The Earth is once again passing through the debris left behind by Halley’s Comet, producing the Orionid meteors that peak this weekend. Go outside! Look at space!

The promise of gene therapy has the potential to drastically limit the impact of human disease by altering the make-up of the body’s cells to fight back against deadly invaders. If used recreationally, though, gene therapy could also expand the physical limits of human strength and endurance. Like high-tech steroids,…

Some dog owners claim to be able to read the face of their cuddly canine like a book, but it’s completely possible they’re just projecting. New research suggests it’s not just their imagination, and that dogs really do switch on the puppy eyes —but only in the presence of a captive audience.

“Glass is an amorphous solid that flows like a liquid,” you’d probably say if you were asked to define the stuff. Is that true, though? What if I told you, for example, that the old myth, that old windows are thicker at the bottom because the glass has flowed a little bit, was false? Glass is an incredibly complex…

Evolution works very slowly—except when it doesn’t. New research shows that certain British birds appear to be changing quickly as result of bird feeders, evolving longer beaks to help them access the food inside.

No one said that monsters needed to be big or even scary. But when James Dwight Dana first spotted one strange plankton species back in the 19th century, he knew he had something weird on his hands. “Little monster,” Monstrilla seemed like as good a name as any. After all, scientists can name species after pretty much…

If physics were complete as-is, the Universe wouldn’t exist. All particles would have found their antiparticle pairs and annihilated into a burst of energy. Matter and antimatter look like exact mirror images of one another, after all. There’s no difference between a particle and its antiparticle partner aside from…

On Wednesday—for only the second time—the Food and Drug Administration approved a cutting-edge therapy that genetically modifies a patient’s blood cells in order to attack cancer. This time the therapy, known as CAR T-cell therapy, is designed to treat aggressive non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

The microscopic processes involved in human fertilization are a difficult thing to convey visually, but a group of scientists, using Star Wars as their inspiration, have managed to do just that, creating a highly entertaining and informative video—while accidentally stumbling upon a new scientific discovery in the…

Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate, reads the gates to the Inferno. “Abandon all hope, you who enter,” which is a pretty nice way of saying “welcome to Hell.” But there’s a real underworld, albeit one with fewer dogs and less being blown around by the wind or wading through shit. Scientists are working on a…

For years, scientists have wondered if dark, crater-like features on the lunar surface might be entrances to giant caverns carved long ago by flowing lava. Researchers from Japan and the United States have uncovered new evidence to prove that these features actually exist—which is good news for future lunar colonists…

Regina Dugan, a tech exec with roots in the government sector as the former director of DARPA, is leaving Facebook and her departure calls into question the status of one of the craziest things Facebook has been working on.

In recent years, superbugs have become one of the biggest threats to modern human health. At present, the CDC estimates that some 23,000 people die every year from multidrug-resistant infections in the United States. The threat of antibiotic-resistant bacteria to global health is big enough that this year the World…