Intellectual humility involves recognising limits and responding to evidence. It is not a behavior shown by nearly all intelligent people or a simple measure of intelligence.
In 2010, two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, published a study in the journal Science that has, in the decade and a half since…
Mission and launch details are documented by the European Space Agency's SMILE launch announcement and SMILE mission factsheet.
The same scattering physics that paints the noon sky blue is what reddens the sun at the horizon — and the only variable that changes is the length of the column of air the light has to push through.
In late August and early September 1859, Earth was struck by a sequence of geomagnetic disturbances, the largest of them on 1 and 2 September.
On December 15, 1970, the Soviet probe Venera 7 became the first human-made object to transmit data from the surface of another planet. The signal was so weak engineers initially thought the mission had failed, until they pulled 23 minutes of data out of the tape noise.
The Pentagon is restructuring Golden Dome, a missile defense program, to operate more like a Silicon Valley platform than a traditional weapons procurement…
The human brain is, by every available measure, an unusual organ in terms of its energy demands.
The standard cultural framing of dark matter tends to treat it as a known scientific substance.
Every human eye has, on close examination, a small region of the retina where there are no light-sensing cells.
The standard cultural intuition about memory treats it as something like a recording.
The fastest object ever built by humans is a small spacecraft, roughly the size of a compact car, currently flying through the outer atmosphere of the Sun at 430,000 miles per hour.
The standard cultural register, when it considers the question of who is good at making accurate judgments, tends to focus on intelligence as the primary variable.
On a windswept slope of the White Mountains in eastern California, somewhere between 9,500 and 9,800 feet above sea level, in a grove of bristlecone pines that…
When professional mathematicians describe the moment a difficult proof finally falls into place, the language they reach for is, on the available evidence, almost always closer to discovery than to invention.
In December 2017, a team of researchers led by Adam Brumm and Maxime Aubert of Griffith University, working with Indonesian archaeologists, climbed into a remote limestone cave called Leang Tedongnge on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi.
