Earth and the entire Milky Way galaxy might be sitting inside an enormous, mysterious void—a giant cosmic hole making our universe expand faster right here than anywhere else. This unusual idea, ...

The Earth might be near the center of a vast low-density void in space, which could explain one of the cosmos's greatest ...

The Chicago White Sox held their reunion celebration for the 2005 World Series championship team, though it came just six ...

Byung-Chul Han's Burnout Society tells us that the subject of neoliberalism is not repressed but exhausted, not punished but ...

A Black girl endured racist bullying in a mostly white Chicago school. Did CPS do enough? The middle schooler faced years of bullying as educators struggled and failed to suppress it.

Colette Laxton and Mark Curry use the two-color scheme for the packaging on the products for their company, the Inkey List, and as a philosophy for their relationship — “total honesty always ...

TikTok has exploded with videos of people arguing for and against a white woman's definition of "Black fatigue." ...

Historically, the white smoke was created by burning the ballots together with dry straw. The black smoke was made from the ballots, wet straw, and with the addition of pitch to darken the color.

Here's how the conclave creates black and white smoke and why the Catholic Church began using them to signal whether a new pope has been elected.

Today, thanks to modern chemistry, the smoke is unmistakable — thick black billows for inconclusive votes, or a bright white plume when a new pope is elected.

Black smoke indicates a non-conclusive answer, and white smoke indicates that a new pope has been selected. Here's what to know about the black and white smoke used during a papal conclave.