Longitudinal studies of retirees keep finding the same two-year arc: a euphoric first year of travel and rest, followed by a sharp dip around month fourteen when workplace weak ties dissolve and loneliness moves in.
The man who devised a complete writing system for the Cherokee language could not read a word of any language when he began.
There is a certain kind of worker who has spent forty years doing one thing. Not forty years in a field, or a company, or a broad profession, but forty years…
The word arrives late in the book. Richard Dawkins, the esteemed evolutionary biologist, spends most of The Selfish Gene, published by Oxford University Press…
The received idea about boy bands is that they are built for one audience and disposable by design.
Elephants make deep rumbles that sit mostly below the range of human hearing. Those same low-frequency calls do something less obvious: they push vibrations into the ground, and other elephants appear to pick those vibrations up through their feet and trunks.
Put on the same rubber caveman mask a team of researchers once wore, walk across the University of Washington campus, and a good share of the local crows will start screaming at you.
A prairie dog standing sentry over its colony does more with a squeak than sound a generic alarm.
The Strait of Hormuz, the narrow sea passage linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and the open ocean, normally carries about 20 million barrels of oil a day.
For a long time, chronic constipation carried a name that hinted, without quite saying so, that it was not a proper illness.
Two researchers propose that the constant pull we never notice is quietly holding perception and the sense of self in place. The idea is elegant, testable in principle, and so far entirely unproven.
Brené Brown's two decades of shame and vulnerability research found something counterintuitive: kind people are rarely bad at giving. What blocks real intimacy is the far harder act of letting another person see the parts you routinely smooth over.
Brené Brown's two decades of shame and connection research point to a specific kind of solitude nobody teaches you to name — the loneliness of being surrounded by people who only want what you can give them.
The last time a Tyrannosaurus rex broke the auction record, it vanished for two years.
There is a popular rule of thumb about social media: scrolling in silence is bad for you, but posting and chatting is good.
Vitamin B12 is built only by bacteria and archaea — no plant, animal, or fungus can make it. The human liver hoards enough to last roughly three years, which is why deficiency hides for so long before it shows.
