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History and Society
We got lucky with our evolutionary history.
The acceptance of fashionable nonsense is a threat to Enlightenment values and public health.
NASA is creating a planet habitability index, and Earth may not be at the top. With our current data, ranking habitability is guesswork.
When the great American tradition of the road trip meets the great Jewish tradition of the deli, we get the Great American Deli Schlep.
Tracing the origin and development of jaws — and other anatomical features that humans share — sheds some light on how we came to be.
All nations have founding myths, but none are quite like Russia's.
It might seem petty and shallow to get upset over a bad gift, but there's often a deeper reason behind the feeling.
With its first view of a protoplanetary disk around a newly forming star, the JWST reveals how alone individual stellar systems truly are.
Economic growth is more about quality than quantity.
One award was for a medical procedure that incapacitated thousands of people.
This year’s Nobel Peace Prize ceremony sends yet another strong message to Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Forensic researchers call such places “limited access environments.”
More than 1,000 years ago, Mesoamerican societies conducted one of history's most interesting experiments in commodity money.
Million Stories
Many were expecting extremism survivor and free speech advocate Salman Rushdie to take home the Nobel Prize in Literature, but Annie Ernaux beat him to it.
Einstein always loses in the quantum realm.
Before we discovered gravitational waves, multi-messenger astronomy got its start with light and particles arriving from the same event.
Japan just opened to tourists for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began, echoing the island country’s isolationist policies during the feudal era.
There's no escaping the death of loved ones. But that doesn't mean we're powerless in the wake of loss.
Uncertainty is inherent to our Universe.
This is a perversion of justice.
Fiona Broome remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s (he didn't). Oddly, many people had the same false memory.
They say that nobody understands quantum mechanics. But thanks to these three pioneers in quantum entanglement, perhaps we do.
There were many other species of human on the planet. Svante Pääbo discovered one of them.
The idea that we're happier at the beginning and end of our lives is really just a comforting myth.
The crabs' blue blood contains an ancient immune defense mechanism that has helped save countless human lives.
Every Christmas could be the last Christmas.
People living in non-industrialized societies don't get pimples.
Pando is a stand of aspen in Utah that is 14,000 years old and weighs 12 million pounds. Humans threaten to end its long reign.