Check out these movie poster and book cover illustrations by Hungarian designer Levente Szabó. The way he uses color and negative space to combine several illustrations is quite clever.

California scientists are testing whether the illegal psychoactive drug commonly known as Ecstasy could help alleviate anxiety for terminally ill patients, the trial's principal funder said.

Early in the afternoon of December 11, 2012, a high-pressure natural-gas pipeline ruptured in Sissonville, West Virginia, 14 miles north of Charleston. The gas ignited, and the flames incinerated three homes and melted an 800-foot section of Interstate 77. Witnesses turned to similes to describe the fire. To one, the roaring “sounded like a turbine engine.” To another, “it was like a space flight.”

Susan Glaspell won her place in American history by demonstrating that sexual differences matter, that women could not protect themselves from abusive husbands unless they could sit on juries.

Since he applied paint thickly, and then repeatedly scratched it off the canvas as his work proceeded, the floor was covered with a largely hardened and encrusted deposit of droppings, mixed with coal dust, several centimeters thick at the center and thinning out towards the outer edges, in places resembling the flow of lava.

Last fall, as oil prices crashed, Ali al-Naimi, Saudi Arabia’s petroleum minister and the world’s de facto energy czar, went mum. He still popped up, as is his habit, at industry conferences on three continents. Yet from mid-September to the middle of November, while benchmark crude prices plunged 21 percent to a four-year low, Naimi didn’t utter a word in public.

Most common errors and manipulations of rhetoric and logical thinking - visualized!

The women begin to arrive just before 8 a.m., every day and without fail, until there are thickets of young Asian and Hispanic women on nearly every street corner along the main roads of Flushing, Queens. As if on cue, cavalcades of battered Ford Econoline vans grumble to the curbs, and the women jump in. It is the start of another workday for legions of New York City’s manicurists, who are hurtled to nail salons across three states.

Honeycreepers, small birds inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands, have a rich assortment of beak shapes. Some species have long, thin beaks suited to plucking insects from leaves. Others possess thick beaks good for cracking open tough seeds. According to the classic view of evolution, natural selection drove the development of these different species. Each variant adapted to suit a different ecological niche. But Blair Hedges, a biologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, has proposed a...

New tools may reveal how quantum information builds the structure of space.

Researchers from the Southwest Research Institute in Texas launched a rocket with a trailing copper wire into a storm, and were able to make lightning happen right where they thought it would. With this predictability, they could train arrays of microphones at the spot and capture the sound waves of thunder visually, in unprecedented detail. Science has come a long way since 1752, but when it comes to inducing lightning not that much has changed since Ben Franklin.

The violence started with shots fired at several buses filled with students. It ended with six people dead and dozens of students seized by armed men. Months later, they are still missing.

Is the natural world creative? Just take a look around it. Look at the brilliant plumage of tropical birds, the diverse pattern and shape of leaves, the cunning stratagems of microbes, the dazzling profusion of climbing, crawling, flying, swimming things. Look at the “grandeur” of life, the “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful,” as Darwin put it. Isn’t that enough to persuade you?

Citizen scientists helped construct the first atlas of airborne bacteria and fungi across the US.

The death of Freddie Gray and the protests that have sent Baltimore teetering into bedlam are part of a national tableau of frustration.

President Obama is apparently quite annoyed by the fact that his own party is basically pushing against his "big trade deals" (that are not really about trade). Senator Elizabeth Warren has been pretty aggressive in trashing the TPP agreement, highlighting the fact that the agreement is still secret (other than the bits leaked by Wikileaks). In response, President Obama came out swinging against the critics of TPP arguing that "they don't know what they're talking about."

Even after the city attorney told them it was a violation of church/state separation, the city council of little Cochran, Georgia, population 5,100, voted last week to fly the “Christian flag” over its City Hall. And the city manager tells us it’s still flying there now.

To celebrate Earth Day, NASA releases some of its best pictures of our planet taken from its satellites and by astronauts in the past year.

For the past couple of years, a young woman known only as “Bionerd23” has been making strange, dangerous videos in and around one of the most infamous nuclear zones on Earth—the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Nothing is too radioactive or risky for her. She has shown herself getting injected with the radionuclide technetium, eating radioactive apples from a tree in Chernobyl, being chased by a possibly rabid fox, and picking up fragments of the nuclear plant’s reactor fuel with her bare hands.

I started out with the intention of coming up with a recipe for a homemade version of the store bought energy drinks, but after doing some research an...

Earlier this week, BuzzFeed launched an internal review of any posts that its editors or writers had deleted from the site since editor-in-chief Ben Smith was hired in January 2012. In an interview on Friday, and a memo sent to staff on Saturday, Smith revealed that the review has already uncovered three instances where complaints from the site’s business and advertising departments led Smith to delete posts.

Some birds wage perpetual war against each other, leaving countless numbers of victims.

Of all the modern anti-science movements out there, few are more dangerous or harmful than the anti-vaccine movement. Yes, it has killed people. It will continue to kill people. It has also resulted in huge amounts of money and resources being devoted to combating public health problems that should have (and in some cases were) eliminated years ago.

Scientists have discovered a protein that plays a central role in promoting immunity to viruses and cancer, opening the door to new therapies. Experiments in mice and human cells have shown that the protein promotes the proliferation of cytotoxic T cells, which kill cancer cells and cells infected with viruses. The discovery was unexpected because the new protein had no known function and doesn’t resemble any other protein.

WHO CAN HATE a Roomba? Astronomers, that’s who. The robotic vacuums we all know and love ensure we don’t have to clean our own homes ourselves to get them spotless. (God forbid.) Now, the Roomba’s maker, iRobot, wants to do for lawn care what it did for vacuuming. According to filings with the FCC spotted by IEEE Spectrum, iRobot is designing a robotic mower—news that should elate lazy people the world over.

Over the past 25 years, Tobias Frere-Jones has created some of the world’s most widely used typefaces. He has taught at the Yale University School of Art since 1996, gives lectures around the world, and has work in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and...

Striking Photographs of the Ancient Tradition of Honey Hunting in Nepal by Andrew Newey

Lead poisoning is a major threat at America's shooting ranges, perpetuated by owners who've repeatedly violated laws even after workers have fallen ill.

It’s a damp, cloudy April afternoon on a muddy industrial park in Appomattox, Virginia, and—clad in the grays, golds, and reds of his Confederate officer’s uniform, Bill is giving me a short soliloquy on the joys of re-enacting America’s past. “I’m bringing history to life,” he said. “You bring the...

Nasa names an asteroid after schoolgirl campaigner Malala Yousafzai.