Hannah Herbst, an eighth grader in Boca Raton, Florida, just became America’s Top Young Scientist. The 14-year-old designed and built a small turbine she calls BEACON, for Bringing Electricity Access to Countries Through Ocean Energy Collection. “Shortly after school began,” Herbst wrote in a blog post for the contest, “I received a letter from my…

Thousands of people in China saw what looked like a giant, floating city in early October, spurringconspiracy theories involving holograms or a window into a parallel universe. While thoses theories were obviously false, there’s actually some cool science that explains how people saw an entire city as a mirage floating in the sky. It has to do with physics…

You may have heard by now that you’re not supposed to flush medication down the toilet. Dozens of scientific studies have found remnants of our medications in rivers, lakes, and streams. And fish don’t need your unused Ambien — it could even hurt them. It’s not just old pills that cause drugs to build up in…

Marijuana today really is stronger that it was in the 1970s, according to several recent reports. Estimates on just how much stronger vary, since marijuana is a tricky thing to measure. Its status as a Schedule I drug, and its incredible variability in potency based on where it’s grown and how it’s ingested make it difficult…

Ten years ago, about $43,000 could cover your home’s rooftop in solar panels. Today the average gross cost is about $29,000 — and the efficiency of converting sunlight into electricity has nearly doubled in that time. This effectively makes the cost of an efficient solar roof lower than the average price of a new car…

High schoolers now report using marijuana more than cigarettes or cigars, according to a US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Oct. 15. In 1997, 21% of high schoolers said they had smoked a cigarette or cigar on one or more days in the last 30 days. By 2013 (the newest data available), only…

If you want to know how good your relationship is, ask yourself: How much do you laugh together? Couples who laugh together reported higher quality relationships, in a study published in Personal Relationships this August. The researchers, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recorded 71 heterosexual couples telling the story of how…

When you’re mapping a coastline, how exactly do you decide what to measure? How many nooks and crannies of shoreline do you trace? What is a coastline, anyway? Coastlines are living, changing entities. The tide goes out, and the length of the shore changes when it comes back in. Hurricanes can reshape the entire makeup of coastal ecosystems. Climate…

The United States is on track to hit a big number in renewable energy: More than 1 million American homes should have solar panels by February 2016. While solar still makes up a tiny part of the sliver of renewables that power the US, it has increased exponentially in the past decade. And the solar…

I think we can agree that except for maybe two weeks out of the year, tomatoes from the supermarket taste like nothing. They’re gorgeous and enticingly red — they lure you in with their looks — but they taste terrible. They’re a fleshy disappointment. Yet there is hope. Researchers at the University of Florida, led…