English adapts to the needs of people speaking it more than it shapes those people’s ideas or ideals.Photograph by kimberrywood / ShutterstockHideo Kojima is the Japanese creator…

Helen Clapp, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT, recounted the biggest news of 21st century physics, the detection of gravitational waves by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave…

If it is in fact accurate to think of witch trial beliefs as viruses, maybe it would be helpful to study their spread the way scientists study the spread of viruses: using an epidemiological…

Ada Lovelace was an English mathematician who lived in the first half of the 19th century. (She was also the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, who invited Mary Shelley to his house…

When Dan Scheffey turned 50, he threw himself a party. About 100 people packed into his Manhattan apartment, which occupies the third floor of a brick townhouse in the island’s vibrant…

Is a fictional test designed to distinguish between replicants and humans, called the Voight-Kampff test, feasible?Universo Produção / FlickrRutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who portrayed…

The Ġgantija temples of Malta are among the earliest free-standing buildings known.Photograph by Bs0u10e01 / WikicommonsThe mysteries of an ancient civilization that survived for…

Today the alkaline desert is quiet. The roar of techno music and flamethrowers has been replaced with the soft clink of rakes and trash cans. Thousands of people put aside their hangovers…

Benjamin Rush was a strange, or a strangely gifted, man, and one of the youngest—at 30—to sign the Declaration of Independence.Painting by John Trumbull / WikicommonsI ascribe…

Have mechanisms like democratization really fostered an enduring trend of peaceful co-existence, or is this just a statistical fluke—a normal interlude of relative calm before another…