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History and Society
Ideas often taken for granted in the United States and Europe about what it means to be a person are, quite simply, not shared with other cultures.
Even though the leftover glow from the Big Bang creates a bath of radiation at only 2.725 K, some places in the Universe get even colder.
We live in a four-dimensional Universe, where matter and energy curve the fabric of spacetime. But time sure is different from space!
The costs of such an endeavor would be extremely high, while the potential payoffs would be uncertain.
The length of a day oscillates slightly every six years. This was a surprising discovery made last decade. We might now know why.
Livestock now outweighs wild mammals and birds ten-fold.
Deep learning AI has accurately created color images from night vision images.
The psychology of alien contact largely revolves around the concept of "otherness." We need to learn to be comfortable around strange things.
In the philosophy of Star Wars, the Sith are evil because they surrender to passion. But is a life of total rationality a “good” life?
Is "The Garden of Earthly Delights" by Hieronymus Bosch a condemnation of sin or a celebration of hedonism? Art historians still aren’t sure.
Mammals have a history stretching back 325 million years. To study that ancient history is to know our own origins.
"Politics is weird. It’s the only business in the world in which you take a really, really important position, and you give it to someone with no qualifications." —Tony Blair
Like humans, stars die. The James Webb Space Telescope's early images already give us a lot of information about how this happens.
Gradualism rejects the idea of a "bright line" in the abortion debate.
The fictitious 31st-century world portrayed by the series is actually quite a bit like our own in the 21st century.
Astronomy's roots rest in the very origins of humanity. We have always looked to the skies for answers. We are starting to get them.
In the early 1900s, some Americans feared that teddy bears would not instill maternal instincts in girls, thereby causing "race suicide."
In the wake of the pandemic, the crystal industry boomed, with customers hoping the stones might relieve a little anxiety.
Predatory dinosaurs with big skulls tend to have tiny arms. Researchers propose there might be a direct link between those traits.
We often laugh at inappropriate things, but not when we are emotionally invested. Laughter cannot be serious. So, can we ever laugh at death?
When you're a genius, how do you make ends meet?
The role of the Devil’s advocate was to argue against the beatification of mystics. Contrary to popular belief, they did not wear Prada.
It is all too easy for humans to fall into the cognitive trap of thinking that an entity that can use language fluently is sentient or intelligent.
Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium.
One might think that people who started poor and became rich might be more sensitive to the plights of the poor. Not so, suggests a new study.
It might seem like science and faith are at war, but the two have a historical synergy that extends back in time for centuries.
John Templeton Foundation
Genetic analysis reveals that a specimen collected in 2019 is the same subspecies as one caught more than a century earlier.
Science and the sacred both allow us to retain our sense of wonder, even as disaster seems to swirl around us.
Three out of four Russians accused of witchcraft were men.