Science
The Creatures That Remember Chernobyl
Radioactive boars and bunnies won’t let us forget about the nuclear disaster.
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Projects
What's the Best Planet?
NASA Venus, the Best and Brightest
A historian makes the case for Earth’s closest neighbor.
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Joe Skipper / Reuters The Fading Meaning of ‘GMO'
The National Academy of Sciences is urging people to focus less on the process and more on the product.
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Gary Hershorn / Reuters The Evolutionary Power of Loneliness
The pain of isolation may be what motivates people to make friends.
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Phil Noble / Reuters Not Doomed Yet: For Several Hours, the U.K. Glimpses a Coal-Free World
The island nation got none of its power from coal-fired power plants last week.
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Orbital View: 100,000 Laps Around the Earth
That’s the milestone the International Space Station reached yesterday. To celebrate, the U.S. National Laboratory aboard the ISS posted…
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The Voorhes The False Promise of DNA Testing
The forensic technique is becoming ever more common—and ever less reliable.
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James Walton Life Isn’t Fair
So why do people behave as though it is?
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NASA The International Space Station's Odometer Hits 100,000 Orbits
The space laboratory has now traveled about 2.6 billion miles since 1998.
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Lisa Maree Williams / Getty The Complex Psychology of Why People Like Things
How do you account for taste?
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jumpingsack / shutterstock / The Atlantic Tracing Zika Back to Patient Zero
Researchers must work their way backward to understand the mutations that made the disease a pandemic.
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Lucy Nicholson / Reuters The Harm in Blindly ‘Going Gluten Free’
It is not an innocuous decision.
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Jim Young / Reuters The White House Launches the National Microbiome Initiative
Half a billion dollars are being pledged to study the microbes in humans, crops, soils, oceans, and more.
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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Northeast Region Climate Change Is Shrinking Earth’s Far-Flying Birds
In which the red knot is the canary, and the planet is the coalmine.
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The Cognitive Science Behind Repeating Mistakes
It’s not your fault you can’t learn from them, it’s how your brain is wired.
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NASA An Update From the Astronomers Who Proposed the Alien Megastructures
Where the quest to understand the most mysterious star in the galaxy stands today.
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Mary Altaffer / AP Concerns About Folate Causing Autism Are Premature
Yesterday’s press release was potentially dangerous.
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Reuters Ancient Space Dust Hints at a Mysterious Period in Earth's Early History
And it could make the search for life on other planets much more difficult.
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Sheng Li / Reuters The Genetics of Staying in School
A huge study found 74 gene variants that are associated with years of formal schooling—but that doesn’t mean there are “education genes.”
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Cappi Thompson / Getty Why 13-Year-Old Girls Are the Queens of Eye-Rolling
As far as facial expressions go, the eye-roll is one of the more deliberate forms of expressing contempt.
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Shannon Stapleton / Reuters How Consciousness Explains Ventriloquists and Religion
The brain projects its own qualities onto the world around it—for better or worse.
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NASA A.I. Is Getting Better at Spotting Galaxies
A computer can’t match a human’s ability to identify cosmic objects, but recent advances in machine learning are helping to close the gap.