A fire consumed the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris, destroying two thirds of its roof and bringing down its spire in what investigators believe is an accident.

After a nine-hour operation that involved nearly 400 firefighters, the Paris fire department announced this morning that "the entire fire is out."

Photos of the damage inside and outside the cathedral.

An art historian recently undertook a massive 3D laser scanning project at Notre Dame, where he collected over one billion data points.

Gothic cathedrals were built to withstand these kinds of disasters, "so that if the roof burns off, it’s hard for [the fire] to spread to the rest of the building."

YouTube's algorithm interpreted video of the Notre Dame fire as Sept. 11 footage, and placed a descriptive link of the World Trade Center attacks under a livestream of the cathedral fire.

A collection of the hoaxes that sprouted around the Notre Dame fire.

In the early 19th century, Notre Dame was in half-ruins, when Victor Hugo's novel helped inspire a revitalization.

The 2019 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced.

Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang pledges to make stump speeches via hologram.

A profile of Lavish Printing, a T-shirt shop that memorializes people killed by gun violence in South Florida.

"Someone simply driving down a street or sitting in a park one day with their phone out is now within the official dataprint of an investigation." The revelations around Google’s Sensorvault, a massive database of device location records, raise questions from both a political and narrative point of view.

A new science, "sociogenomics," probes connections between your DNA and your socioeconomic circumstances.

Empathy has evolved lately into “selective empathy”—and much for the worse. We’d do better to pursue “selfish empathy” instead.

"I practiced over and over again, in every environment on offer, for audiences of all available attitudes and sizes." A new way to cure glossophobia (the fear of public speaking): virtual reality training.

Your word of the week: "poecilonym," a rare synonym for the word "synonym."

As boomers age and the US approaches a historic spike in deaths, traditional funerals are becoming more personal, less morbid.

"I was rooting for Tiger yesterday, but to be more accurate: I was selfishly rooting to relive my own past." Why Tiger Woods’s win at the Masters moved so many.

Video: The Stratolaunch, the world’s largest airplane, flew over the Mojave desert in California this weekend. Its wingspan is wider than a football field.

A climbing account from the first Afghan woman to summit 24,580-foot Mount Noshaq, her country’s highest mountain.

A "pollenpocalypse” overtook North Carolina recently, with massive clouds of pollen tinting the sky yellow.

"All the farmers markets and patio cocktails and river views in the world couldn’t replace me losing my identity." A single parent moves from the city to the suburbs, and back again.

The best urban areas are grown, not planned—a process called "climax urbanism."