American culture demands that pain be productive. Historian Kate Bowler explores how the obsession with finding meaning in suffering turns into what she calls “purpose monsters”: the need to make ever...
Gretchen Rubin is a genuine multi-hyphenate. She began her career as a clerk in the Supreme Court and switched to writing when she had an idea for a book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, w...
There are, in general, two ways in which scientific advancement occurs. There’s the slow, incremental change that represents most scientific advances: where the existing scientific foundation ge...
Jim Al-Khalili introduces the technologies emerging from the second quantum revolution: computers that exploit superposition to solve problems that would take today’s best supercomputers billion...
Partway through our conversation about his new book Good Writing: How to Improve Your Sentences, Neal Allen lost his train of thought. He turned toward his wife and co-author, Anne Lamott. The two rif...
From a scientific perspective, studying consciousness is a bit like trying to describe the singularity inside a black hole from the window of a spacecraft in its gravitational orbit. We can see how th...
Agriculture in India is under threat from extreme weather events linked to climate change. We speak to Meha Jain, an associate professor of geospatial data sciences, food systems at the University of ...
Astronomers have discovered the brightest and most distant "megamaser" to date. The cosmic energy beam is shooting toward Earth from 8 billion light-years away and was spotted thanks to a weird space-...
Some civilizations in inland China underwent dramatic changes and population drops 3,000 years ago. Now, researchers are using oracle bones, archaeological evidence and climate modeling to find out wh...
A new study reveals restoring mangroves could save $800 million in storm damage, protect 140,000 people from flooding, and remove almost triple the amount of CO2 produced by cars in the U.S. every yea...
A German town has been peppered by meteorites after a stunning "fireball" exploded in the skies over central Europe. One extraterrestrial fragment landed in a bedroom after punching a soccer ball-size...
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a powerful imaging technique that reveals atomic scale defects inside computer chips for the first time. Using an advanced electron microscopy method, ...
A new study shows that as humpback whale populations recover from past whaling, older males are gaining a major advantage in reproduction. Early in the recovery, breeding groups were dominated by youn...
Researchers created an AI-driven liquid biopsy that scans patterns in fragments of DNA circulating in the blood. The system detected early liver fibrosis and cirrhosis—conditions that often go unnotic...
Advanced 3D reconstructions of the comb jelly’s aboral organ reveal a sensory system far more complex than scientists expected. The organ contains a wide variety of specialized cells and is closely li...