Trauma doesn’t end when the danger does, and for decades, science couldn’t explain why. Rachel Yehuda, a leading PTSD researcher, has spent her career inside that question, uncovering the way that trauma can leave impressions on our genes, sometimes passing biological echoes of t … | Continue reading
What determines the extent of employers’ wage-setting power? It boils down to how easily — borrowing Beyoncé’s phrase — you can “release your job” when pay isn’t good enough. But how simple is it for someone to quit Walmart if they are dissatisfied with their wage? To answer this … | Continue reading
With the launch of Artemis II in April of 2026, humans are finally set to add to the historical precedent set in the late 1960s and early 1970s: a return to the Moon. Prior to their expected arrival at our nearest neighboring planetary body, expected to occur after just over a fo … | Continue reading
Most people spend years searching for a mentor who will change their life, never realizing the most valuable lessons are already happening around them. Shark Tank’s Robert Herjavec breaks down why the traditional idea of mentorship is not only outdated, but actively getting in t … | Continue reading
For early 16th-century Europeans, this map was a revelation. It showed a previously unknown island metropolis in the recently discovered Americas — an alien Venice, if you will. However, by the time this first European portrait of the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan was published in 1 … | Continue reading
There’s a legendary bit of wisdom that applies just as well to theoretical physics as it does to the drug culture from which it arose: “Don’t get high on your own supply.” While theoretical physicists are famous for coming up with extraordinary, creative, exotic scenarios for wha … | Continue reading
In this monthly issue, we look at resilience not as a buzzword or a self-help prescription, but as a property — one that shows up, or doesn’t, at every scale. | Continue reading
AI tools like RFdiffusion have made protein design dramatically easier, cheaper, and faster. This is accelerating vaccine development, opening new paths for treating genetic diseases, and making science more accessible — labs that couldn’t afford to work on certain problems befor … | Continue reading
To Mallerie Shirley and Christopher Pleasants, nothing felt “revolutionary” about the way they were raising their two kids. Then a stranger called child protective services. It started last November in Atlanta. With school closed on Election Day, the couple’s 6-year-old son, Jake … | Continue reading
A cold wind was whipping down the street when I pulled up to the concrete apartment block in Cambrils, Spain. I parked, pulled out my phone, and texted the repairman that I had arrived. I had only been in Spain for a few weeks when the hinge supporting my laptop screen gave out, … | Continue reading
To live on Mars, humans will need more than rockets and ambition. They will need habitats that can protect them from radiation, brutal temperature swings, and an unbreathable atmosphere. Building such shelters on Earth wouldn’t be a challenge — we could construct an airtight box, … | Continue reading
For nearly every sport, there are innate attributes that can give an athlete an edge. Basketball has a height advantage. With NFL linemen, a little girth tends to help. Most jockeys are small and lean. The best ballet dancers are light on their feet. A high limb-length ratio offe … | Continue reading
I’m sitting on some grass. Picnic detritus surrounds our little camp, and my two boys are wrestling not far away. It won’t be long until one of them starts crying, but until that time, I’ll enjoy a chicken wrap and a swig of my drink. A mother walks along the path in front of us. … | Continue reading
When a tiny poof of a bird shows up at a backyard feeder in a snowstorm, people see perseverance. When ants band together to drag a large crumb, they see teamwork. When a delicate butterfly flaps into the sky, we feel hope. But when a rat escapes a trap or makes a home in a dumps … | Continue reading
Not long ago, I found myself in line at my local dry cleaner. It’s a modest shop, the kind of place you’ve passed a thousand times without a second thought. But the man behind the counter — let’s call him Howard — is not a modest man. He pays an almost fussy, forensic level of at … | Continue reading
In the late 20th century, the world came together to plug a hole in the ozone layer — the part of Earth’s atmosphere that absorbs most of the Sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. If left unchecked, this hole would have exposed life on Earth to dangerous — and in some regions pote … | Continue reading
Dyestuff creation may sound very Ren faire, or like something the Weird Sisters from Macbeth would do in their downtime, but modern synthetic dye manufacture is hardcore chemistry with hardcore chemicals. One early synthetic dye, 2,4,6-trinitrotoluene, yielded a lovely yellow co … | Continue reading
In 2010, Eric Schmidt, then-CEO of Google, claimed that every two days, humanity was creating as much information as it had generated from the dawn of civilization through 2003 — 48 hours’ worth of texts, photos, articles, tweets, and other content added up to more than five exab … | Continue reading
For most people, Tuesday is just the name of a weekday. For 1 in 23 people, Tuesday is also brown, tilted to the left, and tastes metallic. Neurologist Richard Cytowic has spent decades studying synesthesia, the phenomenon where one sense involuntarily triggers another. Cytowic … | Continue reading
For most of us, the Universe doesn’t appear to change all that much on the scale of even a human lifetime. Sure, the stars move relative to one another, our Sun burns through a little more of its fuel, and the Moon slowly spirals away from the Earth as our rotation rate gradually … | Continue reading
Throughout the visible Universe, trillions of galaxies abound. This deep-field view of the Universe showcases a portion of the COSMOS-Web field acquired with JWST. In this field are a wide variety of galaxies, where the largest, most massive ones are nearly all spirals or elli … | Continue reading
Push such people hard, Koch adds, and they will concede the obvious. “Yes, I know they aren’t real.” Yet that recognition can quickly dissolve in the heat of the interaction. Koch sees a resemblance to a rare clinical condition known as Cotard’s syndrome, in which patients believ … | Continue reading
Few transformations in the history of life have been as extreme as the embrace of the ocean by seagrass. Like whales and dolphins, modern seagrasses descend from land-dwelling ancestors. But marine mammals surface for air. Seagrasses often live entirely submerged. Why did they ta … | Continue reading
War is hell. But war is also geometry. And geometry can be quite beautiful. A prime example of that disturbing paradox is the so-called star forts that proliferated throughout Renaissance Europe. Seen from above, these bastioned fortifications resemble elaborate ornamental diagra … | Continue reading
Whenever you have a Universe like ours — governed by general relativity and full of different types of energy — there are many different possible outcomes. Your Universe could tear itself apart, driving objects away from one another faster and faster, with no limit in sight: a Bi … | Continue reading
Neuroscientist David Linden sheds light on the biology behind phenomena that medicine has long struggled to explain, from voodoo death and broken heart syndrome to the placebo effect, and why grief shows up in autopsy results. Linden also explores the rising GLP-1 drugs, their e … | Continue reading
Most people I know are moved by news of tragedy. A terrible earthquake, a drought, a famine, a flood, wildfires, displaced people, innocent victims of military aggression — we feel pity for those pointlessly suffering and a desire, even an obligation, to help. So we donate to dis … | Continue reading
Around 1200 BC, the most sophisticated network of civilizations the ancient world had ever produced collapsed within a single generation. Archaeologist Eric Cline has spent his career forensically reconstructing why, and the answer is far stranger and more unsettling than a singl … | Continue reading
Somewhere, far away, if you believe what you can often find on the internet, there’s a hole in the Universe. There’s a region of space so large and so empty, a region that spans more than a billion light-years across, where there’s nothing located within it at all. There’s no ma … | Continue reading
When I started at Tesla, I assumed that Elon and I looked at work processes from much the same perspective. This was true, but only to a degree. The company had gone from a start-up to a large manufacturer without really defining how to solve problems and scale. Instead, incredib … | Continue reading
Within the span of a single generation, nearly every major civilization in the Mediterranean world collapsed simultaneously: the Hittites, the Mycenaeans, the Canaanites, the great palace cities of Cyprus and the Levant. What is even more consequential than the age that preceede … | Continue reading
For as long as people have been putting effort into anything, there’s been a push to get the most “bang” for your “buck.” More simply, it’s to get the greatest amount out by putting the least amount in. And if that’s what you’re after — that type of optimization — you might have … | Continue reading
A man awakes in some kind of lab, his body riddled with tubes and wires. Nearby, a robot asks him what two plus two is. He can’t remember his name, where he is, or how he got here. At least he knows two plus two is four. Actually, he knows a lot more than that. Walking around the … | Continue reading
Damage isn’t always the cause of pain, and it’s never the only culprit. Pain, it turns out, is much more interesting than that. Here’s what we do know: Science reveals that pain is biopsychosocial, produced by a combination of biological, psychological (emotional, cognitive, beh … | Continue reading
No matter what you may have heard, make no mistake: physics is not “over” in any sense of the word. As far as we’ve come in our attempts to make sense of the world and Universe around us — and we have come impressively far — it’s absolutely disingenuous to pretend that we’ve solv … | Continue reading
Self-help tells us that we can fix anything with the right mindset, the right habits, the right 5-step plan. But what if that belief is doing more harm than good? Historian Kate Bowler traces the deep roots of America’s obsession with self-making — from prosperity gospel theology … | Continue reading
The night sky, accessible to each of us, holds a sense of wonder unlike anything else. Although extended objects, like the plane of the Milky Way and a few distant galaxies beyond our own, are identifiable with the naked eye, there are only a few thousand stars that can be see … | Continue reading
Reshma Saujani says she was “always” moved by social justice. As a young girl, she witnessed her parents’ experience as immigrants in the U.S., and after working as a corporate attorney to help pay off her law school debt, she moved into activism. Saujani founded Girls Who Code … | Continue reading
Most weeks, I’m in a different American city. I fly in, catch an Uber, check into a hotel, and head to a convention center or a sequence of numbers posted on a nondescript high-rise. By Tuesday afternoon, it becomes difficult to remember where I am. The streets feel familiar. The … | Continue reading
Throughout the entire Universe, no matter where or when we look, we see an endless variety of structures that have formed throughout all different stages of cosmic evolution. With a tremendous number of planets, stars, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and components of the great c … | Continue reading
What if space and time aren’t the backdrop of the universe,but rather, are a byproduct of it? NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller makes the case that quantum entanglement may be the underlying fabric from which spacetime itself emerges. This idea would mean that distance, gravity, … | Continue reading
You haven’t been home in 10 long years. You’re exhausted, battle-scarred, and desperate to see your family. At last, a fair wind is at your back, and you stand on the deck of a bounding longship, sails set for home. For days you have strained your eyes against the horizon and now … | Continue reading
Sarah Bright, Head of L&D at Darktrace, built a manager development program from nothing. They trained 75% of their global managers across 20 cohorts in under two years. What follows is the practical detail behind how her team of three did it: the framework they built, how they … | Continue reading
Four years ago, I read in the news that a boy I went to school with had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter. On a different day, in a different place, he’d probably have just walked home, and no one would have said a thing. It happened on a night out. Nick has a … | Continue reading
Let me tell you how this works. A 26-year-old quantitative analyst at a hedge fund in midtown Manhattan — a person who has never managed an employee, never sat across from a customer, never had to explain to someone that their position has been eliminated — opens a spreadsheet, s … | Continue reading
Despite all we’ve learned about the nature of the Universe — from a fundamental, elementary level to the largest cosmic scales fathomable — we’re absolutely certain that there are still many great discoveries yet to be made. Our current best theories are spectacular: quantum fiel … | Continue reading
I was at a networking event a few years ago, making the kind of small talk that makes you question your entire personality. Everyone’s eyes were darting around the room. Conversations stalled after 30 seconds, and the energy in the place was restless, performative, and slightly d … | Continue reading
The ultimate goal of physics is to accurately describe, as precisely as possible, exactly how every physical system that can exist in our Universe will behave. The laws of physics need to apply universally: the same rules must work for all particles and fields in all locations an … | Continue reading