Facts So Romantic

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The universe bets on disorder. Imagine, for example, dropping a thimbleful of red dye into a swimming pool. All of those…

Nina Strohminger, perhaps not unlike many fans of raunchy comedies and horror flicks, is drawn to disgust. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist has written extensively on the feeling…

Belief is a special kind of human power. Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist at the University of Notre Dame, eloquently claims as much in his recent book Why We Believe: Evolution and the…

The Australian philosopher David Chalmers famously asked whether “philosophical zombies” are conceivable—people who behave like you and me yet lack subjective experience. It’s an…

After I got my second dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, a wave of euphoria infused me along with the modified messenger RNA. Many friends describe the same feeling. This is the end of the pandemic…

This piece was produced in cooperation with the Nib.Maki Naro is an award-winning feral cartoonist and science communicator. You can reliably find him online, where he tweets from the…

Life seems to be tied to bioelectricity at every level. The late electrophysiologist and surgeon Robert Becker spent decades researching the role of the body’s electric fields in development,…

INT. HOME OFFICE—DAYBODY, a middle-aged woman, is working at a computer, trying to finish a plan for the household budget.HabitsOh! It’s time to walk the dog.BODY stops typing.Central…

The small wonders of the natural world impressed Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya early. As a girl, growing up in Atlanta, she was encouraged by her mother to draw sketches of things she could…

As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality is bad for national economies—and bad for their…