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History and Society
Placebo treatments don't always need to be given deceptively to have positive effects.
Life became a possibility in the Universe as soon as the raw ingredients were present. But living, inhabited worlds required a bit more.
Western societies seem to be getting inflammation achingly wrong.
Archaeologist Bernard Frischer spent decades uploading the ruins of the Eternal City to the cloud. Here’s what it looks like.
The most celebrated genius in human history didn't just revolutionize physics, but taught many valuable lessons about living a better life.
Our cosmic home, planet Earth, has been through a lot over the past 4.5 billion years. Here are some of its most spectacular changes
I also can’t conjure sounds, smells, or any other kind of sensory stimulation inside my head. This is called “aphantasia.”
One newly discovered, ancient star has a composition unlike any other. Explaining its existence is already blowing astronomers' minds.
From Hogwarts to hashtags, kids' reading habits have changed drastically in recent decades — but data suggests cause for hope.
Smaller family networks, more great-grandparents, and fewer cousins.
The midwest is particularly filled with them.
Parents will sometimes use children as weapons in their relationship battles — and the fallout can be devastating.
Environmental progress is happening quickly but we must keep pushing for change.
Finding it at all was a happy accident. Examining it further may help unlock the secrets hiding within the earliest galaxies of all.
Each time you fold a piece of paper, you double the paper's thickness. It doesn't take all that long to even reach the Moon.
Ketamine’s remarkable effect bolsters a new theory of mental illness.
They have held our fascination ever since we first identified their remains.
Napoleon Bonaparte was a man of many faces. European historian Michael Broers explains which are featured on the silver screen and why.
The cosmic scales governing the Universe are almost unbelievably large. What if we shrunk the Sun down to be just a grain of sand?
The U.S. ranked 59th worldwide.
Fantasy, meet statistics: The census comes to Middle-earth!
Sometimes called “the new gold,” sand is the second most exploited natural resource in the world after fresh water.
Like many of us, the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius hated waking up early, but his stoic philosophy always helped him get out of bed.
Today, the star-formation rate across the Universe is a mere trickle: just 3% of what it was at its peak. Here's what it was like back then.
Millions of people have had a near-death experience, and it often leads them to believe in an afterlife. Does this count as good proof?
As early as we've been able to identify them, the youngest galaxies seem to have large supermassive black holes. Here's how they were made.
A basement renovation project led to the archaeological discovery of a lifetime: the Derinkuyu Underground City, which housed 20,000 people.
For 550 million years, neutral atoms blocked the light made in stars from traveling freely through the Universe. Here's how it then changed.
A volley of new insights reignites the debate over whether our choices are ever truly our own.