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In 1976, NASA's Viking 1 lander found strong "life affirmation" results in a Martian soil sample. Robert Jastrow, then director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said, "Short of seeing something wiggling on the end of a pin, the case for ...

Doi Toshitsura was a feudal lord in Edo-period Japan who studied snow for about twenty years. His 1832 book of woodblock prints, Sekka Zusetsu, has eighty-six drawings of what he called "snow flowers" (sekka), plus a dozen more copied from a 1779 ...

Luke Howard was an industrial chemist in London. He studied clouds as a hobby in the early 1800s. In his Essay on the Modification of Clouds, he gave the standard cloud formations the names we still use today. Cirrus is the Latin word for a wisp of ...

The Hiroshima blast alloy, a 7-element metal grain, formed in the fireball of 6 August 1945.

Kelvin-Helmholtz instability on the Sun makes vortices spaced 50 to 65 km apart, a new study finds.

A NASA panel is setting a Mars dust exposure limit, drawing on what 12 Apollo moonwalkers learned.

Ten Rhijne's 1683 De Acupunctura passed through 4 languages and turned qi into a trapped wind.

A gray apple looks red because your brain invents reality, guessing ahead every 200 milliseconds.

A dietitian rates 10 supplements: the multivitamin memory gain was a quarter of a word in a 20-word test.

The Sonoran Desert toad is the only psychoactive animal on earth. Its entire range sits inside a cartel zone.