All Articles

Pope Francis’ message on the environment is actually a radical call for humans to accept a more modest material lifestyle, and for a major redistribution of the world’s wealth and power. That’s great stuff for a sermon, but not so helpful as a practical guide for achievable change.

What would you do? Imagine you’re a politically conservative, devoutly religious art dealer fleeing your war-torn country when you suddenly see art radically unlike anything you’ve seen before. Do you stay the course or gamble on this next “big thing”? Now add the sudden death of your pregnant young wife, which leaves you with five children under the age of nine whose futures now depend entirely on your choices. Do you roll the dice with your life and theirs? If you’re Paul Durand-Ruel and that artist is Claude Monet, the original Impressionist, you don’t just make that bet; you go “all in” — staking your family’s fortunes to those of a family of revolutionary artists. The exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting, currently at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, goes “all in” with Durand-Ruel’s gamble and pays off big with a stirring tale of personal courage and art history in the making.

No horror movie scenarios ensued.

This is really happening. And solar power is the key.

When we say prostitution is a scourge on society, we typically mean (without knowing it) that able-bodied people have better alternatives.

Researchers found kids will assault a robot, even when it pleads for its abusers to stop.

Pope Francis’s moving plea to save life on Earth from a dystopian future calls on people to sacrifice some material comfort, live more modestly, and recognize that we share a common home and have a responsibility to the future. Given the nature of the human instinct to survive and prioritize ourselves over others and the immediate over the future … good luck with that, your Holiness.

Meet the mischievous computer whizzes who started it all.

Help enact behavioral change by adding a step on the scale to your daily routine and charting your progress.

Catch MIT scientist Sara Seager take you to the cutting edge and into the future, with a live blog (plus commentary) right here! “Hundreds or thousands of years from now, […]

Spiral galaxies have a skeleton-like structure that supports them. See the Milky Way’s first discovered bone! “The progress of science is strewn, like an ancient desert trail, with the bleached […]

Our anger over the murder of nine black church-going individuals in South Carolina is real and justified, but is it useful?

A whole new Jurassic World, where Disney princesses meet velociraptors. “A princess is many things, and a raptor is one of them.” –Laura Cooper It’s important to take time every […]

Words of wisdom from Cuban national hero José Martí: “A knowledge of different literatures is the best way to free one’s self from the tyranny of any of them.”

If you have to say “never forget,” you’ve probably already forgotten.

What makes a great artist? According to French writer Émile Zola, it’s talent coupled with tenacity.

“If you shut up truth and bury it under the ground, it will but grow, and gather to itself such explosive power that the day it bursts through it will blow up everything in its way.”

Words of wisdom from the great composer and pioneer of ethnomusicology: “Competitions are for horses, not artists.”

Words of wisdom from Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, the founder of ethnomusicology: “In art there are only fast or slow developments. Essentially it is a matter of evolution, not revolution.”

Ninety years ago, America invented the Human Map, an art form now dominated by India.

A look at the implications of a promising discovery by researchers at Google.

If all the random motions of the molecules inside aligned, how far and fast would it go? “Millions saw the apple fall, but Newton was the one who asked why.”-Bernard […]

Two documentarians want to do something about it.

The space agency seeks to index the parts of the Internet Google won’t show you.

How does one make a marriage last? Researchers interviewed and surveyed over 700 people with a combined 40,000 years of marriage experience.

Many don’t have a leg to stand on where their understanding of evolution is concerned. David Sloan Wilson (head of the Evolution Institute) says “natural selection is life Monopoly.” But, it could be more like basketball…

Thankfully, parents have the power to help nurture and strengthen this part of the brain.

The gender-wage gap is more complex than we may think, as researchers find female managers are not the solution to the wage issues.

On January 1, 2016, one of the most infamous books of the 20th century — Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — enters public domain and can be published by anyone in Germany for the first time since the end of World War II. Seventy years after the fall of the Nazis, people still debate allowing that particularly evil genii out of the bottle to influence young minds. Others argue that the genii’s been out of the bottle all along, either through underground sources or, more recently, the Internet. More controllable, however, have been the propaganda films of the Nazis, whose chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, announced in 1941 that, “Film is our most important medium for propaganda.” Felix Moeller’s new documentary Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film examines this question of allowing new generations to see these banned films and, if so, how to show them without that evil history repeating itself.

“So much of what we do is ephemeral and quickly forgotten, even by ourselves, so it’s gratifying to have something you have done linger in people’s memories.”