Gavagai

Maximilian Teodorescu: It's been a long time since I've last captured the silhouette of the ISS over the Sun or Moon. This time the background was the Moon, in plain daylight, with the Sun still hanging at 26 degrees above the horizon.

First particle containing four quarks is confirmed.

The existence of our solar system's innermost planet has been common knowledge since ancient times, but that doesn't actually mean we've always know much about it. Mercury's proximity to the Sun has allowed it to jealously guard its secrets, and so this NASA video offers an unprecedentedly detailed view of the planet's surface.

A team of researchers has come up with a list of two dozen 'ultraconserved words' that have survived 150 centuries. It includes some predictable entries: 'mother', 'not', 'what', 'to hear' and 'man'. It also contains surprises: 'to flow', 'ashes' and 'worm'.

Breast cancer afflicts women of all backgrounds, but minority patients still receive worse care than their white counterparts. Dr. Rache M. Simmons on confronting the treatment gap.

Philosopher was horrified by the 'completely ignorant' youth of the age.

The man behind the Pentagon Papers talks NSA, Bradley Manning and whistle-blowers' importance in a new interview.

John le Carré on secret courts and surveillance, and the excessive influence of the CIA and MI6 on democratic institutions.

Denise Herzing has spent 25 years trying to learn the 'language' of dolphins. Here she explains the challenges facing those trying to crack the code.

The United States Supreme Court unanimously ruled on Thursday that human genes cannot be patented. But in something of a compromise, all nine justices said while the naturally occurring isolated biological material itself is not patentable, a synthetic version of the gene material may be patented.

Americans and Europeans like to imagine that aliens will land in London, New York, or Washington, DC, but Russian history is filled with mysterious events that many have claimed to be the work of extraterrestrials.

Natasha Lennard: New York Magazine's Daily Intel grossly misses context of fighting back against neoliberal hegemony.

She blasted off in a Vostok-6 spaceship at the age of 26 and to this day remains the only woman to have made a solo space flight. Two years earlier, Yuri Gagarin made the first manned flight.

We take a look at how the Supreme Court ruling affects risk testing for breast cancer. Plus, this isn't the last word for gene patenting.

A big asteroid that flew past Earth last month belongs to a new category of space rock, scientists say. Asteroid 1998 QE2 and its moon sailed within 3.6 million miles (5.8 million kilometers) of Earth on May 31, making their closest approach to our planet for at least the next two centuries. New radar images captured by the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico are revealing just how unique this binary asteroid is, researchers say.

Over the past decade, bee populations have been dropping, partly as a result of a disease called colony collapse disorder. This is very bad news for humans, because bees are a crucial part of the reproductive cycle of many of our favorite foods, including apples, onions, avocados, and more. This incredible data visualization shows what you'd lose if the world lost bees.

For World War Z, his zombie spectacular, the director Marc Forster sought to create legions of the undead that move together like a collective organism.

Since its publication in the January issue of the journal Nature Communications, Peter Marra's team’s paper, 'The impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the United States', which placed the number of birds felled by felines at 1.4 billion to 3.7 billion per year, had been picked up by most major media outlets, including the New York Times. Sure enough, the reaction from Alley Cat Allies, the country’s most powerful cat group, was swift and furious.

Some lizards and amphibians have the ability to regrow severed tails or limbs -- in fact, the blue-tailed skink abandons its tail intentionally to distract predators. But humans, despite our amazing advancements in the field of spying on each other, are typically thought to lack this superpower-like ability. But in fact, we're more like blue-tailed skinks than you'd think.

The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or is it complete and utter bullshit?