For 12 years, Pluto, small and mighty, has drifted about the universe, living its life as a dwarf planet just because science said so. It was back in 2006 that the International Astronomical Union deigned to reclassify Pluto—which was widely known as a straight-up planet for much of its existence—as a “dwarf planet.”…
Yesterday, I was browsing Al Gore’s internet when something made me laugh. I’m not sure what it was (the Jezebel work slack? A bad meme? This video? I don’t know), but hearing my lone gurgle of laughter pierce the room got me thinking: Isn’t laughing really fucking weird when you think about it?
Why do we want the tea? Of course because it’s hot and tasty, but it’s also often genuinely useful information to have in your mental filing cabinet! Birds are no different. Birds want the tea, too, and they’ll even learn other birds’ languages to get it.
A new buzzkilling study suggests that the Ouija board is probably not summoning dead people. Slumber parties are ruined. Your gateway to the spiritual realm has closed. Your powers of divination are pure delusion. You are a muggle.
I’m gonna live forever!
Today the New York Times reported that the Food and Drug Administration has disbanded its Food Advisory Committee, “which provided guidance on food safety.” Today the New York Times also reported that pre-cut melons were the culprit in at least 60 cases of salmonella from last month’s outbreak.
A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit found that the Advisory Committee for the Sustained National Climate Assessment was allowed to expire last year by Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross because there were not enough members of “industry” on the panel, the Washington Post reports.
Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke has referred to himself as a “geologist” in public at least 40 times, CNN reports, which is notable because Ryan Zinke is not, in fact, a geologist.
A new study affirms what many of us already know to be true: Men have an inflated sense of intelligence over women that hasn’t been earned. Researchers at Arizona State University found that gender has a massive impact on how one perceives their intelligence and their intelligence compared to others. The study focused…
If you’re ever in southern Canada and witness shimmering strands of transfixing purple light strung about the night sky, there’s a name for what you’re experiencing, and it’s “Steve.”
On Tuesday, the world at large learned that Barbra Streisand cloned her beloved dog Sammie, resulting in two genetic duplicates, Miss Violet and Miss Scarlett. Today, Streisand has revealed the rationale behind this decision.
Now is a very popular time for historically important women to be made the subjects of biopics, with every studio head worth their salt digging back deep into the annals of elementary school in search of untapped resources. But just because a movie about the physicist and chemist Marie Curie already exists doesn’t…
A 30-year-old transgender woman was able to breastfeed her baby in what is “the first formal report in the medical literature of induced lactation in a transgender woman,” according to the case report in journal Transgender Health.
I don’t know about you, but I personally haven’t really gotten my fill of alarming news in the last several days/months/year. To be honest, I’m starting to find the barrage of uplifting stories a little tedious, you know? “U.S. Welcomes Record Number Of Refugees,” “Polar Ice Caps Restoring,” “Life Expectancy Soars…
A woman has given birth to an embryo frozen 24 years ago.
There are many reasons to be grateful that we don’t live in the 1700s (Reign of Terror, lack of indoor plumbing), but the most important is probably the fact that wine glasses were extremely tiny. Like, little thimbles. According to a study from the University of Cambridge, wine glasses have ballooned in size over…
“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century,” reads the Fourth National Climate Assessment, released on Friday by 13 federal agencies and approved by the White House. “For the warming over the last century, there is no convincing…
Rabbit rabbit.
A new study from Brigham Young University has concluded that there’s really only one good way to tell someone horrible news: just spill it, directly.
