Edward Gibson

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft captured this view of Earth—appearing as a speck of light—on February 14, 1980, at a distance of roughly 3.2 billion miles (6 billion km) from the Sun—beyond the orbit of Neptune. The words of Carl Sagan, as featured in his 1994 book, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of a Human Future in Space, best describes the significance of this ultra-famous image:... Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human…

Even lawyers aren’t big fans of legal jargon. A new study has found that lawyers have an easier time remembering legal documents written in simple English over those filled with so-called legalese. They also seem to prefer the simpler version for themselves and their clients.The FTC Just Prescribed a Can of Whoop Ass on Health DataLast year, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a paper looking closely at the phenomenon of incomprehensible legal language.The team analyzed thousands of legal…

Photo: NASAEach of the three Skylab missions set new space duration records, with the Skylab 2 mission lasting for 28 days, Skylab 3 for 59 days, and the third and final mission, Skylab 4, lasting for 84 days—a record that stood for 20 years and was finally broken during the Shuttle-Mir program. Skylab 4 launched on November 15, 1973 and ended on February 8, 1974. Planners initially overextended the Skylab 4 astronauts, leading to “frustrations as the astronauts struggled to keep up with the blistering pace of the…

The truth can finally be unearthed.Image: Shutterstock (Shutterstock)This year’s Ig Nobel winners are here, and they’re just as eye-catching and baffling as usual. Among the selections are a study showing that love at first sight may be detectable through synchronized heartbeats, an answer to why legal documents are so incomprehensible, and the discovery of the most effective way to open a door.Running since 1991, the Ig Nobels are the brainchild of the Annals of Improbable Research magazine and are co-sponsored by the…