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, ...

January 2022. TikTok had chosen its villain of the week. West Elm Caleb was a six-foot-four mustachioed lothario who had strung along several different women. They took to TikTok to tell their ...

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 ...

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 ...

In Irish mythology, a man forces his heavily pregnant wife, Macha, to race the King of Ulster’s horses on foot. She wins, gives birth to twins at the finish line, and then curses the warriors of ...

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 ...

In recent decades, Europe has fallen behind the United States. In 2000, incomes in the original six members of the European Union were just 10 percent behind Americans. Today, they are 20 percent ...

The convenience of instant coffee masks a surprisingly difficult problem. Coffee’s appeal lies in the hundreds of volatile compounds that create its flavor and aroma, exactly the substances most ...

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials. But as long as you don’t eat it, you’re probably safe. Plutonium is an element. It’s essentially nonexistent in nature, ...