Cafe

What happens if we bring the sun to earth? No, seriously.

In the 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamian kings recorded and interpreted their dreams on wax tablets. In the years since, we haven't paused in our quest to understand why we dream. And while we still don't have any definitive answers, we have some theories. Amy Adkins reveals the top seven reasons why we might dream.

Plants are constantly under attack. They face threats ranging from microscopic fungi to small herbivores like caterpillars, up to large herbivores like elephants. But plants are ready, with a whole series of internal and external defenses that make them a less appealing meal - or even a deadly one. Valentin Hammoudi explains some of the fascinating ways that plants defend themselves.

On July 26, 1943, Los Angeles was blanketed by a thick gas that stung people's eyes and blocked out the Sun. Panicked residents believed their city had been attacked using chemical warfare. But the cloud wasn't an act of war. It was smog. So what is this thick gray haze actually made of? And why does it affect some cities and not others? Kim Preshoff details the science behind smog.

When most people think of fishing, we imagine relaxing in a boat and patiently reeling in the day's catch. But modern industrial fishing -- the kind that stocks our grocery shelves -- looks more like warfare. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Jennifer Jacquet explain overfishing and its effects on ecosystems, food security, jobs, economies, and coastal cultures.

We've known for a while that ancient humans got busy with Neanderthals, but how exactly did that Neanderthal DNA affect modern humans?

Mosquitoes kill more people annually than any other animal on earth. But several research companies are looking to tame this issue.

Is teleportation possible? Could a baseball transform into something like a radio wave, travel through buildings, bounce around corners, and change back into a baseball? Oddly enough, thanks to quantum mechanics, the answer might actually be yes... sort of! Sajan Saini explains.

Scientists have discovered how to create a real life 'superlaser' using an ultra-pure diamond. How exactly does it work?2

The light from KIC 8462852 faded again, and scientists have some new theories about what's behind astronomy's most mysterious star.

The Impossible Burger is meatless, but it tastes, smells, and bleeds like the real thing. The secret ingredient? Neuroscience.

The nose's olfactory receptors are stimulated when we smell food and other odors. But could the process of smelling cause weight gain?

This video is about why it's harder to successfully land spacecraft and landers and rovers on Mars than on Earth, or Venus, or the Moon, or Titan, or asteroids. It all comes down to atmospheric density! When there's no atmosphere, you can do a powered descent in a flimsy tinfoil spacecraft like the Lunar Module, and when there's plenty of atmosphere you can do an unpowered descent via heat shield and parachutes like the space shuttle, Apollo command module, Soyuz, Huygens, etc. But on Mars with its thin air, you have to do both powered & unpowered descent, getting the worst of both worlds.

Glacier ice is weird. It's solid. Solid things aren't supposed to flow. But glacier ice flows like a liquid, and it does that without melting! How is this possible? I traveled to Mendenhall Glacier in Juneau, Alaska to find out.

Researchers at Stanford University developed a soft, squishy robot that "grows" like a vine and can squeeze through tight spaces. It can also lift heavy objects, which makes it potentially ideal for search-and-rescue operations.

The giant crack that's been racing across Antarctica Larsen C ice shelf finally met its breaking point between July 10 and 12. The result was an iceberg the size of Delaware and weighing a trillion metric tons.

Why Christopher Nolan is obsessed with Shepard tones.