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History and Society
“Like real dreams, it does not explain, does not complete its sequences," film critic Roger Ebert once wrote about "Mulholland Drive."
Two very different ideas, wormholes and quantum entanglement, might be fundamentally related. What would "ER = EPR" mean for our Universe?
About 1 in 5 adults now say they have no religious affiliation, up from 1 in 50 in 1960.
The 1,200-year-old "Book of Ingenious Devices" contains designs for futuristic inventions like gas masks, water fountains, and digging machines.
Jules Verne wrote about gasoline-powered vehicles, weapons of mass destruction, and global warming more than a century ago.
Left to their own devices, yeast cells will consume all available resources and poison themselves to death. Is humanity smarter than that?
The state of global democracy is relatively strong — but there are clear signs of recent erosion.
This is your brain on work.
The zero-point energy of empty space is not zero. Even with all the physics we know, we have no idea how to calculate what it ought to be.
"Of course, the spleen is the biggest organ in the body."
Take a trip through these master-crafted fantasy societies and ask yourself: Could I actually live there?
"Painfully forced" is how one contemporary critic described Fitzgerald's writing style.
Archaeologists turn to other scientific fields to fill in the picture of how victims lived and why they died.
A non-invasive method for looking inside structures is solving mysteries about the ancient pyramid.
Studies suggest that meditation can quiet the restless brain.
The strange bronze artifact perplexed scholars for more than a century, including how it traveled so far from home.
If stars don't go supernova at first, they can get a second chance after becoming a white dwarf. But can their companions survive?
Only humans can voluntarily conjure new objects and events in our minds.
The Church of England is debating if believers should stop using gendered language when talking about God.
Deep underwater, temperatures are close to freezing and the pressure is 1,000 times higher than at sea level.
If you're a massless particle, you must always move at light speed. If you have mass, you must go slower. So why aren't any neutrinos slow?
Darwin missed an amazing example of evolution.
Studies show talk therapy works, but experts disagree about how it does so. Finding the answer could help professionals and patients.
While ticker tape synesthesia was first identified in the 1880s, new research looks at this unique phenomenon — and what it means for language comprehension.
In a state of "hyperwar," accidents or unexpected AI decisions could lead to widespread devastation before humans could intervene.
Unless you confront your theory with what's actually out there in the Universe, you're playing in the sandbox, not engaging in science.
There's a link between dark personality traits and breaches of battlefield ethics.
The Black, Caspian, and Aral Seas are the last surviving fragments of a body of water that stretched from Austria to Turkmenistan.
Democratic freedom, rapturous religion, and newspapers created a hotbed for social experimentation in 19th-century America.