Chinese characters are made up of strokes. Learning to write them involves not only learning where all the strokes go, but also the order in which they are supposed to be written and the direction of each individual stroke (left to right, up to down, etc.

BIG QUESTIONS
Everyone has heard people say that they are “bad at remembering names,” or maybe you are one who claims it. If so, you're not alone. “Most people are bad at remembering names,” says Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of
Noise-canceling headphones seem like an oxymoron: a piece of audio technology that creates silence, rather than noise. They’re useful on planes, in crowded offices, and for light sleepers trying to catch some shut-eye in a thin-walled apartment, but how c
There's a major difference between your body and your environment.
This week, NBA center Jason Collins announced he was gay in a cover story for Sports Illustrated. In other words, he "came out of the closet." This expression for revealing one's homosexuality seems natural. Being in the closet implies hiding from the out
As a marker of singularity, our voices are as effective as our fingerprints. Though people may share a similar pitch or certain vocal characteristics, under close examination, no two voices are alike. Height, weight, hormones, provenance, allergies, struc
Pharaohs were normally meticulous shavers, according to most archaeologists and historians. So why did they wear false beards while eliminating real ones?
Named after the great Roman emperor, Julius Caesar, yet he was not the first baby born by the procedure.
Matt Soniak answers today's Big Question.
Even if you’ve never had your own brush with the law, you no doubt know the Miranda warning. But who was it named after?
Earth Day is here again, serving as an annual reminder of the need to reduce, reuse, and recycle our way to a better planet.
Reader Darren wrote in to ask, "When and why did people start saying um when they are talking?"
Even the Oxford English Dictionary admits they have no evidence of the actual origin.
People have long been known to willfully pull out their own hair owing to anxiety, but it’s widely believed that chronic stress can cause inadvertent hair loss as well.
The unfortunate and untimely death of a young Foreign Service Officer in a suicide bombing on April 6 in Afghanistan’s Zabul province has drawn attention to the careers of U.S. diplomats.
Musical power couple Beyoncé and Jay-Z jetted down to a tropical and somewhat-forbidden destination last week for their fifth wedding anniversary: Cuba. Because of travel restrictions to the country, the couple’s trip raised the eyebrows of some U.S. lawm
It's amazing that we ever got along without "OK." But we did. Until 1839.
At one time or another, though, we’ve all been the emotional drunk, a condition typically marked by ill-timed espousals of affection (or reprisal), acute introspection, and an incontrollable urge to cry in the middle of a crowded bar.
If you're a kid learning how to write, English spelling can seem like a cruel prank.
Whatever significance the number nine had to the phrase, it doesn’t seem to have always been specific to clothing.
When I was a little dinosaur fan, all I wanted was a pet dinosaur. An Apatosaurus would have been choice—big enough to be impressive, but not especially likely to eat me. But that’s never going to happen. As much as I hate to say that science will never s
It's time to pull out those calculators and do the math with the density and volume to determine the total water content of the cloud.