Some truly bizarre and troubling things have been done through the ages in the quest for scientific knowledge. The 10 experiments on this list all made humans into lab rats.

We’ve all heard stories about Americans being terrible while traveling. But other tourists are catching up.

To the cops, Jabbar Gibson was just a low-level drug pusher. But to the residents of a New Orleans public housing complex, he’s the man who rescued them from Hurricane Katrina when no one else would. By Joel Anderson.

Vintage technology is fun and fascinating. It feels new all over again to see how old devices made modern concepts possible. But buying LPs again is different than finding out that missile silos in the United States still rely on floppy disks. And this video of the old tech still...

Just because they're punderful.

A new study has come to some worrying conclusions about our nation’s capital — it’s sinking.

“American,” “illegal alien,” “foreigners,” “mothering,” and “fathering” are just a handful of words deemed “problematic” by the University of New Hampshire’s Bias-Free Language Guide.

Opposition to racism used to be a political stance. Now it has every marking of a religion, with both good and deleterious effects on American society. By John McWhorter.

How a college dropout reordered the heavens and forever changed our understanding of our place in the universe. By Maria Popova.

Type the name “Dorothy Arzner” into Netflix's search bar and you’ll get zero results. It’s an odd outcome, considering Arzner, a prolific golden age film director, has 16 feature films—among the most of any woman in Hollywood, ever. She gave Katharine Hepburn one of her first starring roles. She navigated the transition from silent films to talkies... By Ella Morton.

A prodigy grows up to become one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. By Gareth Cook.

Phillip Lopate has assembled a new collection of essays by Beerbohm, who ranged from theater criticism to satire to social commentary. By Dwight Garner.

In a very powerful exclusive interview, I recently had the privilege of speaking to an American hero, William Binney, NSA whistleblower. By Robin Koerner.

And he’s filed for a patent. By Doug Bierend.

Classical physics, with its totally determinative, forward-in-time, billiard-ball causation, requires sweeping anomalies like psi under the rug, not to mention resigning ourselves to an absence of higher meaning and direction in the universe. Even the local islands of order allowed within the framework of dynamical systems theory... By Eric Wargo.

In an interview, Julian Assange, 44, talks about the comeback of the WikiLeaks whistleblowing platform and his desire to provide assistance to a German parliamentary committee that is investigating mass NSA spying.

Ryan Calo, from the University of Washington’s School of Law warns that our laws will have to adapt to robotics and artificial intelligence or be faced with difficult decisions in the near future.

Dookie the corgi was presented to the Queen Mother in 1933 by celebrated breeder Thelma Gray, who also supplied pedigree dogs to Luftwaffe commander Hermann Goering.

The story that the Costco company pulled a cake design because a Christian Arizona mother complained that its design looked demonic was a hoax perpetrated by a freelance writer and his girlfriend.

Prior to the Snowden revelations, Massie says, he knew almost nothing about the NSA’s surveillance techniques. Now, he says: “If you assume the worst, it’s not a bad position to take, given what we’ve found out.” By Jenna McLaughlin.