“Although it’s becoming fashionable to talk about these solar storms, there is no need for sensationalism.” READ MORE

Dogs "have similar social skills to two-year-old children and are more likely to listen if owners look them in eye," according to Science, while cats can set houses on fire. I think this is the final proof we've been looking for in the debate over which animal is superior. READ MORE

Look, ladies, if scientist Stephen Hawking, whom we as a society have chosen to designate as the world's smartest man—the guy who literally wrote the book called The Theory of Everything—admits that even a person in possession of his vast intellectual capabilities and comprehension of the systems that make our world run cannot understand women, how do you expect someone of my much more modest intelligence to figure out why the hell you're crying? Get off my back. READ MORE

I.

On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb test took place in the Tularosa Basin of the Jornada del Muerto desert near Socorro, New Mexico. Just three weeks later, Hiroshima and Nagasaki would be bombed: the only time nuclear weapons have ever been used in war. The test was code-named Trinity, and it forced a radical shift in the way that human beings came to regard their place on earth; from that day onward, for almost seventy years, we've lived in the uneasy knowledge that a very few people might gain the power to destroy all civilization—all life, even. The events of this day produced the chief wellspring of every kind of modern-day political and cultural anxiety, cynicism and depression. At that moment, humankind was forced to grow up, whether we knew it or not.

In Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!, the bongo-playing, safecracking amateur magician and Nobel-prizewinning physicist Richard Feynman recalled his experiences at the Trinity test site. He was twenty-seven years old.