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This question is probably as old as the airplane itself. It goes something like this: The first question a reasonable person would ask is "Where do you get a giant plane-sized treadmill that goes 100 mph?" Yes, that is indeed a good question—but I won't answer it. Instead, I'm going to give this question the […]

Schedule surgeries, earnings calls, and therapy appointments before noon. Score the biggest bucks by switching jobs every three to five years. The ideal age to get hitched (and avoid divorce): 32. In his new book, When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing, Daniel Pink scours psychological, biological, and economic studies to explore what he calls […]

Today, a teaspoon of spit and a hundred bucks is all you need to get a snapshot of your DNA. But getting the full picture—all 3 billion base pairs of your genome—requires a much more laborious process. One that, even with the aid of sophisticated statistics, scientists still struggle over. It’s exactly the kind of […]

It seems like I have been slightly obsessed with flashlights for quite some time. Perhaps it started when the Maglite lights became popular in the '80s. It was that mini Maglite that ran on 2 AA batteries that I really liked. It was small enough that you could carry around and bright enough that it […]

Your brain is one enigmatic hunk of meat—a wildly complex web of neurons numbering in the tens of billions. But years ago, when you were in the womb, it began as little more than a scattering of undifferentiated stem cells. A series of genetic signals transformed those blank slates into the wrinkly, three-pound mass between […]

I can't decide if this looks like something from a super hero movie or from a video game. In this compilation video of crazy stunts, a guy somehow finds a way to bound up between two walls by jumping from one to the other. "Somehow," of course, means with physics: This move is based on […]

1. Most substances make a clean break between their liquid and solid states. But liquid crystals straddle the boundary: They flow smoothly, like water, while maintaining a crystalline structure. A tiny jolt of electricity aligns the molecules in the same direction and allows them to rotate light—an effect you see when the pixels in your […]

Nearly 300 million years ago, a curious creature called Orobates pabsti walked the land. Animals had just begun pulling themselves out of the water and exploring the big, dry world, and here was the plant-eating tetrapod Orobates, making its way on four legs. Paleontologists know it did so because one particularly well-preserved fossil has, well, […]

For the last two days, a colossal, coursing stream of super-soaked subtropical air has been pummeling California with record-shattering amounts of moisture. On Wednesday, parts of northern California received more snow in a day than New England cities like Boston have seen all winter. On Thursday, Palm Springs got eight months’ worth of rain in […]

Cannabis is a hell of a drug. It can treat inflammation, pain, nausea, and anxiety, just to name a few ailments. But like any drug, cannabis comes with risks, chief among them something called cannabis use disorder, or CUD. Studies show that an estimated 9 percent of cannabis users will develop a dependence on the […]