One of 8 fields we read

Human Stories & Ideas

22 discoveries published so far

August 11, 2026 A health model that cut Mali's infant deaths by more than 90 percent The nonprofit Muso built its model around one insight from co-founder Dr.
August 11, 2026 Why taxi drivers almost never die of Alzheimer's A 2024 study of nearly 9 million US death certificates found that out of 443 occupations, taxi and ambulance drivers had the lowest Alzheimer's death rate of all: roughly 1 in 100, compared with 1 in 60 for the general population.
August 3, 2026 You are carrying DNA from a human ancestor who has no fossil record at all A team of computational biologists and geneticists built a new technique that can find ancient DNA hiding inside modern human genomes without needing any actual fossil DNA to compare it against, and it works: the method correctly picked out known Neanderthal and Denisovan sequences as a proof of concept.
August 2, 2026 What ten writers understood about growing older Maria Popova gathered ten writers and thinkers, spanning more than a century, on what it actually means to grow old in a culture built around youth.
July 20, 2026 Ancient Egyptian princesses were warriors, and their bones prove it For decades, archaeologists argued over whether the weapons buried alongside Egyptian royal women were real tools or purely ceremonial.
July 19, 2026 A Buddhist teacher's simplest idea about love might be his most useful Reflecting on the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh's book How to Love, writer Maria Popova returns to his central claim: "understanding is love's other name".
July 15, 2026 Ancient pine trees are still telling their own history A team of four dendrochronologists and one 12-year-old apprentice hiked two hours up Greece's Mount Smolikas this year to find out how old a stand of gnarled Bosnian pines really was.
July 13, 2026 Astronomers are catching black holes that were built from earlier black holes In 2015, LIGO made the first-ever direct detection of a gravitational wave, from two black holes of about 36 and 29 solar masses spiraling together.
July 1, 2026 Vera Rubin's Telescope Begins Filming the Universe On July 1, 2026, the Vera Rubin Observatory in the Chilean Andes officially began its Legacy Survey of Space and Time.
June 30, 2026 Mars Has Active Geology Beneath Its Apparently Dead Surface The NASA InSight seismometer spent four years measuring the interior of Mars before dust covered its solar panels in 2022.
June 27, 2026 Psilocybin Temporarily Restored Speech and Mobility in Advanced Alzheimer's A psychiatrist in São Paulo named Marcos Lago was treating an 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer's disease, a stage where significant functional recovery is considered essentially impossible, when he made a decision to try psilocybin.
June 27, 2026 Ancient Humans Thrived in Rainforests, Rewriting the Origin Story The standard story of human evolution placed our species emerging on East African savannas and avoiding tropical rainforests until agriculture made survival in those environments possible, roughly 12,000 years ago.
June 27, 2026 The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Is Eight Months Ahead of Schedule NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope arrived at Kennedy Space Center on June 21, 2026, delivered by barge from Baltimore, eight months ahead of the 2027 launch schedule.
June 24, 2026 Rwanda built something that most of philosophy said couldn't exist In 100 days in 1994, approximately 800,000 Tutsi were killed in Rwanda by Hutu militias.
June 23, 2026 A Visitor From Before Our Sun When interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS swept through our solar system in 2025, astronomers knew it was odd.
June 22, 2026 A week of cosmic surprises, from new stars being born to a galaxy hidden inside another The James Webb Space Telescope published a new image of OMC-2, a molecular cloud 1,280 light-years from Earth in the constellation Orion, where new stars are forming and carving their surroundings with jets of glowing gas.
June 20, 2026 Our earliest land-dwelling ancestors skipped the tadpole stage entirely Fossilized hatchlings from the Mazon Creek site near Chicago have overturned more than 150 years of assumptions about how our vertebrate ancestors first came onto land.
June 19, 2026 Denisovan genes are still active in our immune cells A Yale-led team sequenced the genomes of 177 people from 12 populations across Oceania, then compared those sequences against the known Denisovan genome and three Neanderthal genomes.
June 12, 2026 Maps of worlds nobody had seen Two papers published this week mapped places no one had ever fully seen.
June 6, 2026 The Brain Can Learn to Actually Multitask, Through Neurological Migration Georgetown University researchers tracked participants through more than 30,000 image-sorting trials over five to ten weeks and watched what happened to their brains before and after they became experts at the task.
June 6, 2026 Sleep Protects the Physical Structure of the Brain, and That Structure Can Be Shaped A University of Arizona team analyzed brain MRI scans from more than 23,000 adults who had answered sleep questionnaires up to nine years earlier, and found that three specific sleep habits predicted significantly more white matter lesions: sleeping fewer than seven hours per night, frequent daytime napping, and persistent difficulty falling or staying asleep.
June 6, 2026 The Pope Weighs In on AI and What Makes Human Work Human In the first encyclical of his papacy, Pope Leo XIV published "Magnifica humanitas," arguing that AI is not intrinsically immoral but that its adoption needs to slow to build moral guardrails, establish social safety nets for displaced workers, and create democratic processes to keep technology development under public rather than oligarchic control.