Features

Sixty years ago this week, America sent its second man into space. The mission had gone flawlessly, but nearly ended in tragedy when the Liberty Bell 7 Mercury space capsule sank into the sea, almost taking astronaut Virgil Grissom with it.

How much of a problem is it if participants in psychedelic clinical trials can easily tell they have been given a placebo? Researcher Suresh Muthukumaraswamy suggests it is, and many findings from recent psychedelic trials may be over-estimated.

With psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy on the cusp of broad clinical approval, millions of people may soon experience these hallucinogenic drugs for the first time. Can a genetic test help predict how individuals will respond to psychedelics?

On May 5, 1961, about 45 million US television viewers watched as a single-stage Redstone rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral. Mercury Redstone 3 carried Alan Shepard on a 15-minute flight to become America's first man in space.

Several hundred million people around the world have safely received a wildly effective COVID-19 vaccine based on mRNA technology. So what exactly is an mRNA vaccine, where did the technology come from, and what other diseases could it be useful for?

There’s invisible, undetectable stuff all around us, and we call it dark matter. There’s plenty of evidence that this stuff is very real, but what exactly is dark matter? How do we know it’s there? And how are scientists looking for it?

Sixty years ago on Monday, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome atop a variation of a rocket originally designed to launch nuclear weapons to become the first person to orbit the Earth.

One of the great game-changing automobiles, the quirky little Volkswagen Beetle emerged from a dramatic birth to become the best-selling car in history, forever altering how small cars are seen, and sparking a remarkable automotive cult in the process.

Seventy five years ago, the world was introduced to ENIAC, the first ever electronic, programmable, general purpose, digital computer, which not only ushered in the beginning of the computer age, but also shaped popular conceptions of the computer.