History and Society

History and Society

jupiter
The classic picture of Jupiter's great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
a painting of a cucumber with a face on it.
Raw food, paleo, gluten-free, detox, and ketogenic: All of these diet fads withered when subjected to scientific scrutiny.
a painting of a couch and a hot air balloon.
The hallucinations that characterize schizophrenia may be due to a "reality threshold" that is lower than it should be.
A person standing on top of a rock in the water.
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.
asteroid deliver organics to Earth
When the Universe was first born, the ingredients necessary for life were nowhere to be found. Only our "lucky stars" enabled our existence.
a painting of a man and a woman playing instruments.
500 sheep were slaughtered to produce the 2,060 pages of the "Codex Amiatinus," a Latin translation of the Bible.
a computer generated image of a man's head in a doorway.
Large language models are an impressive advance in AI, but we are far away from achieving human-level capabilities.
sun photographed from space
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?
a bright star surrounded by stars in the sky.
Archaeologists can learn how societies lived by studying what they left behind when they died. Astronomers are doing much the same thing.
a close up of a metal object with a reflection in it.
The researchers rebuked writers, scholars, and public figures for lazily perpetuating the notion of widespread gender bias in academic science.
a drawing of a clown wearing a red and blue hat.
Rather than sending serial killer art to auctions, it should be sent to abnormal psychologists for research.
Painting of Dorian Gray
You can learn a lot about life through literature's most unrespectable and heinous characters.
Betelgeuse visualization
A new, unexpected brightening, just 3 years after a massive dimming event, has astronomers watching Betelgeuse. Is a supernova imminent?
a map of the world with a red star in the middle.
“Who is the aggressor?” That depends on which of these maps you believe.
a man with glasses is looking out a window.
Man does not live by measurement alone.
John Templeton Foundation
a group of people standing in front of a car.
The Source Family, a radical 1970s utopian commune, still impacts what we eat today.
a black and white photo of two women sitting next to each other.
We know that everything changes, but we long for something more permanent.
A diagram showing the structure of an electroweak big bang.
The problem of the electroweak horizon haunts the standard model of cosmology and beckons us to ask how deep a rethink the model may need.
a pile of money sitting on top of a pile of money.
If a person stands little chance of ever being wealthy, perhaps playing the lottery is a rational decision.
brandenburg gate
"The Man in the High Castle" may be the most beloved alternate history book, but it is not the most historically accurate.
a black and white photo of a woman and a child.
The chances that a newborn survives childhood have increased from 50% to 96% globally.
two particles different wavelength speed of light
Contrary to common experience, not everything needs a medium to travel through. Overcoming that assumption removes the need for an aether.
a close up of the sun with a black background showing a solar flare.
Recasting the iconic Carrington Event as just one of many superstorms in Earth’s past, scientists reveal the potential for even more massive eruptions from the sun.
a computer generated image of a balloon and a plant.
We have become the greatest threat to ourselves and to life on this planet. We need a set of agreed-upon safeguards to preserve our future.
In "The History of Western Philosophy," Bertrand Russell made it clear whose thinking he admired — and whose thinking he didn't.
a drawing of a lobster on a white background.
The pandemic and the Great Resignation fed into a perfect storm of inflation — and some restaurateurs cleaned up.
a close up of a carving on a wall.
Glimpse into the ancient Maya empire through the writing of its own inhabitants.
a large group of clouds with a red sky in the background.
These composers channeled the horror of the Holocaust and Hiroshima while honoring those who lived through it.