When talking about our health, we tend to refer breezily to “the immune system,” as if it were as simple as an electric fence keeping out invaders. And there’s certainly an electric…

Tales of monsters invading Japan are a longstanding tradition, usually involving menacing kaiju—literally “strange creatures”—rising from the sea to wreak havoc on a Japanese…

This past July the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby boy. An international press corps was parked in front of the entrance of the hospital for over four weeks before that. The…

I had such fun the other evening. LeBron James, Anne Hathaway, J.K. Rowling, and I had gone ice skating in Central Park. My dear friend Koko the sign-language gorilla was there, ice-dancing…

In his most recent book, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, the philosopher Daniel Dennett has revisited his 1991 observation that consciousness arises out of a selection…

Ever since Robert Burton began studying neurology in the 1960s, he has been puzzled by a basic cognitive problem: What does it mean to be convinced? What’s happening in our brain…

The Himba bushmen who inhabit the Namibian grasslands—a 1,200-mile-long swath of land running from Angola into South Africa—have come up with different stories over the years to…

Where does the world begin and where does it end? In many creation stories the Earth has well-defined edges. In early Mesopotamian mythology it is a flat disk floating in the ocean…

Earlier this month there was a rare announcement, promoted widely by the press: a new mammal species had been discovered, the first carnivorous mammal identified in the Americas for…

Just like every new drug the oncologists at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center tested against bladder cancer in the last 20 years, this one didn’t seem to be doing any good.…