Long before tobacco arrived from the Americas, ancient civilizations in the Old World were getting high off hemp smoke and opium.
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In theory, history is the sum of everything that ever happened; in practice, it’s a story we tell ourselves to make sense of and justify our actions in the present.
The artifacts were often made from found objects – an Ivory dish-soap bottle transformed into an earthenware figure.
Wander into the deep recesses of the mind and never return the same with these existentialist books.
Instead of liberation, the sexual revolution has led some people, particularly men, to be addicted to porn.
Books that were rarely taught in 1963, when baby boomers were students, became classics when those same boomers were teachers and parents.
For decades, the Communist Party of China has relied on reeducation camps to reform “parasites” and persuade people to support the communist cause.
A conversation with an advanced alien species is likely to be simple and to take 1,000 years. It might also be dangerous.
The East India Company issued stocks to minimize the risk on their unpredictable but highly lucrative voyages. The rest is history.
Pain makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. What’s puzzling is why so many of us choose to seek out painful experiences.
AI systems can carry on convincing conversations, but they have no understanding of what they’re saying. Humans are easily fooled.
The author of Frankenstein had an obsession with the cemetery and saw love and death as connected.
Climate change and artificial intelligence pose substantial — and possibly existential — problems for humanity to solve. Can we?
A growing body of research shows that religious people seem to enjoy more psychological well-being compared to others.
Retired astronaut Ron Garan believes that before we can begin solving our problems, we must understand our interrelatedness through the “orbital perspective.”
He is only out-sold by William Shakespeare and Lao Tzu.
In the quest to measure how antimatter falls, the possibility that it fell “up” provided hope for warp drive. Here’s how it all fell apart.
Ingesting tiny doses of hallucinogens might not have the outsized benefits that some people claim it does.
The weirdest thing about the 21 feet found near Vancouver since 2007? Foul play has been ruled out.
Research shows that spending more time on social media is associated with body image issues in boys and young men.
There are a few possible solutions to the problem of interstellar travel, but they largely remain within the realm of science fiction.
Unplugging only ignores the hard work of overcoming your distractions.
A tourist generally has an eye for the things that have become almost invisible to the resident.
If you want to be an authentic person, embrace reality. Don’t try to clamber your way up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Bloodcurdling war cries, shrieking elephants, and whistling arrows all made soldiers flee in terror.
Until recently, video games were accused of killing brain cells. Now, researchers are trying to understand how they help players get smarter.
After it became clear that the world wasn’t 6,000 years old, some proposed that northern peoples had emerged independently from others.
The Poisson distribution has everyday applications in science, finance, and insurance. To compare the results of some biomedical studies, more people ought to be familiar with it.
Should we take people’s drunken behavior as evidence of their true character?
“We are biologically programmed to have empathy. It’s something we can’t suppress.”