The three-act ‘hero’s journey’ has long been the most prominent kind of story. What other tales are there to tell?

Imagining how aliens might communicate prepares us for first contact and illuminates the nature of our own languages ...

The world’s isms – capitalism, socialism, fascism and so on – explored through the analogy of your mum doing the washing ...

Inspired by a TikTok trend, a cognitive scientist developed the largest citizen science study in animal communication ...

An awe-inspiring look at how scientific knowledge builds upon itself gradually – one ingenious measurement at a time ...

Like today’s large language models, 16th-century humanists had techniques to automate writing – to the detriment of novelty ...

Peel back the visible and invisible layers of brilliance in one artist’s clever self-portraits juxtaposing East and West ...

On 22 January 1817, Henri Beyle’s heart was beating fast. Not because he had braved the robber-infested road from Bologna, but because he was now approaching the city of Florence. Glimpsing ‘like some ...

is an award-winning British science writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the co-author with John Heilbron of Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement (2024) ...

is a specialist in the early medieval Scandinavians and professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, where he also directs the national Centre for the World in the Viking Age. He ...