philosophers like Pliny the Elder witnessed moonless nights glow bright like the day, it definitely made an impression. Others since then have been awestruck by these “bright…
