In 1856, quarry workers in the Neander Valley in the west of Germany stumbled on 16 humanlike – yet not quite human – bones that would upend our understanding of our species. The finding, which was ...

Morality is rooted in love rather than institutions: the enduring impact on theology and philosophy of Héloïse’s 12th-century ...

Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers. Impromptu is at once a transfixing audiovisual experience and a whirlwind visual history. In the ...

Between 1603 and 1868, Japan entered an era of unified rule and isolation known as the Edo period, named after the city of Edo – modern-day Tokyo – which was the seat of government. This TED-Ed ...

Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

is assistant professor of Classics at Cornell University in Ithaca, US. She is working on a book titled Bad Readers and Ancient Rome. A 3rd-century Egyptian fragment of Sappho’s poetry from papyri ...

In Nigeria’s oil fields, international giants have pumped crude for decades – yet the country struggles to develop its own refineries or high-tech industries. In Mexico, global car companies churn out ...

For the vast majority of human history, we’ve relied on the Sun to tell time – a reliably unreliable method, given the body’s tendency to disappear behind clouds and the horizon. This animation from ...

Created to accompany an exhibition at the Computer History Museum in California, this nifty explainer from the video essayist Grant Sanderson (aka 3Blue1Brown) helps to demystify how large language ...

In the 1930s, a Belgian priest and physicist named Georges Lemaître transformed our understanding of the Universe when he envisioned its birth as a cosmic explosion. According to Lemaître, the ...

A slight shift in Cleopatra’s beauty, and the Roman Empire unravels. You miss your train, and an unexpected encounter changes the course of your life. A butterfly alights from a tree in Michoacán, ...

What happens to the job market when the government raises the minimum wage? For decades, higher education in the United States has taught economics students to answer this question by reasoning from ...