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Who Said Nobody Read Isaac Newton?
The central university library at Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, is an imposing, towered building known...
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We Crush, Poison, and Destroy Insects at Our Own Peril
This past summer, my wife and I ventured to an area near Mount Adams in southwestern...
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Is Life Special Just Because It’s Rare?
A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into...
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Can You Treat Loneliness By Creating an Imaginary Friend?
Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually,...
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Dreaming Is Like Taking LSD
Without a doubt, the biggest questions about dreaming are all variants on this question: Why do...
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Why a Universal Society Is Unattainable
On Jan. 1, 2021, five long years after the vote for what’s become known as Brexit,...
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Why Horror Films Are More Popular Than Ever
2020 was a bad year for just about everything—except horror. Horror films were wildly popular on...
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A Breakthrough in Measuring the Building Blocks of Nature
An artistic rendering of the quarks and gluons that make up a proton.Illustration by D. Dominguez...
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Humans Have Rights and So Should Nature
Humans once lived in harmony with the natural world. Consider timekeeping. Until relatively recently, the human...
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Humans Have Gotten Nicer and Better at Making War
In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the...
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We Didn’t Evolve for This
When a Weddell seal, native to Antarctica, plummets 400 meters beneath the ice on one of...
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We’re the Cosmic 1 Percent But Our Solar System Isn’t a Complete Weirdo
About half of all stars seem to have “super-Earth” planets on orbits closer to their stars...
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How to Talk Like a Physicist
Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who probably is the smartest person on her block, has fun in...
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An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared...
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How a Nuclear Submarine Officer Learned to Live in Tight Quarters
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared...
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Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared...
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You Want to See My Data? I Thought We Were Friends!
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online...
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The Man Who Saw the Pandemic Coming
Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared...