Why African Nations Are Teaching Mandarin Chinese on Their State School Curricula

Mark H. | Wednesday, Dec 23, 2015

Last year, South African officials announced a plan to introduce a new optional language into their public school curriculum by 2016: Mandarin Chinese. From one vantage, this wasn’t a wei...

Crop Circles in the Ice: How Do Ice Circles Form?

Emma B. | Tuesday, Dec 22, 2015

As winter ice spreads across the northern parts of the planet, strange circles will start cropping up on the icy surfaces of rivers around the world—as if aliens had touched down there an...

Japan's Industry of Loneliness

Maddy S. | Friday, Dec 4, 2015

By 2035, 40 percent of Japan’s population will be living alone. They will wake up alone, make breakfast for one, go to work and come home to an empty apartment. It will be the norm. In fa...

A Cult A Day: The Twelve Tribes

Mark H. | Tuesday, Nov 10, 2015

Cult is an ominous word. Conjuring up images of glass-eyed devotees and ecstatic rituals, for most of us it’s a pejorative term used to describe unusual spirituality. But if you ever ask...

A Cult A Day: The Church of Euthanasia

Mark H. | Friday, Nov 6, 2015

Cult is an ominous word. Conjuring up images of glass-eyed devotees and ecstatic rituals, for most of us it’s a pejorative term used to describe unusual spirituality. But if you ever ask...

Barnacles Could Help Us Map Where Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 Went Down

Emma B. | Wednesday, Aug 26, 2015

Chances are the last time you thought about a barnacle was when you painfully crunched your foot onto one of these crusty critters at the beach. But the otherwise nondescript little arthr...

Alligators Bellow Their Size, and So Do You

Vanessa W. | Thursday, Aug 20, 2015

Alligators use their deep bellows to broadcast their size, like shouting their measurements into a megaphone, according to a study published this month in The Journal of Experimental Biol...

8 Reasons Octopuses Are the Coolest Life Forms on Our Planet

Dara K. | Wednesday, Jul 15, 2015

My take on octopuses is this: why are we so caught up with discovering life on other planets when we have these alien life forms right here on our home planet? Well, when it comes to octo...

Everything Is Awful: Death by Mosquito Asphyxiation Is a Thing

Mark H. | Tuesday, Jul 14, 2015

When most of us think about the dangers posed by mosquitoes (beyond just the annoyance of a bite), we think of the multitudinous diseases they carry. This is fair, given that these little...

Houseboats Are Becoming All the Rage in London and It's a Problem

Jes G. | Monday, Jul 13, 2015

For years London’s been listed as one of the most expensive cities to live in. But, according to international real estate company Savills, in 2014, it took the grand prize as the costlie...

The New List of Words You Are Forbidden to Use on the Internet in China

Jes G. | Thursday, Jun 4, 2015

China’s known for policing the internet and suppressing free speech, but now they’ve decided to ban 25 more “inappropriate words” and phrases they say corrupt youth. In recent months, the...

Be Careful What You Flush: Common Meds Could Ruin Your Summer Clambake

Vanessa W. | Friday, May 22, 2015

The drugs we take daily—Advil, Innopran, Prozac and the Pill—harm the marine life that forms the base of the aquatic food chain, and those effects could move right up the chain to us. Luc...