Spelling contests have remained a feature in American life since the Puritans landed on Plymouth Rock — but is peaking at 12 years old all it’s cracked up to be?

To stock Amazon’s shelves, merchants travel the backroads of America in search of rare soap and coveted toys.

When you can’t bear to say goodbye — and have $50,000 to spend.

Drag and drop countries around the map to compare their relative size. Is Greenland really as big as all of Africa? You may be surprised at what you find! A great tool for educators.

Red bat gets her pup back. So touching.

Beestonbirdman has some wonderful bird photography. Go have a peek.

When I reached the world’s pre-eminent sculptor of long-dead monsters, he was standing atop a ladder inside a 16-foot-tall section of a megalodon tail that was propped upright in his warehouse-size studio. “I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m inside a bathroom,” Gary Staab said on his cellphone. The tail was part of a 52-foot-long, life-size model of the prehistoric shark that Staab was custom-building for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Alex was a bouncer when he changed his mind about who he was. Or maybe he wasn’t a bouncer. Maybe he was only pretending. In the year 2000, “reality TV” still sounded to most people like an oxymoron, a bizarre new genre that was half entertainment and half psychological warfare, where neither audience nor participants were quite sure which of them were the combatants.

Billionaire and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates takes stock of his personal and work life in a tradition he calls an "end-of-year assessment."

Amazon wants the FCC to give it the go-ahead to launch 3,236 satellites that would be used to establish a globe-spanning internet network.

Veggie burgers and imitation meat are downright common these days, but it took a long time for meat analogues to earn respect at the table.

As veganism gains in popularity, it has also become more political, sparking a struggle between moderates and zero-tolerance purists.

You know that feeling of being in a flow where your mind is alert, you’re deeply focused on a difficult problem, when time stands still and work stops feeling like work? That productive state where every move you make is purposeful? That’s “deep work,” a concept popularized by Georgetown professor Cal Newport in his book…

When they jump, fleas accelerate faster than a space shuttle. In fact, more than 20 times faster. Due to their size and the force used to jump those great distances, their acceleration is approximately 100 times the force of gravity.

There would be nothing more disruptive than the sudden discovery of aliens. Perhaps that's why a small contingent of Silicon Valley is so interested in UFOs—and wants to know who's piloting them. With US Navy pilots coming forward to talk about their encounters with anomalous aerial vehicles, UFO hunters are starting to feel vindicated. The cross-section of technologists who are also UFO enthusiasts believe that they not only exist, but that we can make significant scientific breakthroughs by studying them.

A Tulpamancer creates a Tulpa, similar to an imaginary friend but with a twist. These imaginary friends possess their own thoughts and emotions. They can act independently of their creator.

In a study in mice, researchers found that neurons that normally signal to the brain to stop eating are less active in obese animals.

It’s a trick that politicians have long exploited: repeat a false statement often enough, and people will start believing that it’s true. Psychologists have named this phenomenon the “illusory truth effect”, and it seems to come from the fact that we find it easier to process information that we’ve encountered many times before. This creates a sense of fluency which we then (mis)interpret as a signal that the content is true.

I met two Aibo owners whose enthusiasm for Sony's robot dog seemed extreme at first glance. Now I'm not so sure.

Imagine that work had taken over the world. It would be the centre around which the rest of life turned. Then all else would come to be subservient to work. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, anything else – the games once played, the songs hitherto sung, the loves fulfilled, the festivals celebrated – would come to resemble, and ultimately become, work. And then there would come a time, itself largely unobserved, when the many worlds that had once existed before work took over the world would vanish completely from the cultural record, having fallen into oblivion.