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Feel a Connection to a Celebrity You've Never Met? Your Bond May Be 'Parasocial,' Which Is Cambridge Dictionary's Word of the Year for 2025 The term is used to describe "a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person t...
Humans Sync Their Blinks and Brain Waves to a Song's Beat While you may not realize it, your physical responses to music, like nodding your head or tapping your foot, are conscious decisions that you can control. However, according to neuroscient...
Sotheby's Hospices de Beaune Charity Wine Sale Nets $21.4 M. in France The annual Hospices de Beaune charity wine auction in Burgundy, France, organized by Sotheby's, made €18.75 million ($21.5 million) on Sunday. It was the third highest total a...
Meet the Superheroes Serving Silicon Valley's Unhoused In the heart of Silicon Valley's glamorous tech paradise, modern-day superheroes known as Batman of San Jose and Crimson Fist are stepping up where many fear to tread. These anonymous heroes ...
A new study reversed transplant rejection twice, uncovering the reasons for transplant rejection on a cellular level :focal(750x343:751x344)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/24/46/24460a5c-42b2-479e-ba24-f0d965...
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The Thumbs Up Debate: When Generations Collide Gen Zers have been campaigning against the ubiquitous thumbs up emoji for years, viewing it as a passive-aggressive, low-effort response. Recently, one Gen Z LinkedIn user, Yanni Pappas, proudly decl...
Conservationists have discovered a previously unknown species of snake, slithering around one of Earth's most unique environments. In naming their new reptile, researchers decided to honor one of popular culture's most unique and beloved wildlife edu...
Tuberculosis (TB) remains the world's deadliest infectious disease, claiming over 1.2 million lives every year. However, in clinics like the Boniaba Community Health Center in Mali, the process of diagnosing TB has been transformed thanks to the inte...
From Waffle Gardens to Terraces: Indigenous Groups Revive Farming Heritage in America's Deserts In 1985, with two young daughters and little money, Roxanne Swentzell, a Native American sculptor and ceramic artist, returned from her studies in Por...
Though soy sauce is ubiquitous today, it was not always a feature of American palates. By some accounts, the very first person to begin processing Midwestern soy crops into the delicious fermented condiment at an industrial scale started it all in a ...
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Thanksgiving, a time of thanks and feasting, often comes with an unanticipated environmental cost. From extra food waste to increased carbon emissions, the holiday season may have a significant impact on our planet. However, choosing eco-friendly opt...
Scientists & Nuns Unite to Save Mexico's Rare Achoque Salamanders For the last 20 years, Dominican nuns in a Mexican monastery have cared for the largest known captive population of the critically endangered achoque salamander. Now scientists fro...
A woman named Rebecca Boening was driving on the highway when her blood sugar unexpectedly dropped to a dangerous level. Boening has diabetes, and the condition, known as hypoglycemia, can leave people feeling weak, disoriented, and even cause them t...
Art Basel Hong Kong Names 240 Galleries for 2026 Fair, with New Names and Notable Absences The list of exhibitors for the 2026 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong remains about the same size as last year's roster, with some new exhibitors and some not...
Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Welcomes KPop Demon Hunters Balloon Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and one of the most anticipated elements of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade this year is the debut of a new balloon featuring characters...
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In mid-October, a mysterious object cracked the windshield of a packed Boeing 737 cruising at 36,000 feet above Utah, forcing the pilots into an emergency landing. While the object was likely a remnant of a weather balloon, the speculation that it wa...
A morning mist hangs over the palm trees in Pasadena, California, as birds chatter and cars roar by on the streets. It's a scene that evokes a tropical island rather than a bustling city in northeast Los Angeles county. "It feels parrot-y," says Die...
Crewed-Uncrewed Teaming Takes Flight In a groundbreaking demonstration, the US Air Force and three major defense contractors have successfully linked an F-22 Raptor fighter jet with a GA-ASI MQ-20 Avenger unmanned aircraft. This milestone event, ...
Brian Alpert's path was always destined for the aerospace industry, but his journey turned toward NASA's Johnson Space Center during his sophomore year in college. That was when Tricia Mack, who works in NASA's Transportation Integration Office withi...
Few people spend more meaningful time with kids than their teachers. From the classroom to the playground to after-school pickup, teachers witness daily moments that often reveal what a child's home life is like...and which parents are consistently s...
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The Vanna Venturi House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania On a quiet street in Chestnut Hill, you'll find a small grey-green home that, on first glance, might look quite ordinary. Keep looking, however, and you'll begin to notice unusual specificitie...
NASA is inviting media to attend the launch of the first crewed Moon mission under its Artemis campaign. The Artemis II test flight, targeted for early 2026, will send a crew of four astronauts - NASA's Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, an...
Chronic Pain Linked to Rising Blood Pressure Risk Chronic pain in adults may raise the likelihood of developing high blood pressure, and factors such as where the pain is located, how widespread it is, and whether a person also has depression app...
After the journey through the winding roads of Hong Kong Island's verdant south side, the first sight that greets visitors to the popular beach town of Shek O is the much-loved bus terminus. Though many beachgoers will make a beeline straight for the...
As its whiskers flitter, the mouse's brain sparks with activity. A tiny implant records the electrical chatter and beams it to a nearby computer. Smaller than a grain of salt, the implant is powered by and transmits data with light. Unlike most impla...
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The powerful coronal mass ejection would have likely destroyed the atmospheres of any potentially habitable planets nearby :focal(960x549:961x550)/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer_public/75/bc/75bc3d3e-ea3d-4394-93d3-...
Watch Four Furry and Adorable Cheetah Cubs on the Smithsonian National Zoo's Online Feed The "strong, active" and "vocal" babies were born during the government shutdown, and they and their 5-year-old, first-time mother, Amabala, are thriving...
Bring Back the Mayoral Transition Tent More than a decade ago, New York City prepared for a new mayor who'd energized the electorate with big promises. Earlier this month, Zohran Mamdani woke up after election night with the same big challenge Bi...
Crafty Creations: 49 Impressive DIY Projects The world is full of talented, creative individuals who pour their hearts into unique DIY projects. From intricate embroidery to whimsical sculptures, these 49 impressive crafts showcase the incredible...
Millions of patients have developed long COVID, a chronic condition that involves a range of symptoms, including fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, and palpitations, that persist for at least three months after infection. In a new analysis of adult parti...
Brightcast is dedicated to restoring faith in humanity by highlighting the progress, solutions, and kindness that often go unnoticed. We believe in a balanced worldview.
Read our full mission →
Controversial NEH Grants Raise Concerns The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) has come under scrutiny for its recent grant allocations, with nearly 10% of its $207 million annual budget going to support just two awards. One of the gran...
Perlmutter Supercomputer Simulates Quantum Chip at Unprecedented Scale More than 7,000 NVIDIA GPUs have been used to simulate a quantum microchip, pushing the limits of one of the world's most powerful supercomputers. This unprecedented full-scal...
NASA Invites Media to Artemis II Moon Mission Launch The NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket and Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission, on the mobile launch platform at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, with a full moon in the backgr...
A Slowdown, Not Salvation: New Extinction Data Reveals State of Life on Earth For decades, biologists have warned that humanity is precipitating a sixth mass extinction. By some estimates, species are vanishing at up to a thousand times the natur...
The Old Jewish Cemetery in Riga, Latvia For the first two centuries of its existence, the story of Riga's Old Jewish Cemetery was like the story of any other Jewish cemetery in Europe. The cemetery was established in 1725 at what was then the out...
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Animals survive in changing and unpredictable environments by not merely responding to new circumstances, but also, like humans, by forming inferences about their surroundings. For instance, squirrels understand that certain bird noises don't signal ...
The Phillips Collection to Sell Major Works, Vatican Returns 62 Artifacts to Indigenous Peoples Controversial Sale at The Phillips Collection The Phillips Collection, an art museum in Washington, DC, plans to auction off major works by artis...
Researchers at ChristianaCare's Gene Editing Institute have demonstrated that turning off the NRF2 gene with CRISPR technology can make lung cancer cells responsive to chemotherapy again. By blocking this gene, the treatment restores how tumors react...
Costume Art: Exploring the Bond Between Fashion and Visual Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Costume Institute is set to open a groundbreaking exhibition called "Costume Art" in spring 2026. This exhibition will examine the deep connection bet...
17 Life Hacks People Almost Didn't Want to Share (But Thankfully Did) Everyone has their own "secret sauce" that makes them unique. A couple hundred people were kind enough to share their best life hacks on a recent social media post. Here are 17...