Without a doubt, the biggest questions about dreaming are all variants on this question: Why do we dream? We began studying dreaming in the early 1990s and, between the two of us, have published over 200 scientific papers on sleep and dreams. Pulling

On Jan. 1, 2021, five long years after the vote for what’s become known as Brexit, and numerous marches before and after that national decision, some of which attracted more than 100,000 impassioned participants, Great Britain formally severed its ne

2020 was a bad year for just about everything—except horror. Horror films were wildly popular on streaming platforms over the past year, and 2020 saw the horror genre take home its largest share of the box office in modern history.1 In a year where t

Humans once lived in harmony with the natural world. Consider timekeeping. Until relatively recently, the human notion of time was based on the natural rhythms of nature. Time was measured by a new moon, the first snow, a migrating bird, or the ebb a

When a Weddell seal, native to Antarctica, plummets 400 meters beneath the ice on one of its hour-long dives, an ensemble of adaptations come together to keep it alive. The seal’s heart rate slows. At this pace, it will burn through its deep reserve

In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the ice. The Iceman, it turned out, died more than 5,000 years ago. At first, archeologists assumed he’d fallen in a snowstorm and frozen to death. Then they discovered var

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Maps” issue in January, 2020. On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in May, 2020. In May, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and ph

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Outbreak” issue in April, 2020. I’m no stranger to forced isolation. For the better part of my 20s, I served as a nuclear submarine office

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Intelligence” issue in March, 2020. Dennis Carroll doesn’t mean to sound callous when he says the coronavirus outbreak was predictable. An

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Energy” issue in June, 2020. Dear Bella, I’m going to imitate Rudyard Kipling and tell you a just-so story. Kipling was one of the most po

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in July, 2020. Stuart Ritchie is a lecturer in the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre at King’s Col

Some evolutionary biologists say that after we pass reproductive age, nature, like a cat who’s been fed, is done with us. The bodily systems that thrived and repaired themselves to ensure that we pass on healthy genes cease to function well and leave

I remember my grandfather commenting—wry amusement tinged with grim resignation—that what made him finally feel old was seeing his children reach middle age. I was a child then. Now I see my own children, not quite middle aged, starting to have child

The Chinese artist Xu Bing has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Last year I visited the Centre del Carme in Valencia, Spain, to see a retrospective of his work. One installation, Book from the Sky, featured sc

The air was warm as the skies grew dark over Diego Garcia. As the nearly full moon reached its highest point, a green sea turtle scuttled her way onto the sand. The ocean giant was more than a meter wide and nearly as long from nose to tail. Her cara

“I have lately been especially attending to Geograph. Distrib, & most splendid sport it is,—a grand game of chess with the world for a Board.”—Charles Darwin to C.J.F. Bunbury (1856) In 1938, Yasunari Kawabata, a young journalist in Tokyo, covered th

The 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared his progress in solving a problem to that of a mountain climber “compelled to retrace his steps because his progress stopped.” A mountain climber, von Helmholtz said, “hits upon traces of a fr

Safe, effective, and available vaccines are the best long-term solution to the coronavirus pandemic.1 So it’s welcome news that two vaccines are poised for distribution and others will soon be on their way. Preliminary clinical trial data from these

I have been wanting to do this since I was 5 years old,” Apple CEO Tim Cook proclaimed to a packed San Francisco auditorium on March 9, 2015. “The day is finally here.” The standing ovation that Cook received as he announced the arrival of the Apple

When people entertain transporting to the past, 19th-century Berlin, say, they don’t often imagine a dramatic shift in smellscape. The inhabitants talk differently. Their fashion looks strange. But what do those streets smell like? Suddenly, it hits

The Man Who Loved PhysicsBy Alan Lightman Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the “retinue,” a constellation of influential and supportive people whom one imagines in an enveloping cloud as one me

Imagine that someone asked you to come up with a sequence of five words. In any other year, some idiosyncratic combination would likely come to mind. This year, though, one five-word sequence that has been etched into the memories of many Americans,

The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite this exalted status, it has long been associated with a great mystery and a bleak implication. The mystery is th