A cloud stretching over 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) above a 12-mile-tall (20-kilometer) extinct volcano on Mars differs greatly from any other clouds on Earth. The cloud emerges and then quickly disappears from the Martian sky every day, much like Australia’s rolling Morning Glory clouds—except the clouds on the Red Planet […]

Ciphers are a wartime staple, yet French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte learned that the hard way when one of his officers was captured in the Iberian Peninsula with a letter containing sensitive military information. Napoleon couldn’t quite grasp the need for encryption until this incident, after which he promptly tasked his

It took six years of working under a microscope in the dark with tiny manipulators for Tessa Montague, a Columbia University neuroscientist, to engineer glowing cuttlefish. This is the first time anyone has succeeded in adding a new gene to a cephalopod— a group of animals that includes mostly octopuses,

Fields Medal-winning mathematician Yu Deng has a plan B if AI takes over his role— “if AI can solve all maths problems, I’ll go home and write my yuri novel”, he wrote on social media. The comic response followed OpenAI’s claim that 10,000 of their AI agents ‘solved’ the Navier-Stokes

The opioid crisis in America is evidence of how pharma companies prioritize profit, even at the expense of public health. Opioid medications are used to reduce pain, but routine use can lead to addiction. The crisis became an epidemic due to fraudulent marketing and institutional greed, which falsely branded opioid

North Korea has often been the epicenter of geopolitical chaos between 2006 and 2017 due to its rampant nuclear tests. The last one was in 2017, and it ended in a heated exchange between the American president, Donald Trump, and North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong Un. However, it wasn’t just

Are you a social butterfly, or keep to yourself? Do you prefer fight over flight when in stress or danger? All of these responses can be compiled into scores across five traits, also known as the Big Five personality traits— openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism– or the “OCEAN” model

Do anything you want with my music, but never make me boring!  Days before his death, Freddie Mercury, lead singer of Queen, reportedly said this to his manager. Twenty-five years later, Queen’s musical legacy lives on, his wish fulfilled. Still, it’s hard to imagine a six-minute song like “Bohemian Rhapsody”

The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP17) took place in Mongolia, a country plagued by desertification, droughts, and dzud winters—severe periods of heavy snow and harsh, cold weather, followed by summer drought. Millions of farm animals die of cold and starvation, leaving a scarring impact on Mongolian herders, who constitute

The fun in video games used to be in mastering and finishing them. However, the definition of fun in the gaming world has changed from skills to ‘skins’—custom designs and wearables inside a game that can be purchased with money. Many of the modern games are also “free-to-play”, but there

When Edward O. Wilson, a champion of conservation and a renowned entomologist, calls for eradicating mosquitoes and is willing to take on the role of an executioner, there must be very little doubt about how dangerous these tiny insects can be. Nearly a million die from diseases carried through mosquito