By Timothy R. Jones The position of the medieval Blacksmith or metalworker is often innately connected with that of the knight for whom he is immortalised as supplying with a steady stream of swords and weaponry. To accurately describe this trade in the context of the medieval period, the blacksmith…

Recently, I sat in the grass at an alfresco lunch with women between the ages of 70 and 90. We belong to a philanthropic organization dedicated to women’s education. “Did you grow up reading Nancy Drew?” I asked the three closest to me. “Oh yes,” they said, almost in unison. They leaned in toward…

On 7 November 1983, around 100 senior military officers gathered at Nato headquarters in Brussels to ‘fight’ World War Three. The annual simulation, known as Able Archer, came at the end of a large-scale conventional exercise ­– Autumn Forge – involving tens of thousands of Nato troops across…

Pay-for-download The internet age has allowed the perfection of this particular fraud: I start a company to sell e-widgets over the internet. I produce e-widgets and sell them for $10. I pay my buddy $10 million to buy a million e-widgets from me. My buddy pays me $10 million for a million…

(CNN) — Researchers have discovered a gigantic complex of 200 million termite mounds in northeastern Brazil , which may be up to 4,000 years old and covers an area about the size of Great Britain. Although visible on Google Earth, the conical mounds, some of which rise up to 10 feet high, are…

As the Duncans soon learned, tens of thousands of contractors, florists, and other small-business owners nationwide were being chewed up by the same legal process. Behind it all was a group of financiers who lend money at interest rates higher than those once demanded by Mafia loan sharks. Rather…

I am bone of the bone of them that live in trailer homes. I grew up next to Tiffany ‘Pennsatucky’ Doggett, the hostile former drug addict from the prison TV drama Orange Is the New Black . I know her by her teeth. Pennsatucky – a scrappy slip of a woman menacing, beating and proselytising to fellow…

China Rules How China became a superpower It was 2000, and Bill Clinton was upbeat. The internet, he said, was opening up the world. “There’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the internet,” he said. “Good luck. That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall.” The internet…

The broad facts of income inequality over the past six decades are easily summarized: The years from the end of World War II into the 1970s were ones of substantial economic growth and broadly shared prosperity. Incomes grew rapidly and at roughly the same rate up and down the income ladder, roughly…

On a remote peninsula in the north-west Highlands of Scotland is the small off-grid community of Scoraig. Accessible only by boat or a five-mile walk, the residents of Scoraig live in relative isolation, partly powering their homes and school with wind power. Among the inhabitants are crofters with…

Loading... Creativity COMMENT 8.95 BUY COPIES Loading... Executive Summary Raw intelligence is undoubtedly a huge asset, but it isn’t everything. And sometimes, when intellectually gifted people don’t achieve as much as they’d like to, it’s because they’re subtly undermining themselves. Five things…

Share this Share this... Facebook One day in October 2014, I had a chance to visit the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for an exhibition that included some of my work. On a tour through its halls, an elderly woman stopped to stare at a photograph I’d taken of a Japanese girl. “I feel as if I…

Dark stores rising: As big-box retailers shutter, many companies have found a way to turn vacant properties into lower taxes on open stores nearby. Madison McVeigh/CityLab Laura Bliss 10:29 AM ET Big-box retailers nationwide are slashing their property taxes through a legal loophole known as "dark…

In the most recent two-year election cycle, the political industry generated roughly $16 billion in revenue. Meanwhile, customer satisfaction — that is, from voters — is at a historic low. (Photo: Bill Pugliano /Getty) We all know our political system is “broken” — but what if that’s not true? Some…

A plant that evolved hollow thorns for ants to shelter in. In exchange, the ants defend the plant from attacks from other insects and mammals. Credit: (c) Field Museum, Corrie Moreau Plants are boring. They just sit there photosynthesizing while animals have all the fun. Right? Not so much. Take a…

There are four original manuscripts containing poetry in Old English—the now-defunct language of the medieval Anglo-Saxons—that have survived to the present day. No more, no less. They are: the Vercelli Book , which contains six poems, including the hallucinatory “Dream of the Rood”; the Junius…

Embedded in the cerebral folds of every city planner who’s ever lived, there’s a cluster of neurons that lights up like Las Vegas when confronted with the possibility of a blank slate. It started with Hippodamus, the man Aristotle claimed was the father of urban planning. When the Persians destroyed…

Henry Murray yearned to go to war. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, and the Harvard psychologist started working out, rowing every morning to get himself in fighting shape. But there was little need for an academic on the battlefields, so Murray turned his skills as an analyst and onetime…

Credit Photo illustration by Paul Sahre Skip to contentSkip to site index Feature New research is zeroing in on a biochemical basis for the placebo effect — possibly opening a Pandora’s box for Western medicine. Credit Photo illustration by Paul Sahre T he Chain of Office of the Dutch city of Leiden…

W i-Fi fills our world with radio waves. In your home, in the office, and increasingly on city streets, humans are bathed in a constant background field of 2.4- and 5-gigahertz radio signals. And when people move, they distort this field, reflecting and refracting the waves as they go. Recommended…

Mobile voting has arrived. By Maksim M/Shutterstock. Almost a year ago, the Department of Homeland Security alerted roughly half of all U.S. states that their election systems had been the targets of hackers linked to Russia. Jeanette Manfra, the head of cybersecurity at the Department of Homeland…

PDF files hold lots of information. Most of the information contained in a PDF file is used to render a document in a reproducible way across many different platforms, be it a PDF of a contract, an instruction manual, or your favorite cat meme. But did you know there’s also an abundance of metadata…

Cancer-linked Chemicals Manufactured by 3M Are Turning Up in Drinking Water

I have never bumped into Tim Maudlin, but I have felt his gravitational tug. A Reddit discussion of " heavy hitters in philosophy " called Maudlin "probably the most influential person in philosophy of physics." Someone chimed in that Maudlin, whose books include The Metaphysics Within Physics and…

What exactly constitutes horror? Being spooked by the dark, and by the dead who might return in it, may have haunted the earliest human consciousness. Ceremonial burial predates all written history; the act apparently represented an effort to placate the corpse so it would not make an unwelcome…

Inside a notorious Chinese labour camp, a dissident smuggled an SOS letter into the Halloween decorations he was forced to manufacture. Years later, a woman in the US opened a box of fake tombstones and found his note. It seemed impossible at that moment that they would ever meet. A few years ago,…

Cattle in the Amazon rainforest. Photograph: Michael Nichols/National Geographic/Getty Images Humanity has wiped out 60% of mammals, birds, fish and reptiles since 1970, leading the world’s foremost experts to warn that the annihilation of wildlife is now an emergency that threatens civilisation.…

If you haven’t heard, universities around the world are offering their courses online for free (or at least partially free ). These courses are collectively called MOOCs or Massive Open Online Courses. In the past six years or so, over 800 universities have created more than 10,000 of these MOOCs.…

In the tech industry, design consistency isn’t just undervalued; oftentimes, it’s an object of outright scorn. That’s why, for instance, Apple consistently gets grief for releasing new iPhones that aren’t radical departures from last year’s iPhones . So it’s certainly no shocker that rifling through…

F or the first time, researchers have discovered that birds can sleep in flight. Together with an international team of colleagues, Niels Rattenborg from the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen measured the brain activity of frigatebirds and found that they sleep in flight with either…

Ancient Egypt’s female feline goddess had two sides. As Bastet, she could nurture and protect; as Sakhmet she had a propensity to brutally attack and maim without control. But in both forms, she had one raison d’être: to protect and nurture the patriarchy. Such was the case for strong Egyptian…

While Wall Street and U.S. President Donald Trump tout news of a booming stock market and low unemployment, college students may be quick to roll their eyes. The improved economy has yet to mean higher wages for graduates already struggling to pay down massive debt, let alone ease the minds of…

As I made my way through the meandering hallways of Tokyo Station, I felt like a pilgrim making a monumental journey, before my actual trip. I was headed to the mecca of ekiben – beloved boxed meals created specifically for long train journeys. Like the crowds bustling around me, I had a train to…

Getty Images/Madison McVeigh Jonathan English 9:00 AM ET The widespread failure of American mass transit is usually blamed on cheap gas and suburban sprawl. But the full story of why other countries succeed is more complicated. When it comes to the quality of public transit, comparisons between…

Press Herald via Getty Images For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he…

Three points motivated me to write this — forming a Bermuda Triangle in which the average American’s savings disappear without any apparent cause. 1. Considerations on Cost Disease — the observation that certain costs (Education, Medical Care, Housing) have increased many times faster than…

Early last year, Scott Blew was standing in line at a food truck in Los Angeles when he caught the glare of Fox News on a television out of the corner of his eye. This is ridiculous , he thought. He couldn’t even escape the deluge of the news, or the ubiquity of screens, on a jaunt outdoors to get…

AUSTIN, Texas—As much as subscription services want you to believe it, not everything can be found on Amazon or Netflix. Want to read Brett Kavanaugh buddy Mark Judge’s old book , for instance (or their now infamous yearbook even )? Curious to watch a bunch of vintage smoking ads ? How about…

Researchers in Japan will be able to edit human embryos in the lab under proposed rules. Credit: Zephyr/SPL/Getty Japan has issued draft guidelines that allow the use of gene-editing tools in human embryos. The proposal was released by an expert panel representing the country’s health and science…

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bill Hinshaw is not a typical 75-year-old. He divides his time between his family – he has 32 grandchildren and great-grandchildren – and helping U.S. companies avert crippling computer meltdowns. Hinshaw, who got into programming in the 1960s when computers took up entire rooms…