"Please try to go to hell frequently because you will find the light there."

"Trust in human nature is acceptance of the good-and-bad of it, and it is hard to trust those who do not admit their own weakness."

"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven."

"No matter how tired you get, no matter how you feel like you can’t possibly do this, somehow you do."

"It is the search for infinity, the search for evidence that our capacious universe might hold life elsewhere, in a different place or at a different time or in a different form."

"Survival often depends on a specific focus: a relationship, a belief, or a hope balanced on the edge of possibility."

Alongside humans, leafcutter ants form some of nature’s vastest, most sophisticated societies — a single mature colony can contain as many ants as there are people on Earth, living with a [...]

"Beyond the difficulty of communicating oneself, there is the supreme difficulty of being oneself."

On an anonymous desk in a spartan classroom of the pioneering Troy Female Seminary, a teenage girl with blue-grey eyes and an oceanic mind is bent over an astronomy book, preparing to revolutionize [...]

"Human lives... are composed like music. Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence... into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of [...]

Summer 2023 was a pretty scary one for the planet. Global temperatures in June and July reached record highs. And over in the North Atlantic Sea, the water temperature spiked to off-the-chart levels. [...]

Most of us would sacrifice one person to save five. It’s a pretty straightforward bit of moral math. But if we have to actually kill that person ourselves, the math gets fuzzy. That’s the lesson [...]

Today, the story of an idea. An idea that some people need, others reject, and one that will, ultimately, be hard to let go of. Special Thanks to Carl Zimmer, Eric Turkheimer, Andrea Ganna, Chandler [...]

In this episode from 2007, we take you on a tour of language, music, and the properties of sound. We look at what sound does to our bodies, our brains, our feelings… and we go back to the reason we [...]

A couple years ago, our producer Annie McEwen listened to an audio documentary that, she said, “tore my heart wide open.” That episode , “Finn and the Bell,” (https://zpr.io/TDjwQuXFDSz6) by [...]

When we think of China today, we think of a technological superpower. From Huawei and 5G to TikTok and viral social media, China is stride for stride with the United States in the world of computing. [...]

Matthew Herrick was sitting on his stoop in Harlem when something weird happened. Then, it happened again. And again. It happened so many times that it became an absolute nightmare—a nightmare that [...]

In online news, stories live forever. The tipsy photograph of you at the college football game? It’s there. That news article about the political rally you were marching at? It’s there. A charge [...]

In 1908, on a sunny, clear, quiet morning in Siberia, witnesses recall seeing a blinding light streak across the sky, and then… the earth shook, a forest was flattened, fish were thrown from [...]

Since the beginning of the space program, we’ve expected astronauts to be fully-abled athletic overachievers—one-part science geeks, two-part triathletes—a mix the writer Tom Wolfe called [...]

The preserved contents suggest the trilobite fed almost continuously and had a gut environment with an alkaline or neutral pH, researchers say.

It’s official: Antimatter falls down, not up. In a first-of-its-kind experiment, scientists dropped antihydrogen atoms and watched them fall, showing that gravity attracts antimatter toward Earth, [...]

New images of two galaxies reveal what look like rarely seen rings of hydrogen gas nearly perpendicular to the galaxies’ starry disks.

Floe Foxon is a data scientist by day. But in his free time, he applies his skills to astronomy, cryptology and sightings of mythical creatures.

Explorer Ferdinand Magellan is not a fitting namesake for the pair of satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, a group of scientists argues.

Just breathing naturally can lead people with COVID-19 to emit dozens of copies of viral RNA a minute and that can persist for eight days, a study finds.

Michael Mann’s latest book, Our Fragile Moment, looks through Earth’s history to understand the current climate crisis.

No brain? No problem for Caribbean box jellyfish. Their seemingly simple nervous systems can learn to avoid obstacles on sight, a study suggests.

Asteroid dirt from Bennu could help reveal clues about the material that came together to make the solar system — and possibly where life comes from.

Mouth taping is big on social media, but few studies have evaluated it. Some evidence suggests that sealing the lips shut may help people with sleep apnea.

You're probably doing it wrong.

Kelp life.

A new way forward?

Things may not all be as they seem.

A 500 million year old menu.

It really is the best option.

They're smarter than we think.

The first direct measurement of free-falling antimatter.

Wait, what?

Suddenly and all at once.

Amreeta Duttchoudhury on composites, vacations, and the FAA.

An interview with ex-Imagineer (and present-day mechanical engineer) Colin Godby.

Hillary Predko on the transmutation that occurs inside a nuclear reactor.

Spencer Wright on the National Forest System's staggering quantity of unpaved roads.

TW Lim on the unfinished nature of kitchen knives

Our AMA with food engineer Larissa Zhou who researches cooking techniques for microgravity.

James Coleman considers alignment problems in the workplace.

Personal computing has long since arrived: Our lives and homes are bursting at the seams with computers; old phones and laptops spill out of drawers, full of the digital ephemera of our lives. In [...]

Hillary Predko visits a nuclear power plant, iterates on ceramic Penrose tiles, and considers how instant ramen is made.

Spencer Wright on workshop time with kids.

Veteran game designer and writer Frank Lantz reflects on the power of video games to capture and express sublime truths.

There is no free lunch when it comes to tricky decisions; you have to do the thinking.

Huxley was a very special kind of expert witness to his own unusual states of consciousness.

Mark D’Esposito draws on a half-century of research, as well as insights gained in his lab, to break down our current understanding of frontal lobe function and working memory.

Fifty years ago, a military coup violently ended Chile’s political experiment with socialism, and with it the nation’s technological experiment with cybernetic management.

A brief excerpt from Marie Darrieussecq’s memoir “Sleepless,” a restless inquiry into the cultural and psychic sources of insomnia.

Some human social constructs like gender are viewed erroneously in an evolutionary context. It’s time for our understanding of a person’s self-identity to evolve.

A little-known story of Marjorie Van de Water, who, in her coverage of psychology and psychiatry, popularized a new journalistic beat among U.S. news reporters.

Abigail A. Van Slyck examines The Game of Buffalo Bill, an 1898 board game that whitewashed racial violence, reducing it to a gentle stroll along a pastel-colored path.

Our “Fascination of Science” series culminates with a powerful conversation with Françoise Barré-Sinoussi, who earned a Nobel Prize for her role in the discovery of HIV.

The Fiji mermaid looked nothing like the lovely sea creatures.

Jenny Hanivers were bizarre, dried specimens resembling mythical creatures, crafted by European sailors.

Completed in 1986, the Robot Building was considered one of the century's top 50 landmark structures.

Bangkok's famous skyscraper, which resembles an elephant and was completed in 1997, is now an iconic landmark.

Margo Dydek, the tallest WNBA player in history at 7'2", ruled the game with a record 877 career blocks.

The Battle of Leuctra, which took place in 371 BC, is considered a turning point that radically changed the balance of power in Ancient Greece and ended Sparta's rule.

The hoary fox is known for its small size and preference for solitude or small groups.

There are about 20 different varieties of the southern viscacha.

Viscachas rely on their thick fur to endure low oxygen levels and cold temperatures.

Neither a fox nor a dog: The pampas fox is found in the wet grasslands of Bolivia, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, and southern Brazil.

A turtle moves through a waterway at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida on May 4, 2017.

The sample return capsule from NASA’s OSIRIS-REx mission is seen shortly after touching down in the desert, Sunday, Sept. 24, 2023, at the Department of Defense's Utah Test and Training Range. The [...]

Expedition 69 Flight Engineer Jasmin Moghbeli captured this image of New Zealand, dotted by white clouds, on Sept. 12, 2023, as the International Space Station orbited 230 miles above the island [...]

The Artemis II crew and teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems Program successfully completed on Sept. 20, the first in a series of integrated ground system tests at NASA’s Kennedy Space [...]

"The stars aligned – I was working at Johnson Space Center in Houston about six months later. That’s how I got here, in a roundabout way.” — Isidro Reyna, Strategic Communications Manager, [...]

"It's amazing when I get a chance to see the space station fly over. I am very fortunate to be able to say that my hands were on a lot of the hardware that is up there. I’m very proud to have been [...]

This dream-like image from the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the galaxy known as NGC 3156.

The Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the NOAA-20 satellite captured this image of fragmented ice in Hudson Bay on June 28, 2023.

Justin Hall lands the Dryden Remotely Operated Integrated Drone 2 (DROID 2) aircraft at NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, on Aug. 22, 2023.