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History and Society
Sex, it turns out, isn’t as easy or simple as popular culture might lead us to believe.
Whether in Russia or China, the secret police are defined by their unquestioning loyalty — as well as by their poor career prospects.
Almost 18,000 projects, brought together on one clickable map.
According to Peter Ward's "Medea hypothesis," photosynthesizing organisms regularly doom most life on Earth by over-consuming carbon dioxide.
A wide-scale examination of early Neolithic human skeletons reveals the violent history of a supposedly peaceful period.
From the earliest stages of the hot Big Bang (and even before) to our dark energy-dominated present, how and when did the Universe grow up?
Video games matter. Their continued technological and artistic development is reshaping the way we satisfy our ancient need to tell stories.
Science will lead us to a universal morality and a cosmic religion.
Fear of being scammed can lead us to make decisions that go against our values and goals — both as individuals and as a society.
For Buddhists, the “Four Noble Truths” offer a path to lasting happiness.
What do you call it when the Earth shakes for three decades?
Here are the signs that you inherited “money anxiety” from your parents.
Million Stories
Simple physics makes hauling vast ice chunks thousands of miles fiendishly difficult — but not impossible.
NASA has finally chosen which flagship mission, like Hubble and JWST, will launch in ~2040. Detecting alien life is now a reachable goal.
Hundreds of these cannabis-related chemicals now exist, both natural and synthetic, inspiring researchers in search of medical breakthroughs.
Alibaba has played a key role in China’s meteoric economic rise.
Imagine going on a tour through the human circulatory system as a tiny cell. That is just one example of education in the metaverse.
Slimy biofilms made up of bacterial and eukaryotic life forms have taken over an abandoned, flooded uranium mine in Germany.
Could the prevalence of flood myths around the world tell us something about early human migration or even the way our brains work?
We are traveling in a realm that once exclusively belonged to the gods. Space travel will force humanity to rethink everything.
Some effective altruists “earn to give” — they make as much money as they can and then donate most of it to charities.
“We suffer more often in the imagination than in reality.”
Smoke taint from wildfires is gross, even to wine amateurs.
Lawmen and outlaws were often the same people.
Most philosophers merely contemplate the world, but what about the ones who actually tried to change it?
Ancient humans crossed the Bering Strait land bridge from Asia into North America. But some of them went back.
To answer that question, we may have to figure out when the famed painter started to go bald.
X marks the spot. The Dutch town of Ommeren has been swamped by detectorists armed with shovels looking for $20-million treasure.
A history of injustice and the greatest natural location for ground-based telescopes have long been at odds. Here's how the healing begins.
Humans are good visual thinkers, too, but we tend to privilege verbal thinking.