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Volcanologists have a flair for understatement. Here is the term for the roiling, spattering 2,000-degree Fahrenheit liquid rock visible in the caldera of Kilauea volcano this afternoon: lava lake.

The president promised peace with Indians - and covertly hatched the plot that provoked one of the bloodiest conflicts on the plains.

Winston Churchill, English prime minister and one of history’s most influential statesmen, was undoubtedly a man with weighty questions on his mind.

For centuries, Aboriginal Australians have said they belonged to the oldest sustained civilization on the face of the Earth, citing their culture and history of oral storytelling that stretches back tens of thousands of years. Now, one of the most extensive analyses of Indigenous Australian DNA to date suggests that they've been right all along.

It was the greatest migration in US history. And when millions of African-Americans fled the South in search of a better life, they remade the nation in ways that are still being felt.

Most supercapacitors - electrical components that store energy - are made from aluminum, graphene or various polymers. But the materials list for the new ones being developed at Arizona State University (ASU) could be mistaken for a grocery receipt: cheddar cheese, eggs, gelatin, Gatorade.

The idea of visualizing data is old: After all, that’s what a map is - a representation of geographic information - and we’ve had maps for about 8,000 years. But it was rare to graph anything other than geography. Only a few examples exist: Around the 11th century, a now-anonymous scribe created a chart of how the planets moved through the sky. By the 18th century, scientists were warming to the idea of arranging knowledge visually.

Federal agencies are starting to embrace scenario planning, a tool developed by the military to plan for thermonuclear war .

On the flat top of a steep hill in a distant corner of northern Japan lies the tomb of an itinerant shepherd who, two millennia ago, settled down there to grow garlic.

In 1946, George Orwell traveled to the house of an acquaintance in Scotland to write his final book. He had been suffering from tuberculosis for a long time, although it’s hard to know how long exactly.

The integrated circuit, better known as the semiconductor chip, has unleashed change comparable to the Industrial Revolution by making the computer revolution and the digital age possible.

On a recent Thursday at 1:45 AM, as I watched the last dinner guests spiral down the vertigo-steep stairs from El Cocinero’s rooftop bar - to where gypsy cabs, old Chevys, and Sovietera Ladas waited along the street - the Fábrica de Arte Cubano next door appeared to be winding down, too.

Versatility has certainly given the iconic, fire hydrant red Radio Flyer some serious staying power. As of next year, the company will have been around a full century, with roots stretching back to the early 1900s when the future founder of the company, Antonio Pasin, arrived in America.

In an electoral surprise, a man from New York recently became president. No, not that man, and not from that slice of New York—Mohamed Abdullahi “Farmajo” Mohamed, a long-time resident of a Buffalo suburb and the former prime minister of Somalia, was selected as the next president of the African nation of Somalia earlier this week.

British nonprofit Alzheimer’s Research UK hopes to help the public understand Alzheimer’s better by putting people in the shoes of someone living with the disease through virtual reality. The organization has just launched an app called A Walk Through Dementia, which talks users through three first-person scenarios depicting life with Alzheimer’s. The app is designed to work on an Android phone, and a user can slip the phone into a specially designed cardboard headset for an immersive experience.

By the mid-1800s, tuberculosis had reached epidemic levels in Europe and the United States. The disease, now known to be highly infectious, attacks the lungs and damages other organs. Before the advent of antibiotics, its victims slowly wasted away, becoming pale and thin before finally dying of what was then known as consumption. The Victorians romanticized the disease and the effects it caused in the gradual build to death.

At nearly 200 miles in length, the Whanganui is New Zealand’s longest navigable river. It starts as an alpine stream, then gains steam with waters from other major tributaries.

The Mariana Trench is one of the most enigmatic spots in the ocean. This crescent-shaped scar in the Earth’s crust forms where the Pacific plate collides and sinks below the Philippine plate. It runs for 1,500 miles and contains the deepest spot known in the ocean: the Challenger Deep, which hides 6.83 miles below the surface.

The Pittsburgh Courier, a leading African-American newspaper at the time, praised Wallace for endorsing what they called the “Double V” campaign. The Double Victory campaign, launched by the Courier in 1942, became a rallying cry for black journalists, activists and citizens to secure both victory over fascism abroad during World War II and victory over racism at home.

In recent months, millions of Aedes aegypti mosquitos have been at work spreading the Zika virus in South and Central America. This summer, millions more, all capable of conveying the virus, will flit and bite throughout the southern United States. Congress just approved funding to battle its spread. This is not the first time a mosquito-borne virus has broken loose in the Americas and it will not likely be the last. Indeed, mosquitoes and viruses have shaped the history of our hemisphere in surprising ways for centuries.