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Iron weaponry brought down the empires of the Bronze Age. Could technologies like drones do the same today?
Alex Chalmers reviews Armies of Sand by Kenneth Pollack.
Taste is subjective. But when it comes to architecture, there is a surprising level of agreement.
The massively multiplayer online game was created in the 1980s.
We've invented microbes that can eat plastic, detect landmines, and extract rare metals. They've been swallowed by a black hole.
What if everything we know about recycling is wrong?
People are right to want less police intrusion in their lives. The way to get there is more precision, not less.
Who benefits when we ask transit to pursue social goals?
What if instead of editing a gene, or blocking the protein it produces, you could simply switch it off?
Its royal family used a charm offensive where military power failed.
If it had a clear effect on children we would know by now.
Economic growth gives us cleaner air, healthier rivers, and safer workplaces. Happier animals could be next.
Few people know how much medicine has progressed in their lifetimes. Fewer know how much faster it could be progressing.
Selective breeding has pushed horses to the limits of biology. But at what cost?
Ugliness might stop houses being built - but not in the way you think.
Is it really plausible that children survived the hardship of medieval life without devoted parents?
Modernity has meant fewer children in virtually every culture around the world. Holdouts like Orthodox Jews might have lessons for the rest of us.
Two Dutch brothers invented a system that transformed a city previously ravaged by fires
Continental drift is as fundamental to geology as natural selection is to biology. Why did it take us hundreds of years to discover it?
Drinking a beer a night for a year is a lot less harmful than drinking 365 at once. Radiation is similar.
Large swaths of America’s cities were originally underwater. We stopped half a century ago, but there is plenty more land left to take.
The AI buildout is bottlenecked by energy. But America has the electricity to power its data centers; the problem is getting it to them.
Childbirth may be the most painful thing a person can experience, but we have the technology to numb the pain.
In 1688, England swept away the encrusted vetocracy that had held back economic growth for centuries. Could we do the same today?
Vaccinating wild animals can protect human health, and spare animals from extinction and suffering.
Rats have conquered nearly every place on earth where humans live. Only Alberta soldiers on.
Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's. So why does nobody there talk about zoning?
The Squamish nation has built one of the world's most exciting bottom-up high-density developments: Senakw. This is its story.
Most flags used to be ugly. They were probably better that way.
Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.
