Send Little Red Riding Hood from Bordeaux toward Russia and her basket changes at every border. A folklorist explains where a fairy tale keeps its nationality.
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Early farmers walked past lands with regular rain and settled where it never came. A historian on why Sumer's dry south may have pushed people to invent.
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A smartphone can hold every grandmaster chess game ever played. A psychologist argues that human limits, not limitless knowledge, are where creativity begins.
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An astrophysicist compares a gamma-ray burst to a laser pointer aimed at Earth: ozone stripped, mutations, and a chance of about once in 100 million years.
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Women have two X chromosomes and men one, so female cells wrap one X in a coat of non-coding RNA and switch it off. A biologist explains why it matters.
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The original definition of AGI can't be tested, so companies wrote their own. In one version, AGI is whatever earns a billion dollars. Here is why that matters.
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Mesopotamians dug canals and invented writing, yet credited the gods. Historian Olga Popova on a mindset with no inventors and almost no named authors.
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A psychologist explains the morphological box: split a messy problem into parts, lay them on a grid, and see options you would not have thought of.
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A meter of sea level rise in a century is a building project for rich coasts and an eviction notice for small poor islands, says oceanologist Alexander Osadchiev.
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