Social media keep old friends close, but the Web used to be for strangers.

Modern historians have found a Medieval mummy head showing that medicine and medical practices during Europe’s Dark Ages weren’t that dark.

Traditional manhood aside, today’s real masculinity crisis is biological—environmental endocrine disruptors common in plastics and fertilizers may be contributing to rapidly declining fertility.

How does a godless universe come to create itself? Tackling the next big question in popular science requires a massive paradigm shift in thinking.

Occupy Sandy organizers Leah Feder and Devin Balkind discuss how open-source technology can help organize communities, solve problems collectively, and build democratic movements.

Read about how network society, the interactions between technology and people, has brought people together to create major social movements.

Collaborative consumption is promising, but doesn't have the potential to create high-skilled livelihoods for users like the maker movement.

England’s Reaction Engines Ltd. is developing a liquid-hydrogen-fueled airplane, called the A2, that would travel at speeds up to Mach 5, pollution-free.

Unbeknownst to most users, our technological revolution depends in large part on the cheap-labor microtasking of Amazon Mechanical Turk and other tech employers.

Teaching climate change in schools is never easy, but science teachers now face the objections of global warming skeptics and climate change deniers.

Marion Winik ponders the world before Google, the endless availability of information, and the necessity of turning to older search engines.

Recent brain research reveals that creative breakthroughs are made when we think with fewer rules.

Cities across the U.S. discover that good biking attracts great jobs and top talent to their communities.

The resistance by many police departments and prosecutors to adopt the best practices in forensic testing has resulted in miscarriages of justice.

Solving crimes, dating artwork and imagining prehistoric landscapes are among the many uses of pollen in science.

Thanks to the internet and the rise of collaborative consumption, great ideas can come to life without a loan (or a wealthy relative).

Increasingly, video games are being seen less as brain-numbing exercises in distraction and more as potent tools for positive social, personal and political change.

Quantum physics is an integral part of human culture—one that explains almost everything. Learn more in this excerpt from “The Quantum Universe.”

Washing my clothes by hand at home with the Breathing Mobile Washer eats into whatever "leisure time" I'd normally have while doing laundry, but the benefits far outweigh the loss of a couple hours of sittin' on my butt.

ARCHIVE Global Brings Healthy Architecture to Haiti.

The benefits of statins — cholesterol-reducing drugs — may be outweighed by the negatives for patients who don’t have pre-existing heart disease.

“Geek Nation” is a spellbinding account of how India is becoming a global hotbed for scientific innovation.

Tech trends toward social, mobile, and local can make the way we work more sustainable.

At Trout Gulch, an intentional community outside of Santa Cruz, California, internet savvy meets the DIY life to create a vision of the future.

Technological change has a dramatic impact on language. Our cultural vitality depends on keeping that language alive.

Computer programming languages might as well be Greek to most people, but the new adult curriculum “Code Year” aims to change that.

When a regime shuts down the internet, the helicopters of free information take to the skies...

Research suggests that Neanderthal DNA enhanced modern human immune systems.

Genetically modified mosquitoes may limit the spread of fatal diseases.

To scratch out a life on other planets, we may need to tinker with our own DNA...

Astronauts may soon tend gardens on U.S. spacecraft, growing good, old-fashioned vegetables—from radishes and lettuce to cherry tomatoes and mizuna greens—to supplement their space-age meals....

 

An Internet startup promises that their free software coding course will teach you the skills to create your own website in one year...

The Guerrilla Grafters—a renegade urban gardening group in San Francisco—illegally graft branches from fruit trees onto the ornamental trees that line their city streets, transforming the boulevards into sources of free food....

Low-frequency sonar has the potential to teach marine biologists a great deal about fish migration patterns—and open the commercial fishing industry to astronomical profits...

A video game called Warco takes away your rifle and gives you a video recorder. Don’t worry—it’s still plenty violent...

We are chained to our love of “being in touch”...

All of those 140-character messages add up to something: a shockingly telling portrait of yourself...

The nuclear industry is ensuring schoolchildren learn the ABCs of their radioactive future...

Vital self-tracking devices promise to make us healthier (and more self-obsessed)...

Impact Earth! is like a mash-up between Angry Birds and Armageddon, a program that allows you to tweak the size, makeup, velocity, and impact site of an asteroid and volley it toward our unsuspecting, defenseless planet...

Pakistan bans 1,500 naughty words from text messages….

With 32,000 employees and more than 10,000 artillery weapons, China literally has an army assembled to fight the ravages of dry weather...

Ten tuberculosis patients from across the globe are chronicling life with their illness to educate the rest of us...

A little bit of pain relief goes a long way—if you can get it...

Number crunchers are touting “predictive policing” as the formula for lower crime rates...

Will testing the brain, even before birth, separate the good seeds from the bad?...

A successful industrial chemist, John Warner helped found the field of green chemistry when he became concerned about artificial toxins in our environment, and in our bodies. Since then he’s done groundbreaking work in promoting a “benign by design” approach to his field...

For the first time ever, cells from the highly endangered white rhino and drill (an African primate) were transformed into stem cells that could hold the key to the future of their respective species... 

 

New research shows that people are willing to harm one another for a paltry amount of cash—sometimes as little as $30...

Baltimore’s software developers geek out for the greater good...

Quick, draw a picture of a scientist. What does the person look like—and what does this image say about the problem recruiting new scientists?...

With the demand for meat expected to nearly double by 2050, two eco-friendly companies endeavor to bring bugs to the dinner table…

 

 

The smallest words in our vocabulary may reveal the most about us, from honesty levels to health status….

Check out this video of a live beating heart in a box—a new technology designed to replace the cooler-and-ice method of donor organ transfer….

Echolocation, the ability to “see” the surrounding landscape by interpreting echoes, allows the blind to use tongue clicks and echoes to get around.

A Japanese company has proposed an outlandish idea to meet Earth’s future energy demands—a ring of solar panels around the lunar surface...

Can design for the third world be both entrepreneurial and altruistic?...

Revolights’s innovative LED lights illuminate the way for urban cyclists...

Recent research suggests that modern men and women are wired to cooperate, whether they know it or not...

Researchers reopen their minds to the healing potential of psychedelic drugs...

FalseFlesh takes online creeping to a whole new level...

Truck drivers are the scourge of other motorists, but they deserve our compassion and admiration...

A design company creates a portable, easy-to-install solution to temporary housing after disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina...

 

An unlikely mycologist wants to bring fungi to the funeral home...

One reason why you might reconsider stepping on the roach scurrying across your kitchen floor...

Grace Lamwaka, a Uganda woman with tuberculosis, blogs about her disease via the new TB&ME project by Doctors Without Borders.

Two recent articles illuminate the secret grotesquerie of the meat industry...

Before voice recognition software, there were women...

A cheap heroin substitute is rotting Russian junkies from the inside out...

If the weatherman lied to you, would it make terrible weather more bearable? Designers of a new Smartphone application think so...

Ambiguous genitalia, otherwise known as disorders of sex development, is present in some 2,600 babies each year in the United States. This is Jim's story...

What makes a bike stay upright? Scientists are finding that the physics of biking are surprisingly complex …

Baltimore uses PDAs to pinpoint where recovering drug users decide to relapse...

The arcane art of cookie design, demystified...

Averting the watchful eyes of online advertisers...

Ten responsible ways to recover from a night of irresponsible drinking...

Will augmented reality usher in the Post-Language Era?...

A design contest called Rethink the Food Label aims to revamp the familiar—but unclear—black-and-white Nutrition Facts label...

The ultimate man cave is an audiophile’s digital laboratory...