Silence is golden — unless you find yourself in the quietest room in the world. In 2015, Microsoft built what is now in the Guinness Book of World Records as the quietest place on the planet. Known as the anechoic chamber at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, “ultra-sensitive tests” performed in 2015 gave an average background noise reading of -20.35 dBA (decibels A-weighted — a measurement of the sound pressure level).

The red planet? More like the dust planet.And the video here shows all the ways you can die on Mars.

Two Florida men were sentenced on charges of conspiracy and trafficking in protected timber rattlesnakes and endangered Eastern indigo snakes on Friday, Dec. 5. A federal judge in Philadelphia sentenced Robroy MacInnes, 55, of Inverness, Florida, and Robert Keszey, 48, of Bushnell, Florida, to 18 months and 12 months in prison respectively for their role in trafficking in state and federally protected reptiles.

The famous Pantheon in Rome boasts the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome—an architectural marvel that has endured for millennia, thanks to the incredible durability of ancient Roman concrete. For decades, scientists have been trying to determine precisely what makes the material so durable.

If you spotted Michael Langlois walking along the Seine, in Paris, as I did one overcast morning last spring, you could be forgiven for mistaking this scholar of the ancient Middle East for the bassist in Def Leppard. He wears his long brown hair in a leonine mane, and when I caught up with him on the Pont des Arts he was sporting a pink sweater and salmon-colored pants.

The rocks on Earth are not all the same age. In fact, most are significantly younger than the planet itself. The oldest sections of the oceanic crust are thought to be 200 million years old—a blink of an eye in the planet's billion-year lifespan. What is going on here? "Earth is an active planet," explains Boyet, a geochemist at the University of Clermont Auvergne in France. "This makes it different to other planets in our solar system, as well as to our moon."

For the last 60 years or so, science has been running an experiment on itself. The experimental design wasn’t great; there was no randomization and no control group. Nobody was in charge, exactly, and nobody was really taking consistent measurements. And yet it was the most massive experiment ever run, and it included every scientist on Earth.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Now you see them, now you don’t. Some frogs found in South and Central America have the rare ability to turn on and off their nearly transparent appearance, researchers report Thursday in the journal Science .

New research provides evidence that narcissism moderates the relationship between testosterone and generosity in men. The study, published in Hormones and Behavior, found that the most generous men tended to be low in endogenous testosterone and simultaneously low in narcissism. Unexpectedly, however, the researchers also found that heightened testosterone levels in combination with heightened narcissism was a significant positive predictor of generosity. ...

Just over 28 years ago, Taylor Swift was a precocious Montessori preschooler growing up on a Pennsylvania Christmas tree farm, and Eddie Vedder was the Most Important Musician in America, Kurt Cobain having bequeathed to him the (unwanted) title with his suicide that spring. Bill Clinton himself called Vedder to the White House to ask him for help with “messaging” around Cobain’s death, and the rock star in turn confided in the president that he was having trouble with a rapacious corporation named Ticketmaster...

Dr. Glaucomflecken at his best. :)

Cats are often left out of university-based animal assisted interventions aimed at reducing stress, but new research shows many people, especially those with strong and highly reactive emotions, want and would benefit from feline interactions.

The conspiracy theory writes itself. Start looking, and you’ll notice how many New York Times crossword puzzles are co-constructed (the preferred term for what most people would refer to as co-written) by a professional crossword constructor and someone with a day job—it’s hard not to see all the artists, web developers, professors, and other titles that imply a degree of wealth and elite connections.