5 things you should know about the champagne you'll drink tonight

Between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, sales of sparkling wines spike, as humans celebrate the holidays — especially the New Year — with cham...

Inuits may have a genetic advantage when it comes to dealing with cold

I go to California for the holidays, and when it comes time to return to the Northeast always ask myself how I’m going to make it through t...

What makes a planet a planet?

Last year, the debate over Pluto’s planet status temporarily resurfaced when NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft flew by the tiny world at the e...

How can humans clean up our space junk?

Humans filled waterways, landfills, and streets with trash, so it’s no surprise the same thing happened in Earth’s orbital neighborhood. No...

Watch astronauts win the Mannequin Challenge on the International Space Station

As 2016 comes to a close, it’s only fair that one of the year’s better memes gets a last hurrah. The Mannequin Challenge had school kids, a...

Teens are vaping more than ever, and not just nicotine

Vaping is more popular with teens than ever, with more than one-third of high school students reporting having tried e-cigarettes. And teen...

Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources site no longer says humans cause climate change

The website of Wisconsin’s Department of Natural Resources no longer says that humans and greenhouse emissions cause climate change. The n...

Dilbert creator Scott Adams issues bad-faith ‘climate challenge’

Yesterday, Dilbert creator Scott Adams issued a challenge to scientists with all the arrogance of someone who believes the main trait Hill...

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates a Scottish chemist and his waterproof raincoat

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates the man whose invention keeps us dry all winter: Charles Macintosh (1766 – 1843), inventor of the waterpro...

President Obama creates two controversial national monuments in Utah and Nevada

President Barack Obama created the Bears Ears National Monument today, protecting 1.35 million acres of land in southwest Utah. The region ...

New cybersecurity guidelines for medical devices tackle evolving threats

Today, the US Food and Drug Administration released its recommendations for how medical device manufacturers should maintain the security o...

Vera Rubin, who confirmed dark matter, has died at 88

Astronomers believe more than 90 percent of the matter in the universe is stuff we can’t see — dark matter. The woman we have to thank for ...

The Verge: 2016 Yearbook

People hated 2016 so much, the year itself became a punchline. Indeed, we saw plenty of signs that something was amiss. Uber began taking o...

These weird little dinosaurs lost all their teeth and grew beaks as they aged, new science says

In a fossil first, paleontologists have discovered that a dinosaur related to the T. rex and modern birds started out life with a full set...

Can Santa Claus bend the space-time continuum?

Okay, so here’s the thing about Santa Claus. Every year, this elderly, overweight man somehow manages to lug giant bags of toys down millio...

The technologies NORAD is ‘using’ to track Santa Claus today

As a child, NORAD’s Santa Tracker served as irrefutable evidence that my belief in Santa Claus was completely justified. If the military wa...

Final trials show Ebola vaccine offers 100 percent protection

A new Ebola vaccine is safe to use and highly effective against the deadly virus, scientists say, following successful trials in Guinea and...

Police barricades still stand between DAPL protesters and emergency services

On December 4th, the US Army ruled that the Dakota Access Pipeline, planned to run underneath the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe’s water source,...

What’s standing between Donald Trump and nuclear war?

When President-elect Donald Trump officially becomes the president of the United States in January, he will take complete control of Americ...

The Verge: 2016 Yearbook

People hated 2016 so much, the year itself became a punchline. Indeed, we saw plenty of signs that something was amiss. Uber began taking o...

2016: the year in space

The year 2016 was a dynamic time for spaceflight and space science, marked by major technological achievements in rocketry and scientific di...