Screenshot from Grand Theft Auto 5Phil RoseLast week saw the launch of the world’s fastest revenue-generating piece of entertainment in history. There’s a good chance that this…

Dr. Hans Reiter achieved the one thing most likely to keep a physician’s name in textbooks forever: He got an illness named after him. While working as a medic in the German army…

You may have heard that Chinese researchers are not very well compensated, compared to their Western counterparts. What you might not know is that they can increase their income by…

It’s pamper time for Maddie, 16, who’s sitting down for a manicure right now, but not before telling her 2,000 Twitter followers. “Spa day,” the teen taps out, her long blond…

About six years ago, I was putting a new roof on a 200-year-old house on an island in Maine when I got a call from Justin Timberlake’s cousin and assistant, a girl named Melissa.…

Fame may be an unavoidable aspect of reality, an inherent part of the human condition, or just a quirk in the minds of some smart, social primates. In any case, it brings with it big…

Jodie Foster listens for aliens in Contact.Yesterday Science published a study including “strong evidence that Voyager 1,” an unmanned spacecraft launched in 1977, “has crossed…

Are your neurons thrown off by this photo? ShutterstockMost of us have an uneasy love/hate relationship with celebrity culture. No matter how much we try to pretend we’re above it…

The year was 1986. It was my first week at my first real job in science after finishing undergraduate work. I just had recently been hired as a scientific programmer at NASA’s Goddard…

When Kim Kardashian was 4 years old, a University of California economist named Moshe Adler wrote a six-page paper explaining the means by which she would eventually attain worldwide…