No matter how you feel about TikTok, you must admit it can get us thinking. #GirlMath (or #GirlMaths if you're Down Under or Across the Pond) went viral when it spoofed the ways women supposedly play mind games about spending. Why Did Girl Math Become a Trend? Girl Math is enough to make a feminist's blood curdle (to be clear, there's also Boy Math and even Corporate Math, although those memes don't focus so much on shopping). But Girl Math is also, well, funny. And it hit a nerve. The trend li ...read more

This story was originally published in our Jul/Aug 2023 issue as "Breaking the Interspecies Barrier." Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.On a warm fall day in 2021, University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) surgeon Jayme Locke peered into a sliced-open abdomen and braced for the task ahead of her: transplanting two pig kidneys into a brain-dead human recipient for the first time in history. Locke had done experimental surgeries before, even putting pig kidneys into babo ...read more

This story was originally published in our Sept/Oct 2023 issue as "Cold Comfort" Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.One year before the U.S. Civil War ended, an embargo had brought the southern ice trade to a halt, causing the region’s chefs, bartenders, nurses and doctors to lose access to the northern ice they’d come to rely on for preserving food, making drinks and healing bodies. Without ice, the South was suffering.What they didn’t know was that 20 years bef ...read more

Most people will agree — moving is a pain. It’s exhausting to find boxes, pack up possessions, and haul them into a vehicle. Given the difficulty, most people stay put in their residences for years at a time.But living in the same location is a relatively new human experience. For hundreds of thousands of years, people were nomadic. They sometimes stayed in a place for mere hours before moving on.Eventually, most people gave up the nomadic lifestyle. Scientists are still learning about ancie ...read more

Imagine that you're looking up at the night sky — and instead of spotting a single moon above you, you see two glowing orbs instead.In this alternate reality, one of these celestial bodies is about the size and brightness of our present-day moon, but the second appears four times bigger and brighter. From this secondary moon's surface, fountains of magma erupt from volcanoes, creating space debris that enters our atmosphere to produce meteor showers more spectacular than any we know today.Thes ...read more

Hey everyone, Stephen Hawking is throwing a party, and we're all invited! One catch: Stephen Hawking is dead, and the party was in 2009. Still, the invitation stands.What if you threw a party and nobody came, but that's exactly what you expected? That's precisely what famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking did on June 28, 2009. He rented a space at Cambridge University and got balloons, decorations, and, of course, the champagne. Then he sat in the empty room for a few hours and left. Only then ...read more

As the orb of the Moon transited in front of the Sun on Nov. 13, 2023, the Solar Ultraviolet Imager, or SUVI, aboard the GOES East satellite captured this image of the resulting partial solar eclipse. For a video of the event, see below. (Credit: Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies)Back in October, tens of millions of people in the Western Hemisphere witnessed a rare "ring-of-fire" annular solar eclipse that elicited cheers and shouts of joy. But when another dramatic ecl ...read more

Art is one of the defining characteristics of the human species because nearly all cultures practice it worldwide. From early humans adorning cave walls or painting the body, humans' appreciation of color goes way back. Iconic paintings like Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring and Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, are renowned for their use of color and details. But how were these color pigments made? Some of the world's most iconic brushstrokes and sought-after pigments were made w ...read more

Hippos are the spring breakers of the animal world – follow them, and you’ll find warmth and water. Today, they reside primarily in the lakes and rivers of Africa, where they splash around as the second-largest land animal on Earth. But according to a new study, these sizable creatures once ventured north into Europe and contended with fluctuations in the continent’s glaciers.The fact that modern hippos, Hippopotamus amphibius, once lived in Europe is well-established science. What scienti ...read more

It was the early 1980s on the Hastings family's ranch in Uruguay. The land, called El Baron Ranch, is made up of nearly 3,000 acres of soft rolling hills, meandering streams, and indigenous trees, where today, the family raises free-range cattle. At the time, the family was building a 1,600-foot dam on the land to irrigate rice. And in order to construct the dam, workers sliced off part of a hill. Hidden within the hill, in an outcrop of rock, was a group of fossils nearly 280 million years in ...read more