Last night's episode of Agents of SHIELD was the first time this show really felt like it was "clicking," in terms of the characters and the storytelling. And I think it's a matter of this show finding its proper genre: It's not a superhero show, it's a spy show.
In today's comments, we waxed nostalgic about times outside of our own, marveled at the destructive power of an unattended rusty nail, and looked at the genre-defying and defining powers of Carrie.
New research shows that tiny bats in Central America use rolled-up leaves as acoustic horns to amplify incoming bat signals. Excluding human activities, it's the first time this technique has ever been observed in nature.
This iconic footage of a person apparently talking on a cellphone in a Charlie Chaplin film is just one clue that time travel is happening all around us. People have seen the past, and the future — and there are tons of telltale photographs and films. Here are the clearest signs of real-life time travel.
NimbleBit, Disney and LucasArts are about to unleash the ultimate weapon
Sometimes when you're trying to get your friends into a show for the first time, you have to pass along some wisdom. Like, which episodes to skip, or what stuff is worth sitting through. But which TV show do you wish you could add a warning label to, for everybody who watches it for the first time?
Can we just have her cast as Wonder Woman already?
After poring over thousands of images, the Natural History Museum has selected its favorite wildlife photographs of 2013. Prepare to see animals at their most spectacular.
The American Museum of Natural History is home to the largest collection of dinosaur fossils in the world. What better time to see some of the highlights than National Fossil Day?
The acclaimed director of Brazil was very close to making a sequel to Stanley Kurbick's apocalyptic comedy masterpiece Dr. Strangelove, but with Kubrick's approval. According to Gilliam, Kubrick had worked on a sequel called Son of Strangelove — just think about that for a second — and wanted Gilliam to direct it.
Forget horror movies. Some of the scariest moments we've ever seen have happened on television, within the short span of a half-hour or one-hour TV episode. We've painstakingly compiled the 50 scariest episodes of science fiction and fantasy television, and here are numbers 26-50.
An investigation into the potential addictiveness of high-fat and high-sugar foods has found that Oreo cookies activate more neurons in the pleasure centers of rats' brains than cocaine. But does that really mean certain foods are more addictive than hard drugs?
In New York City, genders are unevenly mixed. As men and women age, they pour into and out of neighborhoods, pooling, dispersing and redistributing across the five boroughs in a mesmerizing demographic dance that datavisualization expert John Nelson calls "gender flow." In his latest visualization, he charts this dance by assigning a dot to every person in NYC. The resulting map paints a fascinating portrait of life and death in the Big Apple.
If you have ever seen a TED Talk, you need to watch Patton Oswalt's brutal takedown of them immediately.
Tetanus, a dreaded bacterial infection, used to be a terror of the world. Frequently fatal, its first sign was the stiffening of the jaw that rendered the sufferer mute. But how does a bacterium lock a person's jaw shut, anyway?
You think you know what to expect from the remake of Carrie, coming out Friday. After all, this story has been told many times. But this new version includes smartphones and social media — and Julianne Moore takes Carrie's mom to way darker places. We talked to director Kimberly Peirce about making a 21st century Carrie.
Max Fisher from the Washington Post has compiled some maps and charts showing all Nobel Prize winners by region since 1901. Surprisingly, 83% of all Nobel laureates have come from Western countries, revealing a significant amount of scientific inequity around the globe.
Vin Diesel has released behind-the-scenes Guardians of the Galaxy footage. Watch it now.
As a post-apocalyptic fake mailman, a lot of people ask me if I had a time machine, if I would bring a modern sports almanac to my past self so I could get rich. And I answer, "If I had a time machine, I'd go back in time to a point when toilets fucking worked. Also there's no sports almanacs or sports anymore and…
NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg snapped this photo of the Great Lakes while orbiting over North America in the International Space Station.
The International Space Station orbits at roughly 420 kilometers (260 miles) above the surface of the Earth. What would it look like if the Moon circled about our planet at a similar distance? Pretty damn epic, that's what.
In China, the cockroach industry is booming... but why?
Usually, fond reminiscing is reserved for times that we've lived through. But, today, we want to know about the times and places that make you feel a sense of false nostalgia (nostalgia for a time or place that you did not / could not have lived through.)
