A team of researchers have cracked a five century-old code that reveals a rumoured French plot to kill the Roman emperor and king of Spain Charles V. Charles was one of the most powerful men of the 16th century, presiding over a vast empire that took in much of western
The Jurassic Park movies made it pretty obvious that bringing ancient creatures back to life was a very bad idea, but one company is trying to do it anyway. Sara Ord works at a "de-extinction" company called Colossal Biosciences, where they are trying to bring back everything from
The idea that a parasite can cause its host to engage in certain kinds of behavior is not new – a brain-eating parasite attacks ants and then directs them to climb up the tallest blade of grass so they can be eaten by birds. But some researchers believe that a common
In the winter of 2002, a young American named Ryan Neil joined an unusual pilgrimage: he and several others flew to Tokyo, to begin a tour of Japan’s finest collections of bonsai trees. The next-youngest adult in the group was fifty-seven. Like many Americans of his generation, Neil had
Just before noon on Christmas Eve in 1971, Juliane Diller, then 17, and her mother boarded a flight in Lima. The flight was supposed to last less than an hour. About 25 minutes after takeoff, the plane flew into a thunderstorm, and the teenager watched a bolt of lightning strike
It’s a simple sentence that captures the hopes and fears of modern-day parents as much as the bronze age Canaanite who owned the doubled-edged ivory comb on which the words appear. Believed to be the oldest known sentence written in the earliest alphabet, the inscription on the luxury item
In June of 2018, artist Gina Adams took the stage at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. She talked nervously about being selected as summer artist-in-residence for the department of studio art, then greeted the audience in Anishinaabemowin, and talked about her Ojibwe grandfather. The following year, the Emily Carr University
If you're a hard-core nerd, you probably already know this, but for those who don't, it's a fascinating story: In 1941, Hedy Lamarr, a famous silent-film star, patented the spread-spectrum, frequency-hopping technology that became the underpinnings of cellular telecommunications and WiFi. She got the
Egyptian mummies, long an object of modern fascination, seem to link us with the ancient past by preserving distinct human form. But this was not the true reason for the intricate process, according to a new British exhibition. The technique was instead a way of transforming dead dignitaries into a
I usually link to print articles here, but I'm making an exception for this short documentary, which was produced by Madonna and premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. It's from 2019, but I only just came across it. It's about a man from Malawi
The Naturalis Biodiversity Center, a popular natural history museum in the Netherlands, owns about 40,000 prehistoric objects collected in the 19th century by the Dutch physician Eugène Dubois from the banks of the Bengawan Solo, a river in Java, and at other digs in Indonesia. The highlight is a
he human body and brain undergo a series of profound changes over the course of dying. Some of these, like elevated anxiety and agitation, can be difficult for the patient, family members, and caregivers. In the most extreme cases, the only recourse is palliative sedation, which is essentially putting a