Your brain didn’t evolve in isolation. It evolved to run the economy of your body, and every heartbeat, breath, and moment of thirst or anxiety is evidence of that system at work. Neuroscientist and author Aditi Nerurkar, neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki, and neurologist-philosopher A … | Continue reading
Our Universe, to the best of our knowledge, doesn’t make sense in an extremely fundamental way. On the one hand, we have quantum physics, which does an exquisite job of describing the fundamental particles and the electromagnetic and nuclear forces and interactions that take plac … | Continue reading
Sometimes, great writing makes me angry. It’s nothing to do with the ideas inside, of course. Poets and bestselling authors are good at their game. What bothers me is when those ideas are expressed with such perfect beauty that I cannot hope to match them. There might be a degree … | Continue reading
In this monthly issue, we examine how our understanding of energy — and how we source and use it — is evolving. | Continue reading
Here’s something you didn’t know about the Strait of Hormuz: It is named after Ahura Mazda, the Zoroastrian sky god. And here’s another: In about 20 years, Iran will likely be unable to throttle the global economy by closing this maritime chokepoint, as it did in response to the … | Continue reading
In the mid-20th century, while Carl Sagan pioneered the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) in the U.S., eminent Russian astrophysicist Nikolai Kardashev did the same in the Soviet Union, which was, at the time, the other great scientific superpower. From that vantag … | Continue reading
“When you compare a dead body with a living one, the only difference is the presence of energy — the physical machinery, the DNA, the proteins, the skin, the organs, it’s all still there.” I was surprised by Martin Picard’s choice of words. Evoking a lifeless image to start a con … | Continue reading
For you to live, other organisms have to die. That’s because humans, like all animals, are heterotrophs. To fuel our bodies, we must eat other living things, killing them in the process. However, most plants and algae are autotrophs. They bootstrap their biomass without the barba … | Continue reading
When I signed a book deal in the middle of my PhD, I knew that I’d have to be very disciplined when it came to rest, so I did what most people would consider the “right” thing: I took regular breaks and went to bed early. On paper, I was doing everything you’re supposed to do to … | Continue reading
Planning commission meetings in Joliet, Illinois, aren’t typically raucous affairs. The one on March 5, however, was buzzing and standing-room-only. Hundreds of residents crammed into City Hall, filling multiple overflow rooms. Most were waiting for a chance to voice their opinio … | Continue reading
A week before Christmas, nearly 50,000 people living along Colorado’s Front Range lost power for multiple days. The outage was deliberate. Xcel Energy, the region’s utility, had implemented a “public safety power shutoff” out of fear that high winds would down power lines and spa … | Continue reading
As humanity basks in the aftermath of the unprecedented success of Artemis II, which took humans back to the Moon for the first time in 54 years and brought them farther from Earth than ever before, many of us can’t help but think about grander goals. As a species, we don’t just … | Continue reading
You may have heard about our culture’s or workplace leaders’ strong action bias. We like to do things, not reflect on them. But a false sense of urgency is different, and the distinction is important. For one, action bias is not always bad — sometimes things genuinely need to get … | Continue reading
Could solar energy be the key to unlocking a future free from fossil fuels and extreme poverty? Casey Handmer, founder and CEO of Terraform Industries, believes so. His company is pioneering technology that could revolutionize how we produce and consume energy, potentially solvin … | Continue reading
The most pivotal turning point of what would become known as the General American accent was the willingness of the Quakers to share the New World with others from the outset. Early on, the Quakers settled the Delaware Valley alongside a community of Swedes and Finns, who had bee … | Continue reading
Over the last 15 years, data on ancient DNA has upended the old story of human history. In this full-length interview, geneticist David Reich explains how new findings have challenged the family tree model of ancestry and revealed a past shaped by migration, interbreeding, disapp … | Continue reading
If you take everything we know of and can directly observe in the Universe — stars, stellar remnants, galaxies, gas, dust, plasma, and black holes — we find that it’s insufficient to explain what we see on the grandest of all cosmic scales. Unless you hypothesize some novel form … | Continue reading
Wherever star-formation happens, a classic cosmic story unfolds. A spiral galaxy typically consists of four main gaseous regions within the disk: diffuse atomic gas, dense molecular gas, stars and star clusters, and ionized regions of matter arising from energy injections from … | Continue reading
Here in our Universe, there were many profound steps that needed to occur in order for creatures like humans to be able to arise. We needed to forge heavy elements in previous generations of stars: elements that the Universe wasn’t born with, but that are required to enable molec … | Continue reading
Most people are trying to solve the wrong problem, optimizing for happiness when happiness isn’t actually a goal, it’s a byproduct. Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, argues that the entire self-help industry has been selling ephemeral highs: affirmations … | Continue reading
“I think it could be claimed,” Morris wrote in a late unpublished fragment, “that during the second half of the twentieth century I wrote about more places than anyone else, and I was in a position to witness, and to reflect in my writing, many of the great historical events of t … | Continue reading
Perception feels stable. Your sense of self feels solid. Yet neuroscientist Heather Berlin, psychologist Ethan Kross and neuroscientist Nicole Vignola explain that both are created by the brain. Through prediction, memory and neural pruning, the mind builds a narrative that feels … | Continue reading
If you were asked to think about a physical phenomenon that’s responsible for any sort of force in the Universe, what answer would you give? Most people, when asked, respond with one of two answers. Most people will give gravity as their answer: the attractive force between all o … | Continue reading
Marketers wake up every morning convinced nobody cares about what they’re selling. Most learning and development (L&D) pros assume the opposite, that attention comes with the job title, or at least with the mandatory completion requirement. That gap explains a lot. Mandatory Does … | Continue reading
Back in 1997, a joint venture between NASA, ESA, and the Italian Space Agency (ASI) was launched with the explicit purpose of studying the most distant naked eye planet of the Solar System: Saturn. The Cassini-Huygens mission, unlike the predecessor missions that visited Saturn — … | Continue reading
What makes us who we are? Most of us might say that it is our background that creates our identities: our families, where we’ve lived, how we were brought up and educated, the people who have influenced us, the jobs we’ve held. But there is something far more fundamental that mak … | Continue reading
In the early 1980s, I hitchhiked from London to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa. The overland trip took more than six months, and I traveled about 11,000 miles — almost half the circumference of the Earth. I dropped down through Europe, crossed into Morocco via the Strait of … | Continue reading
Mary Beard uncovers the spectacle of the Ancient Roman parade, the Roman Triumph. Simultaneously a declaration of Roman supremacy and an admission that conquest may be theft at scale, these Roman propaganda events were so terrifying that Cleopatra famously chose death over appear … | Continue reading
Out there in the vast depths of space, from our Solar System to the farthest reaches of the Universe, all sorts of objects can be found. There are enormous numbers of small bodies, from tiny moonlets to asteroids to comets and more, that simply aren’t massive enough to pull thems … | Continue reading
Authors write novels for many reasons. Anthony Burgess, of A Clockwork Orange fame, was once described as a man “always on a money-fishing expedition.” Ernest Vincent Wright wrote Gadsby, a novel that avoids using the letter E, as a self-imposed challenge. Joan Didion processed h … | Continue reading
For 15 years now, the expanding Universe hasn’t added up. This graph shows a comparison between the value of H0, or the expansion rate today, as derived from Hubble Space Telescope Cepheids and anchors as well as other subsamples of JWST Cepheids (or other types of stars) and … | Continue reading
Whenever a new star forms, several processes appear to be nearly universal. A cloud of cold molecular gas contracts, fragments, and rapidly collapses in certain places. The densest, coldest clumps of gas contract first, drawing in larger and larger amounts of matter onto them. A … | Continue reading
Due to its Nazi past, Germany’s post–World War II militant democracy has been unusually aggressive in banning hatred and extremism. Early postwar laws prohibited Nazi symbols, propaganda, and organizations. A turning point came in 1960 with the “swastika epidemic” — a surge of an … | Continue reading
On April 6, 2026, humanity set an all-time record as part of the Artemis II mission: the distance record for how far a living human has ever traveled away from planet Earth. Traveling farther than any other humans in history, astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch … | Continue reading
Most people chasing excellence are chasing the wrong thing entirely. Brad Stulberg argues that the 4am routines, optimization stacks, and recovery scores are just elaborate performance passed off as “excellence.” Stulberg breaks down the biology, philosophy, and psychology behind … | Continue reading
With the latest detection of organic compounds by the Curiosity rover, the case for past life on Mars becomes stronger than ever, as suggested in a recent paper by Alexander Pavlov in the journal Astrobiology. And that lends additional credence to an even more exciting idea — tha … | Continue reading
Imagine that you live in total freedom among a group of people unencumbered by traditions, customs, and any other restrictions. Would that be the pinnacle of joy? Maybe not so much. There would be no government, no police, no fire department, no traffic laws, no court of justice; … | Continue reading
Every 90 minutes, our bodies go paralyzed while our brains become more active than during waking life. Sleep psychologist Dr. Shelby Harris and neuroscientist Dr. Patrick McNamara, Associate Professor of Neurology at Boston University, dig into one of the most fascinating mysteri … | Continue reading
Right now, at this very moment, the total amount of entropy contained within the observable Universe is greater than it’s ever been before. Tomorrow’s entropy will be even greater still, while yesterday, the entropy wasn’t quite as great as it is today. With each passing moment, … | Continue reading
“Rawdogging” is a deeply unfortunate term that was popularized with fresh connotations a couple of years back, when people started using the word to describe the unmediated friction of sitting through a flight without any distractions. Video after video began to appear on TikTok, … | Continue reading
You might think that the best leaders possess a long list of competencies. Perhaps you’ve read books detailing these competencies, or perhaps your company measures its leaders against some required list, using 360-degree surveys or performance ratings. No matter how specific thes … | Continue reading
Of all the planets, star systems, and galaxies we’ve ever discovered, the only one that displays any yet-detected signals of life is right here: planet Earth which orbits the Sun right here in our own Milky Way. While there are: hundreds of known planetary bodies in our own Sola … | Continue reading
Sneaky sideways moves that strong chess players swear by are called “intermezzos,” or “in-between moves.” The American chess genius and unofficial World Champion Paul Morphy executed these many times in the New Orleans cafés where he won game after game in the 1800s. Morphy’s mov … | Continue reading
Long ago, far beyond our deepest views of the cosmos, star formed in the Universe for the very first time. It’s not a complete surprise that we haven’t spotted them yet; made almost entirely of hydrogen and helium alone, they were extremely massive and short-lived compared to the … | Continue reading
No, you haven’t suddenly gone colorblind. This map is in color. In fact, it is a map of color — specifically, of each U.S. state’s favorite house paint color. It’s just that those favorites look like a swatch book for a funeral parlor — like fifty shades of gray. Well, gray-ish. … | Continue reading
“Who owns intelligence?” Howard Gardner, a developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard University, has grappled with this question of late. Who gets to be the arbiter of what intelligence is and who, o … | Continue reading
Until April of 2026, only 24 astronauts had ever left low-Earth orbit. The Apollo 11 crew, after safely returning to Earth from their historic voyage to the Moon, are shown in the Mobile Quarantine Facility alongside then-President Nixon. All 24 astronauts who journeyed to the … | Continue reading
Here in our Universe, the light that gets emitted from objects isn’t necessarily the same as the light that arrives in either our eyes or our instruments. Not only are there many intervening effects that can alter a signal on the way — by interacting with fields, by passing throu … | Continue reading