Beautifully captured stop-motion origami.

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How social networks make it tough to see ourselves as part of a larger group, like say, a class.

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A NASA project that studies surface-level ocean currents is like Van Gogh’s Starry Night come to life.

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Why thinking green could actually be bad for the earth.

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What 2050 may really look like (minus the flying cars).

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Backronyms and downright falsehoods: debunking linguistic urban legends.

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The specifics on our brave new digital world.

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What house mice can tell us about where the Vikings have been.

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New research on the other carbon-dioxide problem.

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How the heat wave in the Midwest crashed NOAA’s climate software.

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David Foster Wallace wants you to turn the music down.

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A new app lets Facebook users “enemy” instead of “friend.” The app, developed by a University of Texas researcher, is called EnemyGraph, and purports to encourage a more accurate reflection of our social lives than the "friending" and "liking" can.

Image by Andreas Bauer, licensed under Creative Commons.  

In the paper-folding contest that is life, I recall the tiny origami box I once constructed as a personal coup. This achievement fails to impress, however, when judged alongside Robert Lang’s six-inch-tall, free-standing moose, pictured here.

Lang, a former physicist and engineer who now devotes all his attention to the venerable Japanese art of origami, has crafted hundreds of original designs, from battling insects to a hermit crab, that can be seen on his website. His skills have also found pragmatic applications. As documented on Damn Interesting, Lang has collaborated with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in designing the successor to the Hubble Telescope. This new long-range telescope will comprise two large lenses that can be folded up for easier transportation into orbit—via gigantic paper airplanes, I hope.

—Michael Rowe