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…

Newborn babies don’t shiver. It turns out, they just don’t need to. Older children and adults shiver when they’re cold as a way to create heat. Shivering causes muscles to expand and contract really quickly, which in turn, creates warmth. But babies have more of a type of fat that keeps them warm instead. This brown…

In August 1997, Patient 2 was kicked in the chest and had a heart attack. He went into a coma and was declared to be in a vegetative state. Sixteen years later, at the age of 34, he was still in a coma, though minimally conscious: He could sometimes follow objects with his eyes. Still, in…

On the most recent episode of “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver pointed out how foolish it is to blame gun violence on mental illness — and then deftly pivoted into a discussion on how desperately we need better mental healthcare in this country. His most striking stat, which comes from a study that cited the…

Sometimes looking at the big picture is the best way to understand what’s going on. That’s definitely the case for figuring out where the world’s energy comes from and goes. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory makes these energy flow maps showing where energy comes from and how this energy is used for each country and the…