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During the Cold War, the USSR and U.S. had programs to harness the power of nuclear explosions, demonstrated here in the “Baker” test, for peaceful purposes.U.S. DOD via Wikipedia In the late spring of 2010, the world watched, often in real time, a new kind of environmental disaster unfold: An oil rig operating deep under the […]

Last week, researchers using the Planck spacecraft to study the skies announced that the polarization of light spotted by the BICEP2 experiment could be entirely explained by dust swirling around the Milky Way. This news was a bucket of cold water on the theories of many cosmologists: It meant that BICEP2 might not have been […]

A lithograph of the massive 1883 eruption of KrakatoaThe eruption of Krakatoa, and subsequent phenomena, 1888; Parker &

In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.Brian Goodman via Shutterstock Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from […]

r.classen via Shutterstock In the 1630s, Holland was gripped by the world’s only known case of “tulip mania.” The intensely colored flowers were already a luxury item before then, but their prices leaped when tulips with flame patterned petals hit the market, and they continued rocketing to previously incomprehensible levels. The price for a single […]

These photos show the difference between a healthy brain (left) and one with CTE (right). The tau proteins in all the samples were stained and appear brown.BU CTE Center In 2012, Tim Shaw was still living the rarefied, enviable life of an NFL player. He’d played in college, in Penn State’s storied program, then got […]

A Lykoi kitten next to its normal-coated brother, who carries just one version of the Lykoi gene. It’s no accident that Lykois are bred with black cats. “If they have black as their base coats, they really have that werewolf look. Other base coats don’t look quite as striking,” he says. “An orange Lykoi cat […]