The Origin of the Etruscans
The Etruscans were a sophisticated people who flourished in ancient Italy before Rome rose to power, leaving rich art and a language unlike any…
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The Wow! Signal
The Wow! signal was a strong, unexplained radio signal detected in 1977 by a telescope scanning the sky for possible messages from other…
Ball Lightning
Ball lightning is a reported phenomenon in which a glowing, floating sphere of light appears, usually during thunderstorms. Many people claim to have…
How the Pyramids Were Built
The Great Pyramids of Egypt are among the most astonishing structures ever built, yet exactly how the ancient Egyptians raised them, with millions of…
The Hubble Tension
The Hubble tension is a genuine and growing puzzle in cosmology: two careful ways of measuring how fast the universe is expanding give answers that…
Does Language Shape Thought
Does the language we speak shape the way we think? This question, sometimes called linguistic relativity, has fascinated and divided scholars for…
What Killed the Ice Age Megafauna
At the end of the last ice age, many of the world's largest animals, the megafauna, went extinct, from woolly mammoths to giant ground sloths.…
The Origins of Modern Humans
Where and how our own species, Homo sapiens, arose is a question of intense scientific interest. The broad outline, an African origin, is well…
Why the Neanderthals Died Out
Neanderthals were a species of ancient humans who lived across Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before disappearing around 40,000…
The Nature of Time
Time is one of the most familiar parts of our experience, yet what it really is remains one of the deepest and most contested questions in physics…
Why Do We Dream
Dreams, the vivid stories the mind plays out during sleep, are universal yet deeply mysterious. That we dream is obvious; why we dream, and what…
What Caused the Great Dying
The Permian extinction, often called the Great Dying, was the most severe mass extinction in Earth's history, around 252 million years ago, when the…
What Causes Alzheimer's Disease
Alzheimer's disease is the most common cause of dementia, slowly destroying memory and thinking. That it damages the brain is clear, but what…
How Birds Navigate
Many birds travel thousands of miles between breeding and wintering grounds, often returning to the very same spot year after year. How they find…
How the Americas Were Settled
How and when the first people reached the Americas is a genuinely contested question. That humans came from Asia is clear, but the timing and the…
Why We Age
Why living things grow old and eventually die is one of biology's deep and contested questions. Ageing is nearly universal among complex animals, yet…
The Cambrian Explosion
The Cambrian explosion was a remarkable burst of evolution, beginning around 540 million years ago, when most of the major groups of animals appeared…
The Origin of Language
How human language first arose is one of the hardest questions in science. That we alone among animals possess full language is clear; when, how, and…
Are Animals Conscious?
Whether animals have conscious experiences, an inner life of feelings and awareness, is a deep and genuinely contested question. That many animals…
The Bronze Age Collapse
The Bronze Age collapse was a sudden, widespread breakdown of civilizations around the eastern Mediterranean roughly 3,200 years ago. Within a few…
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