Massive wildfires cost billions of dollars and burn millions of acres in the U.S. every year, but we know surprisingly little about the basic science of how they spread. At the Fire Lab in Missoula, Montana, researchers reverse-engineer spreading fires using wind tunnels, fire-whirl generators, and giant combustion chambers. They’re finding that fire is a mysterious…

#171572331 / gettyimages.com Insight from Esther Inglis-Arkell: Going with the herd makes us feel safe, but herd behavior can go very wrong. It’s not just crowds panicking and trampling. Enough of a crowd, and enough familiarity, will let smart people make exactly the wrong choice…. When the energy of the crowd heats up, or when…

Even if one forgets one’s glasses, it’s possible to read a few words of small print through a simple technique. It’s not magic, it’s science:

We’ve sent advanced probes to the outer solar system, but there are still new, surprising discoveries to be made. One of those discoveries is described in the video below, where astronomers learned that even asteroids can have their own ring systems.