Search
History and Society
Despite the vast number of planets in the Universe, Earth's specific evolutionary history guarantees that its life forms — including humans — are utterly unique.
The history of cartography might have been very different if the Latin version of Muhammad al-Idrisi's atlas had survived instead of the Arabic one.
Ideal models of family life have been broken by societal, technological, and cultural shifts — and we need to rethink our options.
The author of Frankenstein had an obsession with the cemetery and saw love and death as connected.
As the Manhattan Project headed for completion, German attempts to build a nuclear weapon had already been dismantled.
Explore how belief shapes destiny, from Oedipus Rex to modern geopolitics.
Music is part of the human experience, which is why some philosophers have written about it. Some had wacky ideas.
In Kannauj, perfumers have been making monsoon-infused mitti attar for centuries.
Can targeted interventions save Americans?
The use of the letter x as an unknown is a relatively modern convention.
In many ways, it was worse than Chernobyl.
Researchers estimate there may be as many as ten million trillion trillion phages on Earth — that's 10 with 30 zeros after it.
Don’t argue with science. Just do it.
As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery... consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
The arsons were no accident, archaeological evidence suggests.
A brief look at the six-decade challenge to psychiatry.
The global extent of the Revolutionary War surprises many Americans today — but it was crucial to independence.
6mins
Scientists can't define spirituality. But we can study its healing effects, says this Columbia psychologist.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
Only Caesar lived to tell the tale.
You could send your potential paramour a perfume bottle, a cigar cutter, travel plans — or maybe some cocaine.
These landscapes — of geographical differences in head shapes — have vanished from acceptable science (and cartography).
Philosophy can focus on some dull topics. Luckily, some thinkers have spent lots of time on the philosophy of sex
Grief never ends. There is no closure, but there are things we can do to mitigate the feeling of loss.
Einstein's laws of gravity have been challenged many times, but have always emerged victorious. Could wide binary stars change all that?
Meet the masterful con-men who impressed the great and the good despite the astonishing fiction of their very existence.
Now that the DSM lists severe hoarding as a disorder apart from OCD, psychologists are asking what explains its prevalence.
Almost all royal lines try to legitimize their rule with legendary origin stories. Here are five of the strangest examples.
Metaphors like the Great Chain of Being can lead people to misunderstand evolution and humanity’s place in the web of life.