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Can All Living Things Exhibit Albinism?

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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

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Do Other Animals Cry and More Questions From Our Readers

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Why Do So Many Train Stations Have the Same Name?

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When Did East Asian Countries Adopt the Western Calendar and More Questions From Our Readers

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How Many Ways Can Snake Venom Kill You and More Questions From Our Readers

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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

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Do Other Animals Have Baby Teeth and More Questions From Our Readers

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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

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How Does Earth's Geomagnetic Field Work?

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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

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What's the Difference Between Horns and Antlers and More Questions From Our Readers

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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

What Is Dark Matter and More Questions From Our Readers

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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

The Beast must learn to love someone else and be loved before the last petal falls on the Enchanted Rose in the tale of the new Disney film, Beauty and the Beast

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The Beast's Enchanted Rose Lasted a Decade. How Long Can a Real One Last?

A Smithsonian expert says the film's was undoubtedly a hybrid tea rose

Unlike the Apollo spacecraft, Orion will have solar panels to help power longer space journeys, as shown in this concept art of the spacecraft orbiting Earth.

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What's Really Changed—and What Hasn’t—About Getting Humans to the Moon

NASA’s Orion will combine vintage tech with massive advances in computing power and electronics we've made since 1972

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Why Is Pennsylvania Ave D.C.'s Main Thoroughfare and More Questions From Our Readers

Your questions answered by our experts

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