Aeon
Unlocking the mystery of why we sleep
We spend approximately a third of our life sleeping, yet we don’t know why we need to. And if we ...
How do animals react when danger and death threaten?
Our concept of death is one of those characteristics, like culture, rationality, language or morality, that have traditionally been taken ...
‘It’s all in your head’: Do thinking and feeling really happen in the brain?
Someone’s probably told you before that something you thought, felt or feared was ‘all in your mind’. I’m here to ...
How grief overwhelms and transforms who we are
Grief has such a powerful effect on us, I learned, that it rewires the brain: the limbic system, a primal ...
Insect farming is all the rage. Here’s why it might not be such a good idea
Interest in insect farming is booming. Insects have been heralded as a sustainable alternative to traditional animal agriculture, with a ...
Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric issues, it can boost confidence and openness
[W]hy, exactly, is [deep brain stimulation, or] DBS so transformative – not just eliminating OCD symptoms, but increasing self-confidence and ...
Viewpoint: Psychology is more mythology than hard science
In our secular age, many people no longer turn to sacred books to understand who and what they are. Psychology ...
What was life like for Neanderthal women?
Neanderthal women very likely did hunt some or much of the smaller game we find in sites, such as tortoise, ...
How extensively did the Vikings explore the Americas a millennium ago?
Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson set sail from Greenland and landed first in ‘Stone-slab land’, then ‘Forest land’ and ...
Viewpoint: There are only two sexes. That doesn’t invalidate the biological reality of transgenderism
There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When ...
What caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve into behaviorally modern people?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a ...
What physicists get wrong about free will
It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating ...
Were the mythical ‘ebu gogo’ creatures of Indonesia distant human relatives?
An ancient legend from the Indonesian island of Flores speaks of a mysterious, wild grandmother of the forest who eats ...
Deconstructing the idea that consciousness is a ‘spooky’ illusion
These days it is highly fashionable to label consciousness an ‘illusion’. This in turn fosters the impression, especially among the ...
Viewpoint: Neurodiversity movement hurts people with autism by ‘romanticizing’ the disorder
In the past decade, neurodiversity’s popularity has grown enormously, largely because of the buzz surrounding Steve Silberman’s book NeuroTribes (2015). Today, the ...
Revising human history: Asian paleoanthropology reveals human, Neanderthal relationships
[T]he first analyses of Neanderthal DNA seemed to indicate that Neanderthals and modern humans did not interbreed. But this popular ...
Searching for life in 3-billion-year-old fossils: Will we know it when we see it?
Geologists examining fossils in rocks help us to gain purchase on the conundrum of what constitutes life by identifying its ...
