Love & Sex

Scientists can be in love, of course, overcome by its joys, overwhelmed by its pains. But when they put on their lab coats, love and sex are all about the caudate nucleus and dopamine. But the science of love doesn’t shuttle romance to the wilderness. Science is a light on our path to understand ourselves […]

  In their 1968 book The Population Bomb, biologists Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne foretold a Malthusian future of famine and disease if humanity failed to control its growth. The Ehrlichs’ warning made sense. At the time, the global population sat at about 3.5 billion, and its rate of growth was 2.1 percent—close to […]

A new exhibit in Central Park features six statues of women scientists—the first statues of real women to be found in the park.Courtesy of Lyda Hill Philanthropies’ IF/THEN Initiative Forged in metal or chiseled in stone, statues almost always depict dead men. A recent analysis of 12 major American cities turned up only six physical […]

“We conclude,” the researchers wrote, “that objects have a remarkably persistent dual character: their objective shape ‘out there,’ and their perspectival shape ‘from here.’”Photograph by Ryan DeBerardinis / Shutterstock Imagine you are looking at a manhole cover a few paces away on the street. It looks circular, but this is because of some impressive perceptual […]

Hooking up is nature’s way for a species to overcome a bad genomic match.

Medical research director Eric Topol sees light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel.

On the origin of an interstellar species.

This sort of research can, piece by piece, help reshape the online landscape so it isn’t quite so tribal and awash in misinformation and vitriol.Photograph by Prostock-studio / Shutterstock Giant tech companies and governments largely determine what content is and isn’t allowed online, and their decisions impact billions of people: 55 percent of internet users […]

Together, the data imply that the post-pandemic cityscape may be less sexy than the countryside.Photograph by Tero Vesalainen / Shutterstock The pandemic is making its way into every corner of our lives—even the bedroom. While many parts of the world gradually return to normal, the United States still wrestles with the fallout of a mismanaged […]

Why birds of a feather don’t flock together for long.