The most brilliant among us, it’s regularly suggested, are uniquely doomed to comprehend the limitless expanse of the universe, and, as a result, to confront our own inconsequential place within it. This has loosely been termed existential depression,

Virginia raked in $97 million on speeding tickets in 2010; scale that up to a population of 320 million and you get a national figure of about $3.7 billion. If autonomous cars make that sum go away, budget committees are likely to notice.

The growing realization worldwide is that the practice is never going away, and that those selling their services are at far greater risk than their clients.

Guidelines don’t apply to mice, rats, birds, farm animals raised for food and agricultural research, or reptiles and amphibians.

Originally the assumption was that each new discovery would get the next available letter, but the system went to crap.

President Obama called it a “potentially unprecedented environmental disaster.” Despite all this, the surface-level answer is that things are better than one might have feared.

Some combination of room temperature and skin coverage could improve your sleep and/or even help build brown fat, either of which may in turn lower your diabetes risk, and nakedness could play a role in such a scenario.

The existence of an enormous and extremely sneaky biped is unlikely, mostly because its caloric needs would require it to frequent too large an area for it to go unspotted forever.

By most accounts we wouldn’t even have developed vertebrae without the moon, let alone eyeballs. Dark nights would be the least of our problems.

…And they all didn’t die off from skin cancer. What’s the deal?

Yes, the poorest denizens of the poorest corners of the world have stopped dying from the most easily preventable of diseases. But here at the other end of the spectrum, we’re going in the opposite direction.

Why were the futurists of the mid-20th century so wrong? Where are the robots, undersea cities, home nuclear plants, meals in a pill, and moon colonies? Damn it, where’s my […]