What’s so golden about the golden ratio? A myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea ...

Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art ...

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, ...

Freedom over death makes it possible for dying to more fully reflect our selves. And a shorter life sometimes is a better reflection of what we care about, and thereby has greater integrity, than a ...

René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?

Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?

Cinematic shots of Californian farmland frame the stories of its immigrant workers, who live between precarity and hope ...

Can societies exist without families? Can individuality thrive in them? Margaret Mead on the brave new world of 1959 ...

When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue: how does language begin in the womb?

Clayton Page Aldern is a data reporter at Grist. His writing has been published by The Guardian, The Atlantic and The Economist, among others, and he is the author of The Weight of Nature: How a ...

The misunderstood story of Phineas Gage shows that we need a new way of understanding the experiences of brain injury survivors ...