Aristotle called the artichoke a "cactus," but it wasn't a case of ancient Greek botany gone wrong. Back then, the word for an artichoke--or at least its closest relative, a kind of wild artichoke ...

This week, people around the world will be opening heart-shaped boxes with “the food of the gods” nestled in crepe paper inside. But it took a lot of scientific and anthropological work to unearth the ...

Linguist Gareth Roberts joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the etymologies of English words. How did the first languages first form? Was there once a single common language ...

One of my college history professors once claimed that the reason there is no English word that rhymes with orange is that it is one of the few words derived from Persian. He was only partly right; ...

This story originally appeared on Mental Floss. Every two years we get to marvel at them — no, not the superhuman feats of strength and skill from the greatest athletes in the world, but the weird and ...

Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan receives funding from the European Research Council Project #809994 DHARMA. Forest creatures include some of humanity’s closest biological relatives. Due to human threats, they ...

In the 1660s, Robert Hooke looked through a primitive microscope at a thinly cut piece of cork. He saw a series of walled boxes that reminded him of the tiny rooms, or cellula, occupied by monks.