My mother waited two months for her Amazon Echo to arrive. Then, she waited again — leaving it in the box until I came to help her install it. Her forehead crinkled as I download the Alexa app on her phone...

If you want to learn something about change there is no better place to look than evolution. Nothing represents a continuous and unrelenting cycle of order, disorder, and reorder on a grander scale. For long periods of time, Earth is relatively...

The tantalising theory that a fifth force of nature could exist has been given a boost thanks to unexpected wobbling by a subatomic particle, physicists have revealed. According to current understanding, there are four fundamental forces in nature, three of...

In approximately one month and 10 days, I’ll be on my way to making one of the larger decisions of my adult life (so far, anyway); I’m moving to Austin, Texas, approximately 2,000 miles and one hell of a road...

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and I endowed them with magical properties, hunted them like treasure...

  One could be forgiven for a little genetic déjà vu. Launched in 1990, the Human Genome Project unveiled its first readout of the human DNA sequence with great fanfare in 2000. The human genome was declared essentially complete in...

We’re surrounded by negativity everywhere we turn. The news we read, social media we peruse, and conversations we have and overhear. We absorb stress from our family, friends, and coworkers. And, it’s taking a toll. The Mighty, a community platform...

Pandemic life had a way of revealing our weaknesses. For those of us of a certain age, I mean that literally. If you are feeling like certain household activities — toting groceries, hoisting children, moving furniture, carrying laundry — are...

If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world. In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates’s friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at...

You might think that the impact of aging on the brain is something you can’t do much about. After all, isn’t it an inevitability? To an extent, as we may not be able to rewind the clock and change our...

You might think that after centuries of studying light, we know pretty much everything about it. It’s true we’ve had breakthrough after breakthrough in using it, from illumination to communication, from examining the micro- and macro-universes to scanning our own...

Need to know In February 1969, around 10 in the morning, a young Jorge Luis Borges sat down next to an elderly Jorge Luis Borges on a bench by the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Or so it happened in...

      We’re now 7 months into 2023 and I’ve been noticing some things that are quite different from previous years. People are curious for something new, something fresh and different. Almost like folks have stopped saying that’s woowoo...

    About the Artist: Hello, my name is Gemma Matthews, also known as The Sewing Songbird. I am a self-taught embroidery artist from Nottingham, England. My stitching journey began in 2018 as something to keep my hands busy and...

I believe this with every fibre of my being and I live it, in myself and witnessing it in others, in every way I can. So what are some of these super powers that we’re seeing these days? I’ll try...

  My interest in the relations between music and mathematics started at an early age. My grandfather played his violin for me when I was about five years old, and I still remember it clearly. Later he explained to me...

  Unless you’re an entomologist (and on the clock), you probably hate being surrounded by bugs, especially if they bite. While these creatures play important roles in the environment, they can be a real nuisance to humans in the outdoors...

    If you ask Jill Price to remember any day of her life, she can come up with an answer in a heartbeat. What was she doing on 29 August 1980? “It was a Friday, I went to Palm...