For years, researchers who visited the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) passed over a collection of encoded letters. Someone had misdated the letters as originating from the 1520s and mistakenly cataloged the content as pertaining to Italy.The letters, however, were encrypted in a complex code. No one actually knew what was in the letters and who wrote or received them.Then, an interdisciplinary research team studying Mary, Queen of Scots, suspected the queen wrote the letters during he ...read more

For more than two centuries, hundreds of human bones have rested (in peace) under the London home of Benjamin Franklin — one of the founding fathers of the U.S. But the secret of these bones isn’t quite as horrific as you might suspect.As it turns out, the son-in-law of Franklin’s landlady taught anatomy privately in the house, at a time when the new field of science was just taking off in England. But that doesn’t mean the bones were completely innocent: The practice of dissection wasn� ...read more

Most know Musk as the founder of Tesla, cofounder of PayPal, and the CEO of SpaceX. And while he's done quite a bit in his lifetime in the field of science, some may ask the question if he is truly a scientist by trade? Where Did Elon Musk Go to College?Musk has a physics degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and he enrolled in a graduate program in physics at Stanford University before dropping out early on. He was a coder in the early days of the internet and made vast amounts of money ...read more

What is Tulum known for? Well, anyone who’s ever heard of the place knows it as a buzzy resort, the trendier alternative to Cancun (80 miles to the north), and for the past few decades an increasingly popular (and crowded) destination for foodies, influencers and tourists in general.But the ancient Maya people were at Tulum long before it was cool. In fact, skeletal remains found in nearby cenotes and underwater cave systems indicate that the area was populated by Indigenous people 10,000 or m ...read more

Several years ago, Christian Rutz started to wonder whether he was giving his crows enough credit. Rutz, a biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, and his team were capturing wild New Caledonian crows and challenging them with puzzles made from natural materials before releasing them again. In one test, birds faced a log drilled with holes that contained hidden food, and could get the food out by bending a plant stem into a hook. If a bird didn’t try within 90 minutes, the res ...read more

Before area codes were introduced to the public in 1951, there were 10 million possible ways for the seven digits of a phone number to be arranged. This would have become a problem for telephone owners eventually; New York City alone had a population of almost 7.9 million that same year.Yet with the rollout of three additional digits at the front of every phone number, suddenly the total number of possible combinations jumped from 10 million to a whopping 10 billion. Crisis averted, right?Maybe ...read more

Curtis Berlinguette was a preteen when he first heard of cold fusion. The concept involves the generation of nuclear energy at room temperature, rather than heat similar to the searing core of the sun.“My dad read about it in a magazine and said it was going to change the world,” Berlinguette recalls.That seemed like a reasonable conclusion. Cold Fusion EnergyIn the spring of 1989, two electrochemists claimed they’d fused hydrogen atoms into helium under laboratory conditions. If humankind ...read more

A typical wolf pack comprises of a breeding pair and their offspring, including both young and mature wolves that haven’t yet set out on their own. Wolf Pack MeaningA wolf pack is essentially a family, says Doug Smith, a wildlife biologist who headed the program to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone and launched the Yellowstone Wolf Project, an initiative that, over the years, has produced an extensive body of research on wolves.Despite common images of wolves as ruthless and vicious, wolf f ...read more

Aside from their appearance in the historical records of the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, the Nabataeans didn’t keep historical documents of their own. This leaves much of their history and culture open to creative interpretation — including their origins. The NabataeansWhat we do know is that the Nabataeans were a civilization of tent-dwelling nomads who amassed great wealth as merchants. The first accounts of the Nabataeans show that they lived as traders, porters, and nomads in the deser ...read more

Our planet holds a lot of trash. Since the Industrial Revolution, we humans have produced 30 trillion tons of stuff – from skyscrapers and bridges to clothes and plastic bags. Much of it is still with us in the form of waste.Globally, people add 350 million tons to this total every day. What’s worse, much of the world’s garbage is mismanaged – dumped on land, in waterways and in open dumps in cities and towns. This exposes people to serious health risks. It harms plants and soil ...read more