In different contexts, you might speak a different language or use different terms, grammar, gestures, etc. Code switching can help you learn languages, turn the tides of social interactions, use up mental energy, and affect healthcare...

In 1643, Johann Wirsung was shot and killed outside his home, but not before he named one of the men responsible. One rumor that has emerged over the years is the man was paid by one of Wirsung's former assistants, who claimed Wirsung...

There's a list of the 500 most powerful computers on Earth, and we're downloading the details on the top five.

In a small town in the French Alps, a lot of people started to get the neurodegenerative disease ALS. Could the culprit be mushrooms?

You've probably heard of fool's gold, and it might make you think of prospectors in old timey California seeking their fortunes. But there's another kind of fool's gold called chalcopyrite, and lucky for those that want to strike...

You may have heard of Blue Zones, these isolated pockets of the world where people seem to live into the triple digits way more often than everywhere else. But what's really going on, and does the research say it's as simple as eating...

The famous Irish Potato Famine was thanks to farming practices and p. infestans (among other things). But are the Colorado Potato Beetle and the climate crisis teaming up to bring about the next potato famine? Here's what research suggests.

Between 1485 and 1551, England was hit by at least five epidemics of sweating sickness. But after that, the disease supposedly vanished off the face of the Earth. With fatality rates as high as 90% according to some sources (perhaps...

The Park Grass experiment at Rothamsted Research Centre in England is the world's longest-running ecological experiment. It's also the result of a sort of Victorian Stardew Valley, the enduring friendship between John Bennet Lawes and...

Ivermectin does not work against COVID-19. However, it is almost a miracle drug when it comes to treating parasites. Doctors want to know if they can use ivermectin to prevent malaria. Here's how it's going.

Antarctica is more than a continent-sized sheet of ice (and the penguins that live atop it). There's land, liquid water, and even life underneath all that ice. And scientists have built up a suite of tools to find all of it.

Small grains in the Murchison meteorite have been estimated to be 7 billion years old—much older than the Earth, and even the solar system.

In 2009, a man named Edwin Rist planned a museum heist. His target wasn't jewels, or fossils, or the Declaration of Independence. It was bird skins. It took just over a year for authorities to track him down, largely because the...

You've probably heard that processed foods are bad for you. But is that true for all of them? And how do we know?

This video description is brought to you by language. But how long have humans been able to use our gift of gab? The answer is a lot more complicated than you might think. From studying fossil brains and ear bones to DNA migration...

Throughout history, humans have come up with some pretty weird ideas related to longevity. Like drinking neurotoxic mercury to live forever, slathering yourself in oil and eating honey to reach the ripe old age of 300, or getting an...

Can you melt wood? Most of the time, the answer is no. But as with many things in science, under the right circumstances, it might just be possible.

Do animals exercise? Think about it -- do animals need to lose weight, or train for their big migration? We'll look at a few definitions of exercise and see if animals meet the criteria for hitting the gym.

We all have to deal with getting rid of trash. But what do we do when that trash is radioactive? Here's a few of the weirdest solutions to the green glowy problem of storing radioactive waste for decades to come.

All crocodilians look more or less the same today, but to survive two different mass extinctions, they've had to change a lot. Here's how they pulled it off.

Rocky bodies like moons, asteroids, and comets are chock full of resources, from water, to helium-3, to rare earth elements. But how can we access them? Some scientists have proposed using microbes to aid in the mining of certain metals.

More and more people under 50 are being diagnosed with colorectal cancer. These young people don’t seem to have any of the usual risk factors for colorectal cancer, like an inherited genetic mutation. after some sleuthing, scientists...

Correction

07:11 We made a conversion error! The asteroid in this sentence should be 95,000 meters or 95 km. The conclusion (water would be deadly hot and sterilized) is cor

rect.

Let's face it: The Earth is going to get...

The Sahara is rather famously a desert, but it wasn't always that way. And during the time of lush green forests, there were plenty of people who lived there, but they've been hard to study. However, new genetic analysis has given us...