Jane Hu

In 2016, psychologist Dana Carney made quite a splash in the research community. Carney, along with her colleagues Amy Cuddy and Andy Yap, were well-known for their study linking “power poses”—like standing confidently your hands on your hips—to “powerful” hormonal changes: increases in testosterone and decreases in cortisol. After the study was published in 2010, other researchers tried and failed to replicate their results, and Carney began to have doubts about the conclusions of her own study. In 2016, Carney posted a short letter on her website, titled simply “My position on ‘Power Poses.'” She wastes no time getting to the point: “As evidence has come in over these past 2+ years, my views have updated to reflect the evidence. As such, I do not believe that ‘power pose’ effects are real.“

Smart speakers promise to be your voice-activated personal assistant. Devices outfitted with Amazon’s Alexa, Google’s Home, and Apple’s Siri can tell you the weather, add an event to your calendar, or—as these companies are hoping—purchase whatever you need in that instant.

After a six month tour in space, three astronauts are heading back to Earth. In a change of command ceremony, the European Space Agency’s Alexander Gerst of the International Space Station’s Expedition 57, passed the reins of the ISS yesterday (Dec. 18) to Roscosmos’s Oleg Kononenko, station commander of Expedition 58.

It’s likely not news to you that women experience harassment on Twitter. But a new study from researchers at Amnesty International and artificial intelligence software provider Element AI attempts to shed some more light on just how big this problem is. And it’s bad out there.

This holiday season, gift guides are full of “smart home” devices: lightbulbs, plugs, security cameras, thermostats, and doorbells you can control wirelessly from your phone. Analysts anticipate that the popularity of these “Internet of Things” devices is poised to grow over the next couple years, with a projected 20.4 billion devices in use by 2020.

Each year around Dec. 13 and 14, Earth passes through the orbit of the asteroid 3200 Phaeton. As its debris enters our atmosphere, we’re treated to a fabulous light show: the Geminids meteor shower.

Tori Dunlap was feeling stagnant at her job when she received an email from a recruiter with what looked like a perfect position at another company. Dunlap went in for an interview and her internal alarms went off right away. Something didn’t feel right.

As climate change progresses, it will continue to trigger more intense storms, drought, wildfires, sea-level rise, species extinction, and crop failure. While these devastating environmental changes come to mind first when discussing climate change, there’ll also be potentially disastrous downstream effects on businesses—and they don’t seem to be taking the threat seriously.

A human-made object, the Voyager probe, crossed into interstellar space for the first time in 2012. Now, its twin, Voyager 2 has traveled 11 billion miles away from Earth, and has also officially entered interstellar space.

News about the natural world has not been great this year. Ice sheets are melting at unprecedented rates, greenhouse gas emissions are accelerating like “a speeding freight train,” insects appear to be disappearing. But in the midst of all this bad news, there’s a tiny bright spot: the scads of new species discovered in 2018.

If you ride a bike, you likely have a story about a close call with a car. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 840 US cyclists died in 2016 in collisions with motor vehicles (pdf). In the end of its report, the NHTSA offers a list of safety tips; first among them is to wear a helmet. “A helmet is the single most effective way to prevent head injury resulting from a bicycle crash,” it says.

To keep the International Space Station running, NASA must routinely restock its supplies with items like tools to make repairs and food for astronauts. One such resupply mission, CRS-16, is planned for tomorrow (Dec. 4) via SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, but it’s hit a small snafu: moldy mouse food.

NASA engineers successfully guided the probe Osiris-Rex alongside the asteroid Bennu. Osiris-Rex, launched two years ago, is now traveling the same speed as the asteroid and will make several passes over its surface over the next three years. It will even collect a sample from its surface in 2020.

I’ll cut right to it: Anthropologie is selling sticks. Yes, like, just sticks; sticks that exist freely in nature, sticks that you could theoretically find somewhere outside.

This week, there were only two types of people in the world: #TeamKoi and #TeamOtter.

Facebook and Twitter don’t like to talk about how, exactly, their algorithms determine users’ interests. According to their privacy policies, both collect basic information you provide in your profile, like your birthday and gender, as well as details around your log-ins, like what devices you use and your location, and your posts and “likes.” Twitter and Facebook may also receive information from your browser cookies, what links you click, and third party apps that you’ve connected to your account. They might also be able to match additional info from their partners to you based on your phone number or email address.

Electric scooters are being hailed as the next major trend in urban transportation. Companies like Bird, Skip, and Lime have thousands of dockless scooters for rent in major cities across the world. But with the growing number of scooter riders, the number of scooter accidents has risen as well. While there are no official statistics available, there have been a handful of scooter-related deaths worldwide, and emergency rooms say they have seen an uptick in scooter-related broken bones and head injuries. And that’s not counting cuts and bruises that don’t require an ER visit.

The first time I watched a Flat Earther YouTube video, I was entranced.

If you search Martha Stewart on Instagram, two verified accounts pop up: @MarthaStewart and @MarthaStewart48. @MarthaStewart’s posts capture the essence of the Martha Stewart brand: magazine-quality spreads of pies, amuse-bouche, and cocktails, with the occasional garden photo. @MarthaStewart48, on the other hand, does… not.

Black Friday is around the corner, and as ever, that means every gadget maker is gearing up for sales on their devices. If you’re after one of Amazon’s Alexa-enabled devices, but are unsure which of the seemingly endless versions to pick up, don’t fear. Here’s a handy guide of what’s out there.

The first time I ever dog-sat for a friend was in 2009. The dog was a pint-sized Yorkie named Bella who loved to sleep on your lap. The next year, I adopted my first dog, and she often played with my neighbors’ rambunctious boxer puppy named Bella. Then, a friend from college got a beagle, and named her—you guessed it—Bella.

Every November, when the Earth crosses paths with the comet Temple-Tuttle, we’re treated to the Leonid meteor shower. As bits of debris from the comet enter our atmosphere, they burn up and emit light, which we see as shooting stars.

“There is no ‘true’,” wrote French author Gustave Flaubert in a letter to his friend, writer León Hennique. “There are only ways of perceiving.” Though Flaubert couldn’t have known it when he wrote those words in the 1880s, research over the subsequent century-plus has found a wealth of evidence to support his view. Perhaps you’ve heard before that how culture and language shape your perception of color: while some languages like Russian, have separate words for light and dark blue, other languages have a single word that refers to not only blue but also green. And yet other cultures have no word for blue at all, and just have three color words: dark, light, and red.

Buried a half-mile deep under the icy plains of Greenland’s Hiawatha Glacier, scientists have discovered a giant crater. Nearly 20 miles wide, the crater is among the 25 largest in the world; for scale, NASA says it’s a bit bigger than the Washington, DC Beltway area.