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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
Some scientists think we should allow our bodies to more harmlessly live with pathogens until they’re cleared from our systems.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Does humanity have a moral imperative to seed life on lifeless worlds? And should we avoid colonizing a planet if life already exists there?
Within a month of that initial conversation, Peter Singer became a vegetarian.
The Shirky Principle states that "institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution."
Soviet censorship was thorough yet fallible.
George Orwell got it right: "Never use a long word where a short one will do."
The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth's crust.
But make sure you bring the fossegrim the proper offering—or else.
Cyberattacks are growing in number and sophistication.
The classic picture of Jupiter's great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
Raw food, paleo, gluten-free, detox, and ketogenic: All of these diet fads withered when subjected to scientific scrutiny.
The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia may be due to a "reality threshold" that is lower than it should be.
Claims of a "loneliness epidemic" aren't based on robust data. Loneliness might be a problem, but it's not worse than it was in the past.
There may be a symmetrical interdependence between order and chaos.
When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our "lucky stars" enabled our existence.
500 sheep were slaughtered to produce the 2,060 pages of the "Codex Amiatinus," a Latin translation of the Bible.
Large language models are an impressive advance in AI, but we are far away from achieving human-level capabilities.
Some say that the Sun is a green-yellow color, but our human eyes see it as white, or yellow-to-red during sunset. What color is it really?
Archaeologists can learn how societies lived by studying what they left behind when they died. Astronomers are doing much the same thing.