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The Ġgantija temples of Malta are among the earliest free-standing buildings known.Photograph by Bs0u10e01 / Wikicommons The mysteries of an ancient civilization that survived for more than a millennium on the island of Malta—and then collapsed within two generations—have been unravelled by archaeologists who analyzed pollen buried deep within the earth and ancient DNA from […]

Perhaps free will won’t forever be an issue philosophers mull over for a lifetime. Whatever the result, there’s always the ironic answer to the question of whether we have free will: “Of course we do. We have no choice.”Screengrab via The Good Place / YouTube In The Good Place, a cerebral fantasy-comedy TV series, moral […]

The Apollo missions were a giant leap for science.

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. Starlings take to the sky in swirling vortices; ants teem like rivers. “They stretch, they move around, but they retain cohesion in a way you’d expect from a fluid moving,” said Nicholas Ouellette, a physicist at Stanford University. That’s why to him, it isn’t far-fetched to think about collective animal behavior in […]

When I was 12, I made the mistake of watching the Paul W. S. Anderson horror film, Event Horizon. It gave me nightmares for weeks: The movie’s title refers to an experimental spaceship that could create artificial black holes through which to travel, making interstellar trips trivial. But the crew, upon activating the ship’s gravity […]

What the rare cooperative species tells us about ourselves.

What our experiment in the desert taught us about social networks and human cooperation.

Capitalism in space.

Your life’s memories could, in principle, be stored in the universe’s structure.

Nils Aall Barricelli showed that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation.