The summer of 1799 saw a new fad take hold in one remarkable circle of British society: the inhalation of “Laughing Gas”. The overseer and pioneer of these experiments was a young Humphry Davy, future President of the Royal Society. Mike Jay explores how Davy’s extreme and near-fatal regime of self-experimentation with the gas not only marked a new era in the history of science but a turn toward the philosophical and literary romanticism of the century to come.

A trolley is careening toward an unsuspecting group of workers. You have the power to derail the trolley onto a track with just one worker. Do you do it? It might not matter.

Scientists are trying to determine what happens to matter when it is exposed to the immense pressures at the center of gas giant planets and stars. And to help them figure it out, they have hit a tiny sliver of a diamond with the largest laser system on Earth.

The battle for neural-network dominance has heated up as Microsoft has developed a cutting-edge image-recognition system that has trounced a system from Google. The company revealed "Project Adam" on Monday and claimed that the system is fifty times faster and roughly twice as accurate as Google's own DistBelief system.

"Hi, I'm from New York. But what about you? Where are you from?" Yes, I'm asking a wave to tell me where it was born. Can you do that? Crazily enough, you can. Waves do have birthplaces. Once upon a time, one of the world's greatest oceanographers asked this very question.

Can a grand vision of 4,000 free public gyms overcome inequality and fight Brazil’s health crisis?

We should insist that Facebook do experiments on the decisions it's already making for us. Anything else would be unethical

The Universal Typeface Experiment lets anyone, from anywhere in the world, draw the letters of the alphabet and then submit them into a massive database.

If you use a phone to send text messages, chances are you’ve been burned by autocorrect at some point. You’ve typed messages to friends or co-workers wherein “meeting” morphed into “mating,” or the phone changed “Trish” to “trash” without you noticing—making you appear ridiculous, incompetent, or drunk. We’ve all been there.

A controversial scientist who carried out provocative research on making influenza viruses more infectious has completed his most dangerous experiment to date by deliberately creating a pandemic strain of flu that can evade the human immune system.

Researchers have unveiled a study in which Facebook users were experimented on to see if their emotional states could be artificially altered. Sound weird? It is.

Unifying the world’s handwriting into a universal typeface. Explore existing contributions, or add your own writing to the experiment.

Maggie Koerth-Baker reports on the strange science of an experimental result decades in the making.

Watch Anthony and Tara slow down mini lightning bolts and make Lichtenberg figures in wood!

Voice-over-IP (VoIP) is nothing new, of course, but so far it's been regarded merely as an add-on to America's regular, analog-based copper and cellular voice networks - networks that are currently maintained as a matter of legal requirement. The FCC isn't necessarily such a stickler for tradition, however, as it is now encouraging phone networks to explore what would happen if VoIP replaced everything else.

Last January, Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, did something that no other city its size had done before: It made all public transit in the city free for residents.

The federal government has spent nearly a billion dollars to help poor couples stay together—with almost nothing to show for it. So why not pull the plug?

Cool Dry Ice Experiment

Got some dirty money to launder? Well, Rhode Island scientists say they've devised a method of washing human grease, microbes and motor oil from the world's banknotes using supercritical fluid.

Behaviour can be affected by events in previous generations which have been passed on through a form of genetic memory, animal studies suggest. Experiments showed that a traumatic event could affect the DNA in sperm and alter the brains and behaviour of subsequent generations.