130+ Photographs of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Masterpiece Fallingwater

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We’ve featured a variety of buildings designed by Frank Lloyd Wright here on Open Culture, from his personal home and studio Taliesin and the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, to a gas station and a doghouse. But if any single structure explains his enduring reputation as a genius of American…

Astronomers Create a Digital Atlas of Over 380,000 Galaxies

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In the observable universe, there are estimated to be between 200 billion to two trillion galaxies. By comparison to these super-Saganian numbers, the 383,620 galaxies captured by the Siena Galaxy Atlas may seem like small potatoes. But the SGA actually represents a landmark achievement among digital astronomy catalogs: as Samantha Hill…

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioactive a Century Later

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Image by The Wellcome Trust

When researching a famous historical figure, access to their work and materials usually proves to be one of the biggest obstacles. But things are much more difficult for those writing about the life of Marie Curie, the scientist who, along her with husband Pierre, discovered polonium…

Bertrand Russell: The Everyday Benefit of Philosophy Is That It Helps You Live with Uncertainty

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On the strength of a few quotations and the popular lecture Why I am Not a Christian, philosopher Bertrand Russell has been characterized as a so-called “positive atheist,” a phrase that implies a high degree of certainty. While it is true that Russell saw “no reason to believe any of the dogmas…

Advice for Time Traveling to Medieval Europe: How to Staying Healthy & Safe, and Avoiding Charges of Witchcraft

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Generations of foreign tourists in Europe have heard advice about traveling in groups, haggling prices, avoiding pickpockets, and being able to communicate in, if not the local language, then at least the lingua franca. It turns out that very similar guidance applies to time travel in Europe, or at least specifically to the region of…