history
From 1974 to 1978, the chimps of Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania were at war with each other, the first time conservationists saw chimps engage in calculated, cold-blooded killing.
One player’s pawn is another’s farmer. And at one time, the queen was a rather powerless virgin.
Historians have been able to piece together a clear picture of how the average Roman citizen spent their waking hours.
The majority of countries are democracies. But how many people enjoy democratic rights?
If you put very fine black powder powder in a confined space it explodes in a cloud of heat, gas and noise.
In determining what qualifies as solid science, controversy is inevitable.
Haters and disrespect aside, fruitcake is still a robust American tradition.
The gospels imply that Jesus became famous as much for his exorcisms as his ministry.
For consumers of festive beverages, the news is bad: this holiday season, Guinness may not be on tap and glass for bottling wine is scarce. Climate disasters, like British Columbia’s floods, have further weakened already […]
The German-American cartoonist introduced the idea that Santa Claus traveled with a sleigh and reindeer.
Just don’t expect the apocalypse to look like it does in the movies.
For relatives who live far apart, holiday rituals may be the glue that holds the family together.
Opponents of America’s entry into the looming Second World War believed the U.S. would be dismembered.
In her 2020 book, “The Alchemy of Us,” Ainissa Ramirez explores how important material inventions shaped the course of human experience.
In America, Cup Noodles has succeeded by hiding its Japanese roots.
It’s that time of year when the hours of meticulous wrapping of Christmas toys are viciously undone in seconds by tiny children.
France is split in two by its very own “desert,” the Empty Diagonal. The area’s depopulation is fairly recent, and Paris is to blame.
Astrophysicists once believed in a static Universe, containing only the Milky Way galaxy. Science definitively proved otherwise.
Society incorrectly blamed a “population bomb” for problems that had other causes. A wrong diagnosis produces ineffective solutions.
For such a near-universal concept, the definition of “heroism” is difficult to pin down.
It’s all well and good to discuss how our humanity evolved – but what even is humanity?
Even without the greatest individual scientist of all, every one of his great scientific advances would still have occurred. Eventually.
Cities overstimulate our senses and are full of people we don’t know. Maybe humans were meant for this.
Today, every Homo species is extinct besides humans. But one of our close evolutionary relatives still lives on in our DNA.
When we try to recreate simpler versions of natural ecosystems, we invariably make mistakes, argues author and biologist Rob Dunn.
Far from acting as the conduits of a benevolent deity, these religious leaders threw the teachings of their own church out of the window.
Washington believed that particular Thanksgiving in 1789 was a crucial occasion.
The early colonists thought they were being pulled by God into a void left by plague.
Using DNA from samples of extinct flowers, synthetic biologists managed to approximate long-lost floral scents.