Mansa Musa, perhaps history’s richest man, claims he ascended the throne of Mali after his predecessor sailed west and never came back. Could he have made it to the New World?
If our Universe were born a little differently, there wouldn’t have been any planets, stars, galaxies, or chemically interesting reactions.
Perhaps the whole Universe is the result of a vacuum fluctuation, originating from what we could call quantum nothingness.
Germans are masters of building cars, cooking brats — and sitting while peeing.
“Superhabitable” planets might be real, but Earth is probably as good as it gets.
Science fiction movies capture a classic human flaw: getting the future mostly wrong.
Not all conflict is bad. Expert Priya Parker explains how “heat” can be harnessed for good.
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Across all wavelengths of light, the Sun is brighter than the Moon. Until we went to the highest energies and saw a gamma-ray surprise.
Meditation can put you in a wiser relationship with life.
It’s safe to use your face cream, as long as you aren’t eating it.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Does humanity have a moral imperative to seed life on lifeless worlds? And should we avoid colonizing a planet if life already exists there?
Within a month of that initial conversation, Peter Singer became a vegetarian.
Einstein’s most famous equation is E = mc², which describes the rest mass energy inherent to particles. But motion matters for energy, too.
Thomas Edison was on to something…
The replication crisis has debunked many of psychology’s fair-haired hypotheses, but for the marshmallow test, things have only become more interesting.
The Shirky Principle states that “institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”
Soviet censorship was thorough yet fallible.
Geniuses and prodigies are captivating. But generalists rule the world.
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May 22, 2023
The title of this crossword is a quote from Plutarch. In this puzzle, we include many of the diverse beliefs of mankind and touch on many attempts to explain life and its meaning. Can the human spirit prevail over the barriers to survival? Are the barriers locked inside the mind itself?
A surprising JWST discovery around Fomalhaut has a different, superior explanation: not a great dust cloud, but a mere background object.
George Orwell got it right: “Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
If something exists, it is by definition natural.
The first-of-its-kind approval could change how we think about gene-edited foods.
The cycles of life all rely on the dynamism of the Earth’s crust.
Cyberattacks are growing in number and sophistication.
Neuroscience is beginning to provide clues about the emergence of human consciousness.
The classic picture of Jupiter’s great rocky core might be entirely wrong.
This network physicist is mapping the world’s most significant data to create the most beautiful visualizations of information we have ever seen.
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Raw food, paleo, gluten-free, detox, and ketogenic: All of these diet fads withered when subjected to scientific scrutiny.