The extraordinary Chinese writing system has over 4,000 core complex characters – and they’ve been getting more complex over time.
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Saturday 31 December 2022
Sunday 25 December 2022
How the Puritans once banned Christmas in Massachusetts
You have likely heard the story of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas!" — but what about the one where the Puritans in Massachusetts banned the holiday altogether?
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Flexibility is key to building a carbon neutral power system
To manage future electricity demand in line with the EU's Energy Roadmap 2050, power grids need to rely on both supply and demand flexibility and be structured as a system of systems.
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Friday 23 December 2022
Clear Is a Pox on America’s Airports
Happy holidays to everyone but the company for skipping the security line.
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Thursday 22 December 2022
Five ways TikTok is seen as threat to US national security
Many in the United States see TikTok, the highly popular video-sharing app owned by Beijing-based ByteDance, as a threat to national security.
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Thursday 15 December 2022
Bushwalkers accidentally discover Australia's first known bioluminescent millipedes
Scott Kemp first saw glow-in-the-dark millipedes in the Illawarra 18 years ago, but he had no idea he was making a significant scientific discovery.
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Wednesday 14 December 2022
Japanese McDonald’s Restrooms Have Phone Cleaning Devices Built Into Their Sinks
We wash our hands in public restrooms, so why not clean our phones? This is such a smart idea!
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When Argentina Used World Cup Soccer to Whitewash Its Dirty War
'We should not play soccer amid the concentration camps and torture chambers,' wrote proponents of an international tournament boycott that year.
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Tuesday 13 December 2022
Why heiress Marlene Engelhorn wants most of her fortune to be taxed away
What would you do if you inherited millions of dollars? Would you reimburse your debts? Go on a travelling spree? Or lobby your government to take it away from you in the name of tax justice? Austrian heiress #MarleneEngelhorn was left with millions of euros from her family #business. But as co-founder of the organisation Tax Me Now, she wants the government to take around 90 percent of her wealth through a more equitable taxation system.
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Monday 12 December 2022
Australia’s mountain mist frog declared extinct as red list reveals scale of biodiversity crisis
Experts describe it as a ‘beautiful endemic rainforest species’, one of several that have not been seen for decades
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Where Has All the Mustard Gone?
For months, mustard has been tough to find on grocery store shelves in Europe. It's a combination of geopolitical instability and wild temperatures.
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Saturday 10 December 2022
11,000-Year-Old Carving of Man Holding His Penis, Surrounded by Leopards, Is Oldest-Known Depiction of a Narrative Scene
The Neolithic panel indicates a shift from hunting-and-gathering to an agrarian farming society among the Turkish region.
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DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea
Humanity carries traces of other populations in our DNA – and a new study shows how one of these ancestors has influenced the immune systems of modern Papuans.
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Thursday 8 December 2022
Ancient human relative used fire, surprising discoveries suggest
Charcoal and burned bones offer intriguing — if controversial — clues that the species Homo naledi made hearths to light its way and cook in dark caves.
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Monday 5 December 2022
Japanese hanko: What's in a name (stamp)?
The intricately carved hanko has been long associated with authenticity in Japan, but as ready-made alternatives and digital versions emerge, is it still relevant?
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Texas Bookstores Are Writing Their Own Stories
Indie bookshops across the state are embracing change, to thrive and stay alive. But a lot depends on the upcoming holiday season.
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Saturday 3 December 2022
Footprints Claimed as Evidence of Ice Age Humans in North America Need Better Dating, New Research Shows
Recent research claimed that preserved footprints were from the last ice age. Now, a new study disputes the evidence of such an early age.
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Thursday 1 December 2022
Why most men don't have enough close friends
Friendships aren't just about those you sit with on the school bus or play alongside on your childhood baseball team — they are a core component of the human experience, experts say. But making and retaining deep, meaningful friendships as an adult is hard, especially for men, according to research.
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Wednesday 30 November 2022
How Samuel Adams Helped Ferment a Revolution
A virtuoso of the eighteenth-century version of viral memes and fake news, he had a sense of political theatre that helped create a radical new reality.
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Friday 18 November 2022
To Fight Climate Change, Canada Turns to Indigenous People to Save Its Forests
Canada is looking to its Indigenous communities to help manage its boreal forests, the world’s largest intact forest ecosystem and one of its biggest stores of carbon.
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The Only Way the U.S. Can Win the Tech War with China
The tech war between China and the U.S. over advanced semiconductors is rapidly heating up, but the U.S. needs allies to win
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Wednesday 16 November 2022
Hand of Irulegi: ancient Spanish artefact could help trace origins of Basque language
The Vascones, an iron age tribe from whose language modern Basque is thought to descend, previously viewed as largely illiterate
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Never Completely Dutch: Flemish Writers in the Land of Freedom
Writers Ivo Victoria, Sarah Meuleman and Geert Buelens all found it liberating to move to the Netherlands. But it wasn’t long before they encountered the downsides of their destination country.
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Monday 7 November 2022
To Swim in the Seine
Reimaging the Seine’s restoration as one where rivers are enfranchised to their natural right to run free and clean is a hopeful vision.
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Saturday 5 November 2022
Neanderthals: how a carnivore diet may have led to their demise
Zinc in their bones reveal that these early humans were top of the food chain.
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How Tucson, Arizona is facing up to a megadrought
As the south-western United States faces the worst drought in more than a millennium, a city on the banks of a dry riverbed may have answers for gleaning water from the desert.
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Friday 4 November 2022
Why Egypt became one of the biggest chokepoints for Internet cables
When underwater cables congregate in one place, things get tricky.
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Monday 31 October 2022
Rare golden sword pommel acquired by Scottish museum
The pommel, which is about 1,300 years old, was found in 2019 by a metal detectorist near Stirling.
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Sunday 30 October 2022
Man who plays dead on TikTok gets new life as corpse on TV crime show
Josh Nalley specialized in pretending to be a lifeless body on social media – then CSI: Vegas came calling.
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Friday 28 October 2022
Cache of 19th-Century Blue Jeans Discovered in Abandoned Arizona Mineshaft
The seven pairs of pants open a portal into life in the Castle Dome mining district
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Axon evidence-storing system full of flaws, lawyer says, as police consider expansion
A defence lawyer says police's private American-provided evidence storing system is derailing criminal trials and letting in the wrong people.
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Tuesday 25 October 2022
The scary sound of Earth’s magnetic field
scientists in Denmark have taken magnetic signals measured by ESA’s Swarm satellite mission and converted them into sound – and for something that protects us, the result is pretty scary.
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Sunday 23 October 2022
Raising the drawbridge: why are so many Australians creating their own countries?
By some estimations, Australia hosts around a third of the world’s self-declared mini-kingdoms. There are three good reasons for that
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Thursday 20 October 2022
"Dirty" cows are destroying the Amazon rainforest
The beef industry is flattening the Amazon, even when companies tell you it’s not.
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Tuesday 18 October 2022
Adapting Sesame Street for Russian TV — What Could Go Wrong?
“Our preschoolers are much smarter than American children,” a professor insisted. “We will need a more advanced curriculum for the show.”
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Tuesday 11 October 2022
Where to Find Tienda Mexicana cerca de mí in USA
Tienda mexicana cerca de mí: A guide showing you where to find Mexican stores in the USA that sells Mexican products.
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Monday 10 October 2022
The Instagram capital of the world is a terrible place to be
Just because you can (sort of) afford to go somewhere doesn’t mean you’ll enjoy it.
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Son of the Storm by Suyi Davies Okungbowa
The first in The Nameless Republic trilogy. A complex world with a very un-European civilization. Very readable.
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How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned.
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When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Opened a Psychic Bookstore
A considerable mess greeted the station sergeant who peered into London's The Psychic Bookshop in the early morning hours of February 6, 1928. Books and papers
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Friday 7 October 2022
More than half of Silicon Valley residents want to leave: ‘The mood is darkening’
A whopping 64% of residents in Silicon Valley are worried the region is on the wrong track.
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Tuesday 4 October 2022
Google discontinues Google Translate in mainland China
Google has discontinued its Google Translate services in mainland China, removing one of the company’s few remaining services that it had provided in a country where most Western social media platforms are blocked
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Monday 3 October 2022
Finland wants to transform how we make clothes
Firms behind innovative fibres says they can make fashion a more sustainable business.
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Netherlands researchers break the 30 percent barrier in solar cells
Using perovskite with existing solar cell technologies can increase their energy conversion efficiencies. It is only about scaling it up reliably now
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Monday 26 September 2022
The typical Chinese adult is now richer than the typical European adult, a new wealth report finds
Credit Suisse released its 2021 Global Wealth Report this month, which estimates the wealth of households around the world.
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Sunday 25 September 2022
Saturday 24 September 2022
Why Florida is paradise for space nerds
Artemis is a big deal at an already-booming time for the space industry, sending fans flocking to the Space Coast.
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Saturday 17 September 2022
How Book Bans Turned a Texas Town Upside Down
In a political environment where book-banning efforts are being used to drive voter sentiment, librarians find themselves on the front lines.
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