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History & Society
Trace how culture, power, and ideas shape societies across time.
We value human life in a way that assumes we possess a sacred something not found in beings like lambs, turkeys, or mosquitoes.
The quadratic formula isn't just something that teachers use to torture algebra students. The Babylonians once used it to calculate taxes.
America’s war in Southeast Asia is fading fast from memory. These maps offer a horrific reminder.
In general, 5G is not a threat to human health or activities, but there are some legitimate questions about interference with airplane instruments.
Yes, the Universe is expanding, but you might wonder, "How fast is it expanding?"
Historically, periods of mass flourishing are underpinned by technological revolutions. Currently, we are undergoing a technological revolution unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Although saying the wrong thing could often get you killed in ancient civilizations, history shows that the ideal of free speech has deep roots.
65 million years ago, an asteroid strike caused the 5th great mass extinction. Could we save Earth, today, from a similar event?
The U.S. has the world's largest debt in absolute terms, but Japan's is the largest when measured in terms of its debt-to-GDP ratio.
The pulse took just 35 hours to cover the whole world.
When Saint Ambrose of Milan was venerated, his life became public property, its meaning expanding with the unique interpretations of each new generation.
With this unique opportunity to create a totally new world, why does the metaverse already feature such old-world concepts?
Many first-hand accounts from the golden age of piracy were grossly embellished, meaning it's extremely difficult to separate Blackbeard the legend from Edward Thatch the person.
Space planes could radically lower the cost of spaceflight.
One hundred years ago, a Ukrainian flag flew over Vladivostok and other parts of the “Russian” Far East.
For a long time, important events could only be visualized retroactively through paintings. Photography allowed us to capture history as — or sometimes even before — it happened.
A new analysis of an ancient hominin fossil sheds light on the "Out of Africa" dispersal events that occurred more than one million years ago.
In scientific theories, the Multiverse appears as a bug rather than as a feature. We should squash it.
According to Sigmund Freud, our revulsion at taboos is an attempt to suppress a part of us that actually wants to do them.
There are ~400 billion stars in the Milky Way, and ~2 trillion galaxies in the visible Universe. But what if we aren't typical?