The English language is the lingua franca of a large swath of the world. Approximately 20 percent of the world’s 7.5 billion people speak English, either as a primary or secondary language. Of those, 360 million individuals claim English as their native tongue.[1] As a dominant international tongue, English has its peculiarities. The language has

No matter what you think of your country’s legal system, you cannot deny that some people belong locked up behind bars for a very long time. Every year in the United States alone, 636,000 people[1] are released from prison. Add this up with the rest of the world, and you have a large number of

Psychopaths both intrigue and frighten us to the core. The media and movies often paint larger-than-life portraits by using far-reaching claims and describing these supposed mental illnesses with exaggerated traits. With estimates of the number of psychopaths ranging as high as 3–4 percent of the population, you probably know several of them right now without

The Lady in White is a popular ghost tale relayed from generation to generation in many countries around the world. Of course, there is no solid evidence that any of these spooky stories have any substance in truth whatsoever, but this hasn’t stopped thousands of people retelling them over Halloween or around the campfire. In

Over the course of the last century, the public imagination has been simultaneously enthralled and terrified at the prospect of extraterrestrial involvement in human affairs. Ever since rumors emerged that the secretive Vril Society in Germany had successfully channeled beings from other stars in a trance state, and schematics were unveiled of what appeared to

Our relationship with gravity takes each of us back to about first grade, when we initially learned about this amazing force. However, gravity is so much more than the force that holds us on Earth. In school, we learn some basic ideas about gravity. But these give rise to many misconceptions and gaps in our

Many people, at some point, have looked up at the vastness of a summer night’s sky and wondered, “Is anybody out there?” There are over 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, which is just one of maybe 100 billion galaxies in the known universe. Our understanding of space changes daily, and our perception