The world is, quite literally, a surprisingly shocking place. Lightning lights up the sky, carpets crackle with static electricity, and electric eels can unleash powerful jolts. While these examples are old news, scientists keep finding electricity in unexpected places. Some discoveries promise better technology, including devices designed to harvest energy from heat radiated into the […]

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Espionage existed long before the Cold War, but the decades-long standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union transformed it into a contest of cryptanalysis, surveillance, deception, and increasingly sophisticated technology. The operations from this period have inspired countless books and movies… or at least the operations we know about. Many remained classified for […]

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The expression “Dark Ages” grew out of the work of the fourteenth-century Italian scholar Petrarch, who contrasted the cultural achievements of classical antiquity with what he saw as the darkness that followed. Later writers expanded that judgment until the term came to describe much of the period between the fall of the Western Roman Empire […]

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Ants wage chemical warfare, perform life-saving surgeries, and even fall victim to fungi that turn them into zombies. But things can become stranger still around the colony’s reproductive center, where a queen might lose her position to a worker or an invader might persuade loyal daughters to murder their own mother. Of course, an ant […]

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Caribbean food tends to come with good associations: Christmas tables crowded with black cake, jerk smoke drifting from roadside grills, roti wrapped around curry, and soup joumou appearing in enormous pots every New Year’s Day. The histories behind those dishes are considerably less comfortable. Caribbean cuisine took shape through Indigenous survival, European colonization, African enslavement, […]

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Documentaries are often treated as one of the closest things cinema has to truth. Unlike fictional films, they present themselves as carefully researched windows into reality, promising audiences facts instead of fantasy. That reputation gives documentaries significant influence. A persuasive narrator, dramatic music, selective editing, and confident “experts” can convince millions of people that they […]

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Caribbean food is often described through color, spice, celebration, and comfort. Black cake at Christmas. Jerk smoking over pimento wood. Roti folded around curry. Soup joumou filling kitchens on New Year’s Day. The history behind those foods is less cheerful. Centuries of Indigenous survival, European colonization, African enslavement, indentured labor, migration, and trade shaped what […]

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