Discovered: Video games can help dyslexic kids read; pregnancy increases foot size; around 100 million sharks are killed annually; mammalian sperm swims upstream.
Somehow, a dolphin has ended up trapped in Brooklyn's heavily polluted Gowanus Canal. The world watches with bated breath (and cruel Twitter jokes) while authorities attempt to rescue it — if the dolphin can't wiggle its way out first.
President Obama violated the Constitution by filling three National Labor Relations Board seats in the midst of a Senate recess, according to a court ruling issued today. "Told you so," says every conservative on Twitter.
Dexter Filkins on women in combat, Ron Fournier on Obama's great liberal expectations, Malcolm Potts on fighting terrorism through education, Jonathan Weil on Caterpillar's missing millions, and Jim Yong Kim on climate change.
Red Hot Chili Peppers, Blur, The Stone Roses, and Phoenix have been confirmed as this year's official Coachella headliners. And judging from online reaction, there are already a lot of ways to whine about this year's lineup.
Te'o continues to maintain that he was duped into believing his fake girlfriend was real all along. But one commenter wants to know — if he's so easily fooled, how could he possibly be passing college-level courses?
Discovered: Carbo-loading is why we have cute dogs; dung beetles follow the stars; research to resume on H5N1 avian flu; look at this newly discovered Brazilian bird before it goes extinct.
Brooklyn art student Thomas Calabrese was just trying to do his homework, but music bloggers desperate for a scoop were quick to believe that his faux Vampire Weekend album cover was the real deal.
President Obama will be confronted with the first big policy decision of his second term where environmentalists and business interests are at odds: the Keystone XL oil pipeline. Despite promising to act on climate change in his inaugural address, all signs point to the controversial project going forward.
Could the library of the future replace bookshelves with petri dishes? New research into the possibility of storing information in DNA has already preserved words by Shakespeare and Martin Luther King in genetic material.
Margaret Carlson on Hillary Clinton's Benghazi testimony, Susan Crawford on speeding up America's Internet, Alex Pareene on electoral vote rejiggering, E.J. Dionne on Obama's Reaganisms, and Amy Davidson on child-abuse victims.
Discovered: The predictable race and political affiliation of "reverse racism" victims; car crashes are more deadly for the morbidly obese; ADHD on the rise in high-income minority communities; plain labeling could cut smoking rates.
Today federal authorities charged three men with building and disseminating a virus that crippled NASA computers and brought in tens of millions of dollars for cybercriminals. The new court documents detail the inner workings of Eastern Europe's cybercrime market.
The vague idea guiding this year's World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, sounds a lot like another vague idea forwarded in Davos-hating Nassim Taleb's book Antifragile.
The state of Florida has a bounty out on invasive pythons, luring amateur snake killers into the Everglades for a month-long hunt. Hilarious, right? Not to those who say it encourages cruelty and does little to solve conservation problems.
Jill and Scott Kelley on privacy and Petraeus, Mark Bittman on Coke's obesity awareness ads, Simon Jenkins on Prince Harry's Afghanistan story, Sarah Chayes on Benghazi and bureaucrats, and Aaron David Miller on Israel's election results.
Discovered: It's not quite an invisibility cloak, but it's a start; men are more likely to commit scientific fraud; multitasking causes more mistakes; Davos looks for "X factors" of the future.
When Harvard geneticist George Church sat down for a casual interview with a German magazine, he wasn't trying to send out the message, "Mad Scientist Seeks Lady To Give Birth To Neanderthal Monster."
Andrew Ross Sorkin on the myths of Davos, Elizabeth Economy on polluted Chinese water, John Cassidy on Obama's liberal agenda, Ruth Margalit on Israel's left, and William Pesek on Lew's strong dollar.
Discovered: Some of our DNA is four-stranded, and that's not a good thing; the brain's selfishness center; men who can't smell don't have much sex; hearing loss foreshadows mental decline.
From initially defining marriage as "between a man and a woman" to citing Stonewall as a civil rights milestone in his second inaugural address on Monday, here are the defining moments in how Obama's public pronouncements on gay rights have evolved.
George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, even Oprah Winfrey — the famous people who didn't attend Barack Obama's second inauguration say as much about the ceremony as those who did turn up.
Let's take a look at the instant pundit reaction to specific segments of the inaugural address, from gay rights and health care to gun violence and climate change.
Paul Krugman on recapping Obama's first-term successes, Simon Johnson on Bernanke's successor, Jason Burke on al-Qaeda's non-resurgence, Alan Johnson on Israeli elections, and Penn Bullock on stand-your-ground laws.
Discovered: Those crustaceans you're eating probably do feel pain after all; sleeping sickness carried by animals; let's look for aliens on moons instead of planets; new tick-transmitted disease.
Aren't conservative supposed to be hawkish on terror? They tend to be when it comes to foreign terrorists, but many are taking umbrage at a new West Point report on violent far-right extremists home-grown right here in the U.S.
District cab drivers will be forced to start accepting credit cards soon, according to a new decree from the D.C. Taxicab Commission. But the change won't come in time for Obama's second inauguration.
Once an adventurous diner who frequented hip D.C. eating establishments, President Obama can now be found picking over bland fare at fusty old-school restaurants, apparently.
Howard Kurtz on the media and Manti Te'o, Paul Krugman on the deficit non-crisis, Jill Lepore on Roe v. Wade at 40, Mimi Whitefield on Cuba's travel restrictions, and Molly Redden on Teddy Turner.
Discovered: Even your DNA won't be private anymore; a rock harder than diamonds; the depression gene remains elusive; ancient sea creatures straight out of Dr. Seuss.
Energy drink benders have been sending an alarming number of people to the emergency room lately. ER admissions have doubled since 2007, and lawmakers are now demanding to know what energy drink makers put in these brews.
The Nobel-winning physicist brought an empirical focus to the Department of Energy. But after struggling to solve the formulas behind Beltway politics, the star scientist will reportedly step down.
A Seattle radio station claims to have their hands on the new single by garage rock revivalists The Strokes, and fans are already foreseeing a fifth album, and maybe—just maybe—another tour.
Skrillex is burning up. In fact, the dubstep poster boy is such a hot commodity on the superstar DJ circuit that his hair caught on fire last night.
Dana Milbank on kids being used in the gun debate, Fred Kaplan on Mali, Jonathan Mahler on Lance Armstrong, Slavoj Žižek on European elites, and Ricky Sekhon on playing bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty.
Discovered: Racial separation corresponds with more lung cancer; barnacles have gross sex; social interaction is genetic in ants; Facebook is more memorable than books for many people.
No matter what Obama says about putting armed police officers in schools, the NRA keeps criticizing him. Lost in all that shouting are the voices of people who'll actually work in such schools — the teachers.
Time to add #FreeChiefKeef to the lexicon of hip hop hashtags. The young Chicago rapper was jailed yesterday for violating his probation, and—bizarrely enough—the music taste-makers at Pitchfork might've helped put him behind bars.
Gun advocates are already in a fit over one of the president's directive regarding healthcare professionals. Except that the order actually just preserves a legal expectation for doctors to report on their patients that has existed for 37 years.
Things just keep getting bleaker for the two Pussy Riot members still in prison. Today, Maria Alyokhina asked a Russian court to defer her sentence until her 5-year-old becomes a teenager. They denied her plea at an emotional hearing, sending her straight back to jail.
Debra Saunders on the White House press corps, Maureen Dowd on President Standoffish, Simon Jenkins on EU membership, Karin Klein on the right to die, and Mark Mills on California's fracking goldmine.
Discovered: Lighting up might not lead to dumbing down; playing music can put you on a natural high; black carbon is twice as bad as we thought; evidence that obesity is inherited.
James Holmes' sanity is already an important issue in the Aurora movie theater shooting trial. And now the alleged shooter's mental health is at question in another lawsuit against his psychiatrist.
Don't look now, and don't blame the bad karaoke, but Lena Dunham really cannot do wrong: According to recent numbers online and off, HBO's Girls has become a kingmaker to just-under-the-radar musicians, sending their record sales abuzz
A New York retail magnate bequeathed a trove of artwork, but after a series of recent high-tech inspections, many of the donations turned out to be fake. And because of the benefactor's will, the museum can't even throw them out.
The court reporter's filing on yesterday's historic Supreme Court session is in, committing to public record the moment Thomas ended his seven years of silence... with a joke about Yale. Here's what he reportedly said—all four words of it.
Jeffrey Toobin on Obama's gay marriage stance, David A. Bell on France's domestic malaise, Matthew Yglesias on dueling hedge-fund managers, Dana Milbank on Obama's new bad-cop routine, and Mark Frazier on an aging China.
Discovered: the most depressing day of the year; the problem with dieting after age 75; the truth about chimps; the dingo might not even be Australian.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas went nearly seven years without making a peep during oral arguments, but today he just had to get in a jab at Yalies.
Public health efforts around the country have been calling out soda's central role in the obesity crisis. In response, Coca-Cola debuted a new commercial today that already has people drawing the big-tobacco comparisons.
After much teasing, he dropped his natty new single, "Suit and Tie" — and while the Internet mostly likes it, everyone seems to agree that JT had the most annoying reveal in a week packed with major pop comebacks.
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