Human Factors
In 2017, New Zealand granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River after a…
In March 2017, a river in New Zealand stopped being property and became a person.
Human Factors
In 1980, China's economy was about the size of the Netherlands'. By 2010 it had…
A person born in China in 1980 is not yet old. They are in their mid-forties, younger than a good number of the people who will read this.
Human Factors
Thought of the day from the father of American psychology, William James
What follows is a piece of reading and reflection, not guidance. We are writers, not psychologists or clinicians, and the studies mentioned here describe patterns across groups of people, not rules for any one reader's own mind or decisions.
Human Factors
Pooling 71 studies of nearly 100,000 people, researchers found heavier short-video…
In September 2025, the journal Psychological Bulletin published a large review of the research on short-form video, the endless feeds on TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts.
Earth & Life
Since the 1950s, dogs have leapt from the same spot on Scotland's Overtoun Bridge…
For decades, dogs have leapt from one spot on Scotland's Overtoun Bridge, earning it a grim nickname. A behavioural investigation points not to the supernatural but to a hidden animal's scent and the weather that carries it.
Psychology
We tend to think loneliness is about having no one around, but the Harvard Study of…
A person can sit at a full dinner table, in a house they share with people they have known for years, and feel a specific kind of absence.
Human Factors
In the Viking Age town of Birka, Sweden, a warrior buried with two horses, a sword…
In 1878, the Swedish archaeologist Hjalmar Stolpe opened a chamber grave at Birka, the Viking Age trading town on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren, and found what looked like a textbook.
Human Factors
Papua New Guinea has a population of roughly 10 million people and 840 living…
In parts of the Papua New Guinea highlands, two villages within a day's walk of each other can speak languages as far apart as English and Japanese.
Human Factors
Research suggests East Asian skin often shows visible wrinkling later than…
The claim circulates in roughly this shape: skin ageing in East Asians begins about a decade later than in Caucasians, and the reason is structural, a thicker dermis packed with collagen that holds the skin firm long after it would otherwise start to give.
Human Behaviour
Falling in love with a machine is no longer science fiction
About nineteen percent of American adults, in a survey of roughly 3,000 people released in February 2025 by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University, said they had chatted with an AI built to act like a romantic partner.
Human Behaviour
Only about one in five workers worldwide feels truly engaged at work, a 2026 Gallup…
Twenty percent. That is the share of workers around the world who feel truly involved and enthusiastic about their jobs, according to Gallup's State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report.
Human Behaviour
For most of history the worry was too many people, yet by 2050 some 155 of the…
For most of the last century, the fear was too many people. That fear has now flipped.
Human Factors
A 14-year-old who applied to NASA, was rejected, and ended up cleaning a space…
In 2001, ahead of the opening of the National Space Centre in Leicester, a teenager on work experience was helping to prepare the exhibits.
Human Factors
A University of Tokyo study found that students who wrote schedules on paper…
Give a person a diary, a tablet and a phone, ask them to write down the same set of appointments, then quiz them an hour later, and the one who used paper tends to recall the simpler details more reliably.
Science & Engineering
For centuries, Korean women used rice water as a beauty ritual
Farmers who rinsed rice by hand noticed something ordinary: their fingers came away soft.
Psychology
There is a small window in a boy's life, between the ages of four and six, when he…
There is a stretch of early childhood, roughly between the ages of four and six, when a boy tends to read a room with real accuracy.