Everyone loves the streets of old cities like Verona, Bruges, and Prague. The reason might seem obvious: they are lined by beautiful historic buildings. But people also love the streets of Osaka, ...

Paradoxically, porcelain is both one of humankind’s oldest high technologies and one of its newest. The earliest proto-porcelain was created more than three thousand years ago, and was, for the time, ...

Every child is taught that landfill is the worst place our trash can end up. It is the sad consequence of a failure to recycle: a mountain of waste leaking chemicals and smells, blighting the land ...

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal ...

Who is right? Does daycare traumatize children or does it turn them into upstanding citizens? Or perhaps both are true, and daycare sacrifices the emotional health of toddlers in order to turn them ...

Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing. Medical innovation has transformed our lives, but hardly anyone realizes it.

Drinking one beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 beers in one go. The same applies to radiation exposure, but regulation doesn’t agree. Chernobyl was the world’s worst ever ...

The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy. But America has the electricity to power its data centers; the problem is getting it to them. One of the most expensive projects in history is under ...

In Irish mythology, a man forces his heavily pregnant wife, Macha, to race the King of Ulster’s horses on foot. She wins, gives birth to twins at the finish line, and then curses the warriors of ...

The Coyote Getter, invented in the 1930s, was a hunting device that spewed cyanide into the mouth of any coyote that bit its scented wool bait. Thirty years later, researchers revisited the device.

European policy debates often become Americanized because of the American domination of social media. This tends to be troublesome, leading Europeans to see their policy problems through frames into ...

Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for ...