Everyone loves the streets of old cities like Verona, Bruges, and Prague. The reason might seem obvious: they are lined by beautiful historic buildings. But people also love the streets of Osaka, ...

Subscribe Ruxandra Teslo and Niko McCarty on Chinese biotech Pieter Garicano on Emmanuel Macron Saloni Dattani on smallpox eradication Jamie Rumbelow on the internet's infrastructure Samuel Hughes on ...

Paradoxically, porcelain is both one of humankind’s oldest high technologies and one of its newest. The earliest proto-porcelain was created more than three thousand years ago, and was, for the time, ...

Japan is the land of the train. 28 percent of passenger kilometers in Japan are travelled by rail, more than anywhere else in the developed world. France achieves 10 percent, Germany 6.4 percent, and ...

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale ...

Just beyond central Vancouver, the Squamish Nation is building one of the most ambitious and unusual housing developments in the world, and getting rich in the process. How they did it has lessons for ...

Every hundred South Koreans today will have only six great-grandchildren between them. The rest of the world can learn from Korea’s catastrophe to avoid the same fate. South Korea has the lowest ...

Western countries used to let landowners build almost anything anywhere. Now, strict rules freeze the character of most neighborhoods, banning change and densification. Why? One theory is that modern ...

The phones we carry around in our pockets have two million times more memory and are thousands of times faster than the room-sized computers that guided the Apollo mission to the Moon. This incredible ...

If you ran out of food, would you hesitate to eat your dog? If stranded on an island, have you put any thought into how you would carve up the family cat? What is it that separates these animals from ...

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace. In 2020, an odd food product hit the shelves of ...

Time and again in the communist bloc, economic reformers from Moscow to Pyongyang planned to introduce rationality and markets into planning. They often thought they had won the argument, and not just ...