# politics
Skeptical groups were poised to bring science and critical thinking to the masses. They failed in their mission. But did they ever really have a chance to succeed?
# tech
Sometimes, jobs we're told are automated really aren't. They simply hide the humans making your request possible. And that's going to backfire when machines really do take over.
# health
Just as a lack of food can cause malnutrition, so can highly processed food full of empty calories. And UNICEF now seems equally concerned about both.
# tech
Washing clothes uses a lot of chemicals and fresh water. Now, some companies are trying to change that by rethinking how to keep clothing fresh and wrinkle-free for months.
# politics
When we want to see if economy is growing or to measure its relative size to others, we use the gross domestic product, or GDP. But what if this number is horribly misleading?
# oddities
With everything we do quantified by social media likes, impressions, and shares, we need to remember the reason and purpose for creating something for the sake of creation.
# science
The longest ever study of intergenerational narcissistic traits finds that millennials are not as sensitive and self-absorbed as boomers.
# sex
In the latest blow to the media's myth of hookup culture, it turns out that hookup apps are actually really bad at letting users hook up.
# health
Researchers tried to test whether debates about vaccination lead to more extreme polarization and found a complete shutdown of all debate. But is their study critically flawed?
# longform
Thanks to social media, everybody can be a pundit today, and that's ruining how we build a factual understanding of our world and what's happening in it.
# science
Denialists are now imagining cabals of ecoterrorists burning down entire ecosystems so they don't have to admit that scientists were right about the symptoms of climate change.
# tech
Code storage and sharing platform GitHub wants to archive open source software for up to 10,000 years. But is that a good idea, and could we use its momentum to rethink how and why we code?
# space
When some stars die, they take their entire systems with them. Others appear to give their planets a fighting chance.
# space
A new study sees evidence of more than a dozen galaxies that seem to lack dark matter and raises big questions about our ideas of galaxy formation.
# science
It turns out that clothes have an amazing effect on how we're perceived by others, even at first glance.