A new review of 21 hunter-gather societies indicates that competition for territory may drive conflict, and that when territory is not up for grabs, widespread aggression generally does not occur.
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This week in 1848, 68 women and 32 men signed a Declaration of Rights and Sentiments for women’s equality. This document, and the convention at Seneca Falls, New York, out […]
Taking a pill could one day replicate many beneficial effects of exercising, according to a pair of studies that successfully simulated physical workouts at the cellular level.
China wants to challenge Anglo-Saxon monopoly on cultural soft-power? Don’t do it all in English! Why Zhongguo Meng, and not “Chinese Dream?” This we learn from history: Great powers (almost) […]
Look up at Saturn tonight and Saturn will be looking back at you. Well, not exactly, but the Cassini spacecraft will be orbiting Saturn and taking a picture of you.
I really do believe that America has this weight problem, obesity issues and we have all these diseases that we get, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, autoimmune diseases that are primarily lifestyle diseases.
If your mother was stressed during pregnancy, then you have a higher probability of being an addict when you grow up.
Pleasure is absolutely central to human behavior because it’s evolutionary ancient.
We’ve made a little progress, perhaps in applications, but not a lot of progress in understanding the hard problem.
The current research that is most exciting is aimed toward understanding how the brain looks now at the connectivity between specific areas.
As we learn about things more deeply and more deeply, we will discover that in fact, there’s all kinds of peripheral work to be done that we couldn’t have even imagined looking forward.
We often want something to be illegal that we don’t actually want punished in a lot of circumstances.
News of a company behaving unethically has become so common that it hardly raises an eyebrow except, perhaps, in the most egregious cases – and even then the outrage is […]
Over the past sixty years, the global birth rate has steadily declined with clockwork consistency.
90% of the news in the newspaper and on television is negative because that’s what we pay attention to.
Energy becomes literally the fuel that allows us to fulfill almost all of our dreams and what I point out to people is we do have a squanderable abundance of energy. It happens to be sunlight.
The first two words that came to my mind about the Rolling Stone cover of The Bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev were “craven” and “disingenuous,” but they were followed by other words. […]
Technology has a scarcity-liberating capability. It takes that which is scarce and can make it abundant.
Melville’s sentence exposes the fiction between employers and employees that employees have any choice in the matter.
It’s a great luxury for a society to take it’s 18 to 21 year olds and to let them develop as thinkers.
If you don’t recognize these scars on the lunar surface – caused by ancient asteroid collisions – that is because the Moon is locked in synchronous rotation, showing only one side to Earth.
The decay of a Bs (B-sub-s) particle into two muons is one of the “rarest measureable processes in physics.”
We live in a country so cool you can take the flag and burn it on stage in Vegas.
When you can’t have something, when it’s not going to work out for you, find a way to not want it.
If you didn’t work and you were an adult male in 1960 you were a bum and you were seen as a bum by everybody else in the neighborhood.
What has happened to the founding virtues of the United States over the last half century? The news is fairly grim.
The combined average temperature over global land and ocean surfaces last month made it the fifth hottest June on record, tied with 2006.
The twisting path to becoming less dumb has led to many stops.
Many of Johannes Vermeer’s most famous paintings seem almost eerily silent: The Milkmaid pouring cool milk into a jar, The Lacemaker deep in concentration, the Girl with a Pearl Earring […]
Drifting in the deep, the hulking, yet streamlined mammoth unleashes a string of sound, a booming, but delicate song.