Human Behaviour
A genetic analysis of nearly 700,000 people identified 74 distinct locations in the…
Anxiety is still more often treated as a mood problem than a biology problem. A new study makes that harder to justify.
Human Factors
Physicist Roger Penrose has spent decades arguing that consciousness isn't…
Roger Penrose does not think a computer will ever be conscious, and he does not think a brain running on ordinary neural computation would be conscious either.
Human Factors
Pooling 10 UK studies of 1,252 people, researchers found that exercising outdoors…
A short walk, paddle, or cycle in green surroundings tends to lift mood and how you feel about yourself.
Science & Engineering
The word algebra comes from the title of a book called Al-Jabr, written around the…
Two of the most substantially used words in the current global vocabulary of mathematics and computing come from the same 9th-century scholar — associated with…
Human Factors
Japan's pachinko parlors, at their 1994 peak, generated more revenue every year…
Walk down essentially any commercial street in essentially any Japanese city on essentially any weekday evening in 2026 and you will pass at least one building…
Human Factors
In 1971, a struggling nightclub drummer named Daisuke Inoue built the first karaoke…
The single most-commercially-consequential invention of the late-20th-century Japanese consumer electronics sector was popularised by a self-described mediocre…
Science & Engineering
When Sony released a robotic dog called AIBO in Tokyo in May of 1999, the first…
Approximately 26 years after the small dog-shaped robots went on sale, the ones that stopped working are being given Buddhist funerals at a rural temple in Chiba Prefecture.
Human Factors
Between 1849 and 1874, roughly 100,000 Chinese men from Guangdong province were…
The most beloved fusion cuisine in modern South American gastronomy was invented by the survivors of one of the more brutal indentured-labour systems of the 19th century.
Human Factors
After the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis nearly bankrupted South Korea, the government…
The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which nearly destroyed the Korean economy, is the specific reason that essentially every listener of contemporary global pop…
Human Factors
After the Soviet Union invaded Finland in the winter of 1939 expecting an easy…
Stalin had expected to reach Helsinki in two weeks. He never reached it. The specific mechanism by which a country of approximately 3.7 million people…
Human Factors
When Norway peacefully separated from Sweden in the autumn of 1905 after 91 years…
The peaceful separation of one European country from another by referendum, in the specific autumn of 1905 during which the substantial majority of European…
Human Factors
Researchers found that on days people did more small kind things for others, the…
Do a few small kind things on a bad day, and the day may sting less. That is the plain finding of a 2016 study in Clinical Psychological Science.
Human Behaviour
There is a language on a small Spanish island in the Canary archipelago that is…
The island is called La Gomera. It sits in the Atlantic Ocean approximately 300 kilometres off the west coast of Morocco, in the western half of the Canary Islands archipelago.
Human Factors
When Israel's first president died in 1952, the new nation offered the presidency…
"All my life I have dealt with objective matters, hence I lack both the natural aptitude and the experience to deal properly with people and to exercise official functions.
Psychology
Researchers compared 5,556 people across 10 nations and found that parents tended…
Ask most parents what matters to them most in life and the answer is immediate; their kids.
Earth & Life
Demographers estimate that about 117 billion members of our species have ever been…
Start with a single number: about 117 billion. That is the Population Reference Bureau's estimate for how many people have ever been born on Earth.