Every once in a while, a hoax or claim that's so spectacularly absurd goes viral that even the most circumspect bystanders can be taken in. Yet science doesn't stop being true just because some people ...

Born around 276 B.C. in Cyrene, Libya, Eratosthenes soon became one of the most famous mathematicians of his time. He is best known for making the first recorded measurement of the Earth’s ...

In the mid-20th century, we began launching satellites into space that would help us determine the exact circumference of the Earth: 40,030 km. But over 2000 years earlier, a man in Ancient Greece ...

Recently, a lot of celebrities (and other random people) have been asserting that the Earth is flat. Maybe they are doing it for attention. Perhaps it’s all some attention-grabbing scheme. If so, it ...

IN 240 BC, it took all of Eratosthenes’s ingenuity to estimate the circumference of the Earth within 10 per cent of the correct value. But students today can achieve a comparable level of accuracy ...