Mother’s Day can elicit complicated emotions in the human animal. Not so Mother Hamster. While you were out to brunch, she was matter-of-factly devouring the runtiest of her litter. And not because he failed to present her with a bouquet and flowery card.

George Carlin was more than a Class Clown. He was also a class act, as evidenced by this undated missive to comedy writer Sally Wade, with whom he shared the final decade of his life. The man who once parsed the Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television showered his “spouse without papers” with such notes daily.

Carlo Zapponi, a data visualization designer at Nokia, has created a pretty splendid visualization of the 1,042 meteorites that humans have witnessed hitting our planet since 861 AD. If you click the image above, you will see the visualization in full screen mode.

The evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould famously said that science and religion are “nonoverlapping magisteria”:
The net of science covers the empirical universe: what is it made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory). The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.

The astronauts aboard the International Space Station work every day on all kinds of experiments, from working with robots to preparing for spacewalks. But when they get a break, they often field questions from school children and adults about life in space.

Popular Science is the fifth oldest continuously-published monthly magazine—a long way of saying that the magazine has done a fine job of maintaining a niche in a crazily fast-paced industry.

Most “optical illusions” are not really optical. They have less to do with the way the eyes work than with the way the brain processes the information sent to it from the eyes. For this reason, many scientists prefer to call them visual illusions.

This map shows the oldest light in our universe, as detected by the Planck mission. Click on the map for a larger image.
By now the Big Bang theory is widely accepted scientifically. The idea is that the universe began to expand rapidly about 14 billion years ago from a dense, hot state and continues to expand to this day.

Here’s an extraordinary recording of Albert Einstein from the fall of 1941, reading a full-length essay in English:

The essay is called “The Common Language of Science.” It was recorded in September of 1941 as a radio address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science.

We’ve written a fair amount on the various facets of Thomas Edison’s career, and somewhat less on his less-famous former employee-become-rival Nikola Tesla (who seems to polarize people in ways Edison doesn’t). Both inventors provoke all kinds of serious speculation, commentary, and debate.