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London-to-New York Passenger Captures Spectacular Northern Lights Timelapse Out Airplane Window

Being unable to sleep on a red-eye can have occasional advantages

Washing Your Hands in Hot Water Wastes Energy–And Doesn’t Make Them Any Cleaner Than Cold

If Americans turned down the heat when washing their hands they could save 6 million metric tons of CO2 every year

Evangeline Lilly plays Tauriel, an invention of Peter Jackson's, in the latest Hobbit movie.

The Tolkien Nerd’s Guide to “The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug”

As Peter Jackson ventures further from J.R.R. Tolkien’s original text, the source material becomes harder to pin down but is still satisfyingly nerdy

Robot

In the DARPA Robotics Challenge, Robots Drive, Climb, Bust Through Walls And Prepare to Take Over the World

Trials for the DARPA Robotics Challenge this weekend will put these robots to the test

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The Impressive Results of When You Ask Architects to Build With Gingerbread

From Modernist reconstructions to favorite museums, these confectionary constructions are sights to behold

There Is a Way to Make Lion Hunting Good for Lions

A contentious issue may have a bright side

The Vast Majority of Raw Data From Old Scientific Studies May Now Be Missing

A new survey of 20-year-old studies shows that poor archives and inaccessible authors make 90 percent of raw data impossible to find

Great White Sharks Swim Up, Down, Far, Wide—All Over the Place, Really—And We Had No Idea

Satellite tags map great white shark movements

Egg nog has not always been such a refined holiday quaff.

Eggnog: It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Starts a Holiday Riot

When four gallons of whiskey were smuggled into a West Point Christmas party, a third of the academy erupted into chaos

"Cloud Music" scans the skies about the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Lincoln Gallery and turns the clouds (and occasional flock of birds) into sound.

If Clouds Could Make Music, What Would it Sound Like?

How an engineer, video analyst and musician created a pioneering artwork that makes music from the sky

The SlimStyle’s radical design allows for continuous operation without the need for aluminum heat sinks, one of the major cost drivers of LED bulbs.

Tech Watch

Switching to This Flat LED Light Bulb Could Be an Easy Resolution to Keep in the New Year

With its radical new design, the Philips SlimStyle may be the cheapest LED yet

The Scientific Reason Super-Villains Always Lose

Evil isn’t the only culprit

Ancient Reptiles Kept Switching Between Laying Eggs And Giving Birth to Live Babies

Colder temperatures seem key to triggering the switch to live births

There’s a Simple, Effective Way to Get Kids to Eat Vegetables—Pay Them

Kids throw away around $3.8 million of uneaten veggies and fruits from school lunches each year

A golden eagle swoops for a rabbit.

Art Meets Science

Beautiful Anatomical Skeletons, Posed and Photographed As Sculptures

Photographer Patrick Gries transforms ordinary specimens, stripped of fur and flesh, into art that showcases motion, predation and evolution

The British Library Just Put More Than a Million Images in the Public Domain

From the largest library in the world, more than a million images free to download and use

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LISTEN: Smithsonian Folkways Re-releases Anthology of Indian Classical Music

This Mick Jagger-approved album includes Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan’s first recordings released in the West

This Past November Was the Hottest November Ever Recorded

In the 134-year observational record, we’ve never had a hotter November

Frozen seafood in the lab, ready for DNA testing.

The DNA Detectives That Reveal What Seafood You’re Really Eating

Genetic sequencing allows scientists to uncover increasingly prevalent seafood fraud

The new tapir, Tapirus kabomani.

Scientists Discover a New Species of Tapir; Locals Say, “We Told You!”

The new tapir is the smallest of the world’s five known species but it still counts as one of the largest mammals found in South America

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