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History and Society
Get ready for the most peculiar road trip that will help you understand the vastness and emptiness of the solar system — and Sweden.
No, Gandhi did not single-handedly bring about Indian independence. Pacifism alone usually gets you killed.
The biggest nuclear blast in history came courtesy of Tsar Bomba. We could make something at least 100 times more powerful.
When done right, dark humor can help us face inconvenient truths and question stifling social conventions.
But it's still challenging to build a 22,000-mile elevator.
Roosevelt had become president but not in the way he wanted. Still, he understood that he had been given the rare opportunity to make history.
Headlines have blared that quasar ticking confirms that time passed more slowly in the early Universe. That's not how any of this works.
Perhaps there was something theatrically satisfying about a learned man waving around a flask of pee, looking at it from all angles, sniffing it, and making bold proclamations.
If you want to write and speak well, use common words, not grandiose ones. Unless you're Shakespeare, you're more likely to annoy people.
Math can explain why your laces spontaneously come untied — and how to stop it.
Functional complex systems arise from functional simple systems. Failing to heed this advice can and will lead to disaster.
For thousands of years, we puzzled at how far away the Moon was. Today we know its distance, at any time, to within millimeters.
A philosophical debate spanning creation, free will, and a sneaky teapot.
Dante’s epic journey through hell and heaven reveal how the poet felt about his own country.
It's like combining Google Translate with a time machine.
When you turn a map of East Asia upside down, Beijing’s geographic constraints and regional ambitions become much clearer.
6mins
Knowing your key strengths can make you happy in anything you do. Here’s how to identify them.
You become the main protagonist in these novels.
While Saturn and its moons all appear faint and cloudy to JWST, Saturn's rings are the star of the show. Here's the big scientific reason.
Over the past two decades, the proportion of those who identify as bisexual increased from 1.2% to 4.5%.
A marine reptile fossil from Svalbard challenges ideas about evolution and Earth’s greatest mass extinction.
For better and worse, the Columbian Exchange plugged the Americas into the global system — and there was no going back.
The crisis of the Anthropocene challenges our traditional narratives and myths about humanity's place in the world. Citizen science can help.
John Templeton Foundation
Since 2012, the amount of time that teenagers spend socializing in person has plummeted. Is it a coincidence that depression is more common?
There's an entire Universe out there. So, with all that space, all those planets, and all those chances at life, why do we all live here?
They had the technology. So why didn't they use it?
Is mathematics woven into the very fabric of reality? Or is it merely a product of the human mind?
Due to export controls from China, the Europeans had to invent their own forms of porcelain. One type involves dead cows.
It is generally ineffective, occasionally poisonous, and driving numerous species to the brink of extinction.