When it comes to television, you usually know who and what is going on because all the main characters are right there for you to see. On occasion, a character might be able to cover all their lines and get it done completely behind the scenes. These characters tend to be the wise ones—the givers

2017 has been significant for archaeology. We have uncovered new discoveries and made sense of ones we found years ago. There is still plenty more to learn (as there always will be), but this year helped give us a better understanding of the world as it was hundreds and thousands of years ago. In this

This is the one white light in the sky you don’t want to go toward. And if you can’t figure that out on your own, the boom of thunder afterward should send you racing for cover. Then again, after you hear how a lightning strike dramatically changed an orthopedic surgeon, you may reconsider. Throughout history,

Islands seem to sit in a place between two worlds. They’re land, but they’re surrounded by sea. The isolation that they offer has been fruitful in fiction but has also inspired folklore around the world. How many sailors have spotted an island on the horizon and wondered if it meant salvation or a supernatural threat?

Sometimes it feels like scientists are getting pretty close to solving every mystery there is. We have theories on wormholes, dark matter, the beginning of the universe, and a whole map of how single-celled organisms evolved into human beings. We’ve solved some mysteries so complex that it boggles the mind to even think about them.

Keeping up with the news is hard. So hard, in fact, that we’ve decided to save you the hassle by rounding up the most significant, unusual, or just plain old mind-blowing stories each week. This week, the news in the United States was understandably dominated by the second hugely deadly mass shooting in barely a

Although they’re not always given as much attention as the boys, ancient women do receive their fair share in forensic anthropology. Their stories, told with bone and reanimated flesh, can be as unique as their faces. It’s amazing how much we can learn from ancient facial reconstructions of women. Whether they are witches, saints, powerful