We all picked up new habits during the COVID-19 pandemic. But not all of them stuck. Here's the data on whether we're better or worse drivers, exercisers, social media community members, neighbors, and self carers than during and before...

Whether or not you think humans should be announcing our presence to the cosmos, we're doing it, anyway. Both intentionally, and not. And if aliens really do exist, there are several ways they could find us. Here are six of them.

Astronomers have spent the past century (roughly) trying to figure out where all the elements on the Periodic Table come from. For example, the oldest hydrogen emerged when the universe was just a baby (Big Bang nucleosynthesis). And the...

While the word "mummy" may conjure up an image of King Tut (or a 1999 Brendan Fraser action/adventure movie), ancient Egyptians were far from the only culture that mummified their dead. Around the world, and across millennia, people...

If you’ve been around the internet long enough, you’ve probably heard of the “conspiracy” that birds aren’t real (It's not a real conspiracy theory; it was started as a joke). Well for decades, scientists have been using fake birds (even...

Mushroom foragers rejoice! Your lives just got a whole lot easier! Now, we can farm four mushrooms that used to only be found in the wild: morels, huitlacoche, chanterelles, and truffles. Here's why it took so long.

Space travel is infamously bad for your health. But it turns out that in some very specific cases, space travel may actually be beneficial. Like by strengthening your bones, or repairing your DNA.

To explain how the world works, scientists occasionally have an idea that — upon further testing — turns out to be wrong. From rays that carry coldness instead of heat, to a neighboring star that causes regular mass extinctions on Earth,...

Most cultures who developed metalworking technology never let the skill go to waste. But in what's now Michigan, Native Americans started making metal tools well before anyone else did, and then stopped. And the reason why this happened...

There's one human innovation that's so critical to our lives that every modern human group seems to have it. And you probably have some in your craft drawer - it's glue! Turns out there's a long history of glue-making that cements it as...

Diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires are most of the classic gemstones adorning royal jewels. But they used to be accompanied by a stone that nowadays is most often found in museum gift shops: Amethyst. Here's the story of...

Science can help solve the world’s most important problems, and what could be more important than keeping pee off your shoes? Yes, even the lowly urinal—and those who use it—can benefit from the occasional peer-reviewed study. So let’s...

Whether you saw a quantum computer featured in a tech news blog post, or that Black Mirror episode "Joan is Awful", the chandelier-like look may have inspired the thought "Why does it look like that?" Well, it's not for the sci-fi...

Even though cleft lips and palates are really common, there's still a lot of research that needs to be done into why they form. But scientists have found a whole new line of evidence that might crack the case wide open, and it's in dog...

Soviet agronomist Nikolai Ivanovich Vavilov was obsessed with plants. Especially finding out where domesticated crops first came from. And out of his research came a proposal that certain crops, like rye and oats, were evolutionary...

In the middle of the South Pacific lies Point Nemo: the most remote location on Earth. This super isolated spot is home to a graveyard filled not with human remains, but hundreds of broken up spacecraft and satellites. And after more...

Does it seem like your workweeks are full of bright sunny days and then every weekend, every time you make plans, it rains? It's not just you -- at least if you live in the Northeastern US, it really does rain every weekend. The reason...

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.

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.

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.

When you see a bunch of fossils in a museum, you might not think about how unlikely it is that they got there. But there's a lot of lucky dice rolls that landed that mastodon in the museum, and researchers are really motivated to find...

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...

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...