We Know Mars Better Than Our Own Backyard Spacecraft have photographed Mars from orbit in enough detail to chart individual craters and ridges. The Moon has been mapped with similar precision. Meanwhile, Earth’s oceans cover roughly 140 million square miles, about 71% of this planet’s surface, and as of April 2026, only about 28.7% of … Read more
Wings Are Wonderful. But Can They Point at Something? Picture a pigeon on a park bench. Now picture the same pigeon flexing a fully formed, muscular human arm, bicep tight, fingers spread wide. That image shouldn’t work. The brain snags on it, tries to file it somewhere, and comes up empty. That snag is exactly … Read more
Cutting a Virus Out of Human DNA Nearly every treatment for a viral infection works by interfering with the virus: blocking cell entry, stopping replication, neutralizing it in the bloodstream. What researchers at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University did was structurally different. They used a gene-editing tool to physically remove HIV … Read more
When Homer Melts Picture the most familiar animated faces on television, but wrong, not wrong the way a rushed sketch goes wrong, but wrong on purpose. Sam Taylor’s drawing “Melthouse” takes characters that anyone could recognize from over two decades of Sunday-night viewing and lets them drip. The shapes that usually snap together into familiar … Read more
Two Monsters Walk Into a Review Picture Freddy Fazbear and Slender Man not lurking in the dark, but sitting on a couch together, debating what actually makes a horror game work. That is the premise The Warp Zone ran with, and the result is a surprisingly sharp piece of genre criticism dressed up as sketch … Read more
Your Brain Is Running on Multiple Clocks at Once Think about flinching at a sudden loud noise, no decision, your body just moved. Then think about weighing a difficult choice, turning options over for minutes or hours. Same brain, two completely different operating modes. Most people assume the difference is simply attention. The reality is … Read more
The Thing That Makes You Better at Learning Is the Thing You Dread Most people treat an exam like a report card: you find out the verdict after the fact. Either you learned the material or you didn’t, and the test is just there to tell you which. If that’s how you think about tests, … Read more
The Uninvited Guest with the Best Timing Dogs fill the internet with charm. Cats supply the attitude. But there is one photographic scenario where birds hold an uncontested position: the photobomb. Not just any photobomb, the kind where the bird arrives at the exact wrong moment, locks eyes with the lens, and makes the original … Read more
Two Million RSVPs, About a Hundred People, and One Arrest for Public Urination In June 2019, a 20-year-old from Bakersfield, California named Matty Roberts created a Facebook event as a joke. He called it “Storm Area 51, They Can’t Stop All of Us.” The tagline: “They can’t stop all of us. Let’s see them aliens.” … Read more
A Fictional Home Made of Real Plaster The Lars homestead appears in three Star Wars films. In A New Hope (1977), it’s where a young Luke Skywalker stares at the twin suns before his life changes; it appears again briefly in Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005). On screen it … Read more