This year, io9 brought you in-depth explainer stories on topics ranging from physics and history, to cognitive science and the politics of teaching evolution in schools. Here are 23 of the most exciting ones which you may have missed.
How 19-Year-Old Zack Koppelin Is Making Life Hell for Louisiana's Creationists
8 Incredible Facts You May Not Know About Human Evolution
Americans — Why Do You Keep Refrigerating Your Eggs?
This Tiny Wearable Patch Makes You Invisible to Mosquitoes
Wine Tasting Is Bullshit — Here's Why
The 12 Cognitive Biases That Prevent You From Being Rational
What the Death of the Sun Will Look Like
The Worst Lies You've Been Told About the Singularity
Gay Marriage in the Year 100 AD
Why Does Coffee Make You Poop?
9 Ruined Cities That Remain a Mystery to this Day
The Mysterious Law That Predicts the Sizes of the World's Biggest Cities
The Science Behind What Makes an Introvert and an Extrovert
This Is Why You Aren't Sleeping Right
Why Do We Have Sex at Night?
What Is the Purpose of the Universe? Here is One Possible Answer.
Has Humanity's Explosion Become a Population Bomb?
Why You Should Starve Yourself a Little Bit Each Day
Where Memes Really Come From
Why We Should Switch to a Base-12 Counting System
The Evolutionary Biology of Star Trek
How 19-year-old activist Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana's creationists
For Zack Kopplin, it all started back in 2008 with the passing of the Louisiana Science Education Act. The bill made it considerably easier for… Read…
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8 Incredible Facts You May Not Know About Human Evolution
Homo sapiens evolved about 200-150,000 years ago in Africa, but our story as a species stretches back much further than that with early human… Read…
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Americans – why do you keep refrigerating your eggs?
The U.S. is one of the only countries on Earth that keeps chicken eggs in cold storage. But why? Read…
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This tiny, wearable patch makes you invisible to mosquitos
A mosquito can detect the carbon dioxide emanating from a prospective meal from hundreds of feet away. The Kite Patch, a small, non-toxic sticker… Read…
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Wine tasting is bullshit. Here's why.
The human palate is arguably the weakest of the five traditional senses. This begs an important question regarding wine tasting: is it bullshit, or… Read…
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The 12 cognitive biases that prevent you from being rational
The human brain is capable of 1016 processes per second, which makes it far more powerful than any computer currently in existence. But that… Read…
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What the Death of the Sun Will Look Like
About 1.2 billion years from now, the sun will begin to change. As the hydrogen fuel in its core is used up, the burning will spread outward toward… Read…
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The Worst Lies You've Been Told About the Singularity
You've probably heard of a concept known as the Technological Singularity — a nebulous event that's supposed to happen in the… Read…
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Gay marriage in the year 100 AD
Gay marriage sounds like an ultra-contemporary idea. But almost twenty years ago, a Catholic scholar at Yale shocked the world by publishing a book… Read…
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Why Does Coffee Make You Poop?
You know it when you feel it. You've just sat down at your breakfast table, or settled in at your favorite café. You're a few sips into… Read…
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8 Ruined Cities That Remain a Mystery to This Day
The world is full of ruined cities, but some have such mysterious rises and falls that they haunt our imaginations. Even if we know who built them,… Read…
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A mysterious law that predicts the size of the world's biggest cities
For the past century, an obscure mathematical principle called Zipf's law has predicted the size of mega-cities all over the world. And nobody… Read…
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The Science of What Makes an Introvert and an Extrovert
Do you like to make small talk? Do you prefer one-to-one conversations or group activities? These questions and many others often show up in… Read…
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This is why you aren't sleeping right
Why can't you get a good night's sleep? The problem is that you probably don't realize what makes you fall asleep in the first place. Read…
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Why do we have sex at night?
Humans can have sex anytime we damn well please – so why do we mostly do it in the dark? Here's what science has to say about our preference for … Read…
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What is the purpose of the Universe? Here is one possible answer.
The more we learn about the universe, the more we discover just how diverse all its planets, stars, nebulae and unexplained chunks of matter really… Read…
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Has Humanity's Explosion Become a Population Bomb?
The world's population has exploded over the past century, growing from less than 2 billion to 7 billion people. And it's not stopping. The … Read…
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Why you should starve yourself a little bit each day
We've been told since we were children that we need to eat three square meals a day. But new research shows that we don't need to be eating … Read…
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Where Memes Really Come From
Though history will probably remember Richard Dawkins as the activist who spearheaded a new atheist movement, there is something far more famous and… Read…
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Why We Should Switch To A Base-12 Counting System
Humans, for the most part, count in chunks of 10 — that's the foundation of the decimal system. Despite its near-universal adoption, however,… Read…
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The Evolutionary Biology of Star Trek
One of the big mysteries of human evolution is what happened to all the humans who shared the planet with Homo sapiens for hundreds of thousands of… Read…
onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The Best of io9's Science and History Stories in 2013