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The Evolutionary Arc From Pigeon Brains to Machine Consciousness

A conversation with comparative cognition researcher Edward Wasserman about learning and the “edge of chaos”

How Your Body Clock Affects Your Mental Health and Ways to Keep It in Sync

Our internal body clock helps regulate sleep, alertness and mood, following a roughly 24-hour cycle influenced by light and darkness

Chimps Can Be Thieves, But They Hesitate to Rob Their Friends

And their friends were quicker to forgive them for their thievery

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The Iron Age Queen Who Helped Bring Britain to its Knees

New scholarship reveals an exiled Roman client king was a woman


Read Stories from Our Newest Print Issue: The Stupid Issue

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The Elegance of a Stupid Question

Are computers in mathematics rewriting the definitions of stupid and smart?

The Resistance Is Here

They didn’t plan to be activists. But scientists have united to overturn Trump’s drastic cuts to science.

The Return of a Discredited Pseudoscience

Eugenics is rearing its ugly head again in today’s crucible of politics and culture

A Collapsing Star Produced an Afterglow Brighter Than Its Galaxy

“The explosion packed roughly a billion years of the sun’s energy output into a pencil-thin beam”

“We Will Find a Graviton Before We Find Dark Matter”

A quantum information scientist on the hunt for the elemental mediator of gravity and why AI can’t solve physics problems creatively

The Original X-Men

These intellectual superheroes revolutionized science in Britain and beyond by developing independent research

Is This the First Corporate Psychopath?

A historical study makes a compelling case

This Is the Oldest Peace Treaty Ever Discovered

Maybe there are a few things we can still learn from it

What Can We Learn About Happiness From the People Who Study It?

Happiness pioneers recently gathered to discuss the good life

Inside the Mind of a Narcissist

Their brains don’t sync the same way when it comes to processing empathy

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A Cross-Species Same-Sex Love Story

In Ethiopia, scientists documented repeated sex and bonding between a bull and a male donkey

The Quest for Wisdom in Turbulent Times

A conversation with three Harvard professors about the practice of wisdom in everyday living

Could AI Have Consciousness That Isn’t Human-Like?

Philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith on AI consciousness and existential risk

What a Picture of a Dog Has to Do with Reason and Logic

People who can’t see images in their minds challenge an old philosophical standby

The Myth of Mommy Brain

A conversation with neuroscientist Susana Carmona, author of “A Mother’s Brain,” about how the brain changes in motherhood