Science & Engineering
A new species of mosasaur named Tylosaurus rex
A new species of marine reptile, identified from fossils that have been sitting in various museum collections in North Texas and elsewhere for as long as…
Science & Engineering
Complex animal life may be 10 million years older than scientists thought
The standard cultural framing of where animal life originated has, for most of the last century, placed the origin in shallow water.
Culture
The cosmos is silent, slow, vast, and almost entirely indifferent to whether we're…
The cosmos, in any honest accounting, is silent, slow, vast, and almost entirely indifferent to whether we are in it.
Science & Engineering
Astronauts on the ISS lose about 1-2% of their bone density per month in…
The human skeleton is, on every available physiological measurement, considerably more dynamic than the standard cultural framing tends to credit.
Psychology
Quote by Carl Sagan: “Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious
Carl Sagan used this line in Cosmos (1980). The line has, since his death, become one of those quotes that floats around the internet attached to photographs…
Psychology
Quote by Brian Cox: “We are the cosmos made conscious and life is the means by…
Quote source: Brian Cox, Wonders of the Universe, episode “Messengers” (2011).
Culture
I spent years convinced the moon landing was faked
I want to write about something slightly embarrassing, partly because it is true, and partly because the path out of the belief was, in my case, a particular piece of evidence that I have not, in the years since, ever heard a conspiracy debunker bring up.
Culture
A decade on, Interstellar is still the space movie I measure every other space…
It has been more than a decade now since Interstellar came out, and I have, in that time, watched a fair number of the space movies that followed it.