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, ...

Why did the Communist regime collapse in the Soviet Union? Why has it survived in China? The answers might surprise you. Explanations for the sudden end of the USSR after seven decades, and the ...

Stephen Kotkin is a historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author of Stalin: Waiting for Hitler.

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, ...

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 ...

Pour-over coffee has long been popular with coffee enthusiasts, but it frustrated coffee shops because it takes so long to make. That’s changing. In the US, almost every coffee shop serves drip coffee ...

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 ...

Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did. But the problems holding it back seem solvable, and some of the answers may lie inside our own bodies.

Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world. What can its expansion teach other cities? In 1995, the Madrid Metro was 71 ...

If you want a picture of biomedical research, imagine a boot stamping on a biologist’s face – for decades. The boot is labeled ‘medicinal chemistry’. This should not be taken as an insult to medicinal ...

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 ...