It’s so toxic, curators can’t handle it without gloves – but drinking wine from this cup was once a popular wellness trend ...

Interpreting the emotional lives of animals requires a subtler and more nuanced understanding of anthropomorphism ...

To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness ...

Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art ...

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, numerical memory and navigational memory differ in kind, but the deeper point ...

What does it mean to be Mexican? Meet the artist who forged Mexico’s identity in the brushstrokes of his landscape paintings ...

What’s so golden about the golden ratio? A myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea ...

Hereditary social inequality was the first form of social complexity to have emerged in human history, and gave rise to chiefdoms, kingdoms and political states. By helping to build and maintain ...

Can a Tibetan singer make the leap from the slow pace of life on the Tibetan plateau to the fast rhythms of urban Beijing?

In Ancient Greece, the route to vengeance was through gossip for women, slaves and others with no access to legal retribution ...

Laws of nature are impossible to break, and nearly as difficult to define. Just what kind of necessity do they possess?