iLiteracy

1,350 light-years: the distance to a “fiery ribbon” stretching across the Orion Nebula, captured recently by a submillimeter-wavelength camera inside Chile’s Atacama Pathfinder Experiment telescope. The ribbon is actually a glow given off by cold interstellar dust at wavelengths too long for hu ...

A water slide for worms, the glorious C. instagram, and more    

A water slide for worms, the glorious C. instagram, and more Click here to enter the gallery Is this the era of C. instagram? That's the clever name of a cellphone photo one undergraduate took of a plate crawling with C. elegans (it kind of rhymes). Caenorhabditis elegans are microscopic worms ...

Plus the most beautiful image of Earth, New York City on Venus, and the world's largest (deflated) rubber duck. Click here to enter the gallery     

Plus the most beautiful picture of Earth, New York City on Venus, and the world's largest (deflated) rubber duck    

CNN's Nic Robertson says a rare interview with Bashar al-Assad shows the Syrian president hasn't changed his narrative.

CNN's Dan Rivers reports on the influx of companies into Myanmar as the country opens up to foreign business.

CNN's Becky Anderson speaks with Leonardo DiCaprio about his new film, "The Great Gatsby," at the Cannes Film Festival.

President Barack Obama speaks to graduates at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He makes fun of the rainy weather.

A lone ticket in Zephyrhills, Florida, has won the $590.5 million jackpot. The ticket was purchased at a grocery store.

Valletta, Malta August 2012

Valletta, Malta August 2012

St. George's Square, Valletta Malta August 2012

Valletta, Malta August 2012

Ruaha's landscape toward the end of the dry season (middle October) is austere, leaving the zebra and baobabs to stand out.

The harlequin ladybug is an aggressive invasive species that has leveraged intraguild predation to devastate native ladybug populations. Saving those native species might now rest on finding ways to eliminate a parasitic fungus that was recently discovered inside harlequins and that may be respo ...

Many of the species of sharks (and shark relatives) that Paul Clerkin studies live at such depths that the only contact they have with humans is when they surface as bycatch on commercial trawlers. On a two-month voyage aboard one such vessel last year, Clerkin, a graduate student at Moss Landin ...

A ship is undoubtedly the noblest machine that ever was invented; and consists of so many parts, that it would require a whole volume to describe it minutely. However, we shall endeavour to satisfy the reader the more fully on this head.

Languages change—sometimes abruptly, sometimes at a predictable rate, almost always profoundly. Linguists are pressing on with their long-standing quest to trace the evolution of the languages we speak, even as so many of those languages are disappearing. Step inside for more on this complex sub ...

What are America's urban trees and forests worth? A recent study suggests that when it comes to carbon storage and sequestration, their economic value soars to more than $50 billion.