House Votes to Fund the Arts, Despite Trump Threats
The Senate must now vote on the bill, which sets annual allocations for the NEA, NEH, Smithsonian, and other cultural programs.
Jan 13, 2026
Lifestyle
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The Internet According to Sex Workers and Cyberfeminists
Mindy Seu’s A Sexual History of the Internet is part performance, part artist book, and part financial experiment.
Jan 13, 2026
Why Are We Paying for the Privilege of Rejection?
Application fees are one of the least examined but most pervasive forms of class stratification in the arts.
Jan 13, 2026
Starts With A Bang podcast #125 – Large-scale structure
One of the most exciting developments in modern astrophysics isn’t merely our standard “concordance cosmology” model, but rather the cracks that seem to be emerging in it. Sure, we&#...
Jan 11, 2026
NASA watched this supernova blast expand for 25 years
Although the Universe constantly evolves, astronomers rarely see that evolution. This snippet from a structure-formation simulation, with the expansion of the Universe scaled out, represents billions ...
Jan 12, 2026
How to be as innovative as the Wright brothers — no computers required
In 1895, the world’s top scientist predicted wrong. Epically wrong. The scientist was Lord Kelvin. Born in early nineteenth-century Ireland to a mathematics teacher, he was from his youngest summers a...
Jan 12, 2026
From infinite scroll to infinite worlds: How AI could rewire Gen Z’s attention span
Members of Gen Z have grown up hearing that our attention spans are shrinking and that our lives will be defined by the eight-second scroll and an endless stream of content. The narrative is that we&#...
Jan 12, 2026
The four paths forward for US scientists in 2026
For nearly 100 years, the United States has been the world’s leader in a wide variety of scientific fields. No other country has: invested as much in fundamental scientific research, has made mo...
Jan 13, 2026
Why the real revolution isn’t AI — it’s meaning
Since the end of the Second World War, technology and management have evolved together like twin helices. Each new machine has required a new way of organizing people around it. The mainframe gave us ...
Jan 13, 2026
Our intuitions about consciousness may be deeply wrong
We tend to trust our intuitions about consciousness because they feel immediate and personal, but feeling convinced is not the same as being right. Annaka Harris explores what happens when science sto...
Jan 13, 2026
U.S. tests directed-energy device potentially linked to Havana Syndrome
Since 2015, more than 1,000 U.S. government personnel working across the world have reported symptoms linked to Havana Syndrome, an acute illness marked by sudden headache, nausea, and the hearing of ...
Jan 13, 2026
Submerged sandbanks shine like underwater auroras in astronaut's view of the Bahamas — Earth from space
A 2016 astronaut photo of the Bahamas shows a series of luminous, rippling sandbanks partly carved out by a coral reef. The image also reveals subtle differences in the ocean's surface caused by a ste...
Jan 06, 2026
The moon has been secretly feasting on Earth's atmosphere for billions of years
A new study reveals that tiny fragments of Earth's atmosphere are transported to and absorbed by the moon via gusts of solar wind and our planet's magnetic field, upending a 20-year-old theory based o...
Jan 06, 2026
Advanced alien civilizations could be communicating 'like fireflies' in plain sight, researchers suggest
A new paper posits that advanced alien civilizations may communicate through subtle flashes, like fireflies do on Earth. The thought experiment suggests that we need to avoid human biases in our searc...
Jan 06, 2026
Orbiting satellites could start crashing into one another in less than 3 days, theoretical new 'CRASH Clock' reveals
Researchers have proposed a theoretical timepiece, dubbed the "CRASH Clock," which tells us how quickly satellites would start colliding if they lost the ability to avoid each other, such as during a ...
Jan 08, 2026
China's 'artificial sun' reactor shatters major fusion limit — a step closer to near-limitless clean energy
China's EAST nuclear fusion reactor has successfully kept plasma stable at extreme densities, passing a major fusion milestone and potentially bringing humanity closer to wielding near-limitless clean...
Jan 09, 2026
Parkfield, San Andreas, and the quest for a 'crystal ball' for predicting earthquakes before they happen
A small town in California was hit by earthquakes once every 22 years for over a century, setting the stage for a major seismic experiment in the 1980s and 90s. But the quake ended up being 11 years l...
Jan 13, 2026