BIG QUESTIONS

One thing is for sure: It’s not because we find it funny. In fact, many people find tickling very unpleasant. So why does it make us laugh?

All-Stars on contending teams may have cause to try their hardest once they get to the Midsummer Classic, but what motivates them to get there? And I mean that in the most cynical sense.

Immortality is nice and all, but it doesn't keep strudel on the table.

Just as we humans cling to our air conditioners and plunge our heads into the freezer in the summer months, koalas have found a source of relief from stifling temperatures.

Not recently, of course. But what about their ancestors? The question is: Did the flightless birds of today, a family known as Ratites, evolve from flightless birds of yore or did their airborne ancestors lose the ability to fly over the millennia?

The "anti-gravity treadmill" was originally invented by Robert Whalen, a biomechanics researcher at NASA Ames Research Center, in the 1990s. Hint: It *doesn't* defy the laws of physics.

The overarching drive in naming practices over time seems not to be toward giving names pre-determined masculine or feminine properties, but toward keeping them different.

Owning a casino isn't much of a gamble. In almost every game, the casino has a statistical advantage—so for every one gambler raking it in, there’s more than enough people leaving with empty pockets to net an enormous profit. But between the rolling dice

Terrible and terrific are both formed off the same root: terror. Both started out a few hundred years ago with the meaning of terror-inducing. But terrific took a strange turn at the beginning of the 20th century and ended up meaning really great, not ter

Climate models are predicting that this fall, there's a 75 percent chance that an El Niño will occur. But just what is this weather phenomenon, and how does it affect us?