Many animals, like this red sphinx cat, are bred to be hairless. Other times, animal baldness is a symptom of stress and other factors.

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Do Other Animals Besides Humans Go Bald?

From Andean bears to Rhesus macaques, non-human mammals have hair woes of their own

Genetic testing is opening up new ethical questions for parents.

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Now You Can Genetically Test Your Child For Disease Risks. Should You?

Genomics is cheaper and more available then ever, but its usefulness for parents has yet to be proven

A replica of Foucault's famous experiment at the Museo Nazionale della Scienza e Tecnica in Milan, Italy

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How Does Foucault’s Pendulum Prove the Earth Rotates?

This elegant scientific demonstration has been delighting everyday people for nearly 200 years

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Can All Living Things Exhibit Albinism?

You asked, we answered

What's a dinosaur, anyways? The answer is in the evolutionary tree.

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What Makes a Dinosaur a Dinosaur?

The question may sound like a “duh,” but it gets to the heart of how we categorize and define nature

A NASA image of Hurricane Sandy moving along the United States' East Coast. Extreme weather events like this are becoming more frequent, but scientists still face challenges when attributing any one storm to climate change.

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Does Climate Change Cause Extreme Weather Events?

It’s a challenge to attribute any one storm or heat wave to climate change, but scientists are getting closer

Coastal regions and islands are vanishing due to a lethal combination of erosion, sea rise and subsidence, or the slow sinking of land over time. The network of 1200 coral islands and atolls that makes up the Maldives in the Indian Ocean is ground zero.

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What Are All The Ways That Land Can Disappear Beneath Your Feet?

From sinkholes to liquefaction, we look at how solid earth can shrink and elude our grasp

The astronauts of "2001: A Space Odyssey" hide in a pod to discuss the troubling behavior of their spacecraft's artificial intelligence, HAL 9000. In the background, HAL is able to read their lips.

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When We Go to Mars, Will We Have a Real-Life HAL 9000 With Us?

How generations of NASA scientists were inspired by an evil Hollywood supercomputer

Ornithologist John Gould's illustrations of finches collected by Charles Darwin on the Galápagos Islands show the physical differences that the men relied on in dividing them into different species.

Future of Conservation

What Does It Mean to Be a Species? Genetics Is Changing the Answer

As DNA techniques let us see animals in finer and finer gradients, the old definition is falling apart

On May 6, 1937, the German airship Zeppelin LZ 129 Hindenburg burst into flames in Lakehurst, New Jersey, while the airship was landing.

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What Really Felled the Hindenburg?

On the anniversary of the conflagration, mysteries still remain

Construction on the Pentagon was completed in January 1943. With about 6.4 million square feet, it is still today the world’s largest low-rise office building.

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Why Is the Pentagon a Pentagon?

Planners battled to ensure the building kept its unique shape

The heroes of the movie Kong: Skull Island prepare to encounter the 104-foot-tall ape King Kong.

Science in the Movies

How Big Can a Land Animal Get?

King Kong’s biggest enemy isn’t humans—it’s the laws of physics

Shortly after the announcement of the TRAPPIST-1 system, NASA crowdsourced its Twitter followers for possible planet names. The actual process of naming new planets, however, is a bit more involved.

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How Do New Planets Get Their Names?

Sorry, Planet McPlanetface: Asteroids, moons and other celestial bodies go through a strict set of international naming guidelines

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