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By Sophie Bushwick Antimatter, the equal-but-opposite twin of regular old stuff, is a finicky material. It’s only in the past 20 years that scientists have been able to create the simplest atoms of antimatter and keep them stable. Now they have made the first measurements of antihydrogen’s internal structure. Hydrogen is the first element in …

By Chris Mooney The Office of Special Counsel, an independent U.S. agency that protects whistleblowers and investigates prohibited practices that affect government employees, declined this week to further investigate a questionnaire sent from the Trump transition team to the Energy Department. The memo asked for the names of staffers who attended international climate change meetings or …

By Joel Achenbach Carl Sagan died 20 years ago Tuesday, at the far-too-young age of 62. He had many strong beliefs, none greater than his conviction that science was a candle in the dark. There’s a lot of darkness these days — science denialism in its various forms. It’s certainly not a novel development, but …

By Julia Belluz At many moments of 2016, it seemed the world was falling apart. In June, there was the Orlando nightclub shooting, where dozens were killed and injured in the deadliest terror attack in the US since 9/11. That was followed by July’s blood-soaked Bastille Day in Nice, when a terrorist drove a truck …

“We’re living in the midst of a revolution in human attitudes and belief. In much of Europe and North America and other areas of the developed world, such as Australia and Japan, large portions of the population are now nonreligious, that is, they reject belief in God and transcendent spiritual entities of any sort. This …

By James Hamblin When Larry Schlachter was a 31-year-old neurosurgeon, he was driving to the hospital early one morning and “just blacked out.” He crashed his car and crushed his chest; broken ribs punctured his thorax, which filled with air and blood. “I almost died.” Instead he was left with 14 fractured bones and a …

By Yvette d’Entremont When you deeply want something to be true, that’s when you have to question it the most. I want chocolate-covered bacon to be a health food. Who doesn’t want to get in shape by eating food so tasty it might give you an orgasm? To pretend it’s true, I could hunt and …

By Evan R. Goldstein The day after the presidential election, Mark Lilla had to get something off his chest. “I wrote in a fever,” he says. The article that resulted, which appeared in The New York Times, argues that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity …

By Rebecca Searles When Tobias van Schneider slips on a virtual reality headset to play Google’s Tilt Brush, he becomes a god. His fingertips become a fiery paintbrush in the sky. A flick of the wrist rotates the clouds. He can jump effortlessly from one world that he created to another. When the headset comes …

By Megan Garber and Ross Andersen This conversation discusses plot points of Arrival, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Contact. What if there’s more? What if, somewhere out there, there are others? What if, one day, everything—really, everything—changes? Contact with extraterrestrial life is an ongoing theme in film, and there’s a good reason for …

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus Prologue: You Are What You Have Read Late one Friday night in early November, Jun Rekimoto, a distinguished professor of human-computer interaction at the University of Tokyo, was online preparing for a lecture when he began to notice some peculiar posts rolling in on social media. Apparently Google Translate, the company’s popular …

By Joseph J. Helble Consider this: In a nation that will need 1.7 million more engineering and computing professionals in less than a decade, U.S. universities and colleges this year awarded less than 20 percent of engineering bachelors degrees to women. That equation won’t work. Gender equality in engineering programs should be the standard, not …