Search
History and Society
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.
5mins
Geniuses and prodigies are captivating. But generalists rule the world.
John Templeton Foundation
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.
7mins
This network physicist is mapping the world's most significant data to create the most beautiful visualizations of information we have ever seen.
John Templeton Foundation
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.
The researchers rebuked writers, scholars, and public figures for lazily perpetuating the notion of widespread gender bias in academic science.
Rather than sending serial killer art to auctions, it should be sent to abnormal psychologists for research.
You can learn a lot about life through literature's most unrespectable and heinous characters.
6mins
Aimless wandering is essential for understanding yourself. Here’s why.
A new, unexpected brightening, just 3 years after a massive dimming event, has astronomers watching Betelgeuse. Is a supernova imminent?
“Who is the aggressor?” That depends on which of these maps you believe.
Man does not live by measurement alone.
John Templeton Foundation
The Source Family, a radical 1970s utopian commune, still impacts what we eat today.
We know that everything changes, but we long for something more permanent.
4mins
Science has opened so many doors to humanity’s understanding of the world. Scientism shuts them. Here’s how to tell the difference.