Science

This week, researchers reported the world’s second-tiniest toad, winning the silver in the Brachycephalus contest. Chemists at UCLA disproved a 100-year-old organic chemistry rule. And researchers in Kenya report that elephants don’t like bees, which […]

I’m standing in a basement kitchen prodding at a sheep’s liver, looking for marks on its smooth surface. People crowd around to film the proceedings, since I’m here to ask a question that everyone wants […]

Throughout accounts of 17th-century witch trials in Europe and North America, physical features alone were considered undeniable proof of witchcraft. The belief was that the devil branded witches’ bodies with symbolic, material marks—such as unusual […]

What keeps you up at night? Bank account woes? An impending work presentation? Analyzing that embarrassing thing you said in the seventh grade?This article is brought to you by Phys.Org.

Medieval people have a reputation for being superstitious—and many of the supernatural phenomena found in the pages of medieval chronicles, miracle stories and romances are still alive in modern culture. Think ghosts, werewolves, demons, vampires, […]

This time of year, I often run across articles proclaiming Halloween a modern form of the pagan Irish holiday of Samhain—pronounced SAW-en. But as a historian of Ireland and its medieval literature, I can tell […]

This week, physicists suggested that quantum entanglement may be really, really fast rather than instantaneous, and could be measured at an attosecond scale. Paleontologists discovered a fossilized mammal in Colorado that may have lived alongside […]

This week, researchers discovered a near-Earth microquasar that sheds new light on sources of relativistic outflows. Doctors reported finding a triphallic gentleman. And neuroscientists reported on modest cognitive boosts from short (or “acute,” in clinical […]

Digital media technology has changed journalism considerably, and perhaps most obviously in data journalism. Data journalism uses the power of data analysis and visualization to develop news stories that can be highly engaging and accessible […]

I teach a course on New England witchcraft trials, and students always arrive with varying degrees of knowledge of what happened in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692.This article is brought to you by Phys.Org.