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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
We often assume that movement means progress and that doing something is better than doing nothing. That is often not true.
Thanks to protocols established centuries ago in Europe, world leaders no longer need to worry about having their heads bashed with an axe.
The clash of academic archaeology and what might be called folk archaeology comes into stark focus at Stonehenge.
We need a hypothesis that accounts for both the fine-tuning of physics for life but also the arbitrariness and gratuitous suffering we find in the world.
The combined intellectual heft of multiple “big thinkers” delivered arguably the most successful scientific theory in history.
Survivorship bias occurs when we fail to consider how data was collected. To combat this, search for the "silent evidence."
What do ghosts and anomalous galaxy rotation rates have in common? Some sci-fi enthusiasts believe the answer involves "parallel universes."
Sometimes, going "deeper" doesn't reveal the answers you seek. By viewing more Universe with better precision, ESA's Euclid mission shines.
Destruction of the Ukrainian dam unleashed a catastrophic flood—and surfaced centuries of cultural heritage. Now there’s a call not to rebuild it.
If the Universe is expanding, and the expansion is accelerating, what does that tell us about the cause of the expanding Universe?
Bathtubs and toilets each got their own rooms until health professionals urged architects to put all the plumbing in one room.
Everything we observe beyond our Local Group is speeding away from us, omnidirectionally. If the Universe is expanding, where is the center?
Scientists agree that eons ago, a bacterium took up residence inside another cell and became its powerhouse, the mitochondrion. But there are competing theories about the birth of other organelles such as the nucleus and endoplasmic reticulum.
Many countries' histories are governed by the familiar demographic story of growth, industrialization, and decline. But not France.
AI was key to making Moderna's COVID mRNA vaccine. Its role in mRNA therapeutics will rapidly grow in the coming years.
In 1054, a core-collapse supernova occurred 6500 light-years away. In 2023, JWST imaged the remnant, and might solve a massive mystery.