You can spend every day surrounded by other people and still feel lonely. You can also spend long periods alone without finding the experience distressing. That difference may help explain why loneliness affects health differently from social isolation.
Why have public displays of piano playing become so compelling? At railway stations, shopping centres and airports, an instrument usually associated with concert halls bursts into everyday life.
When a devastating heat wave, hurricane, flood or wildfire strikes, people often want to know: How much did human-caused climate change influence this event, if at all? For many years, scientists could answer that question only in general terms.
One of the greatest pains a human can endure is to have no friends. What if we could build machines that replicated the experience of friendship?
Wildfire smoke has been pouring across the U.S. border from fires in Canada again, turning skies an eerie shade of orange in several states in July 2026. In the West, smoke has also been spreading into communities in Colorado and neighboring states as more wildfires burn in hot, dry conditions.
Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries.
Simonetta Vespucci is probably one of the most painted women of the Italian Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli is widely believed to have used her as his model for Venus, and she appears, transformed and idealised, across several of his most famous works. She died in 1476, aged just 23.
It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat.
In the 1980s, universities lobbied Congress to make student loans unlimited, so everyone could get a college education and have higher earnings. Now, college is more unaffordable than ever.
Melatonin – a go-to sleep aid for kids and adults alike in many households in America – continues to create media buzz, with conflicting messages that leave people uncertain about its safety.
Images of families displaced by floods, prolonged droughts or extreme storms have become a distressingly regular feature of the daily news. As the impact of climate change intensifies, so does concern over its effects on human mobility.
Your child’s small, delicate, chalk-white baby teeth fall out. In their place grow yellowish-brown, fragile teeth – much to everyone’s surprise.
You might think of cancer as a mass of rogue cells that grow uncontrollably. But cancer is more organized and strategic than that. Rather, cancer is a tightly controlled cellular neighborhood that can keep the body’s defenses out or weaken them once they get in.
