The school holidays are here, and parents struggling to get their children to bed will no doubt be thinking: what is wrong with you? I would do anything to get more sleep! Children seem to do everything possible to avoid sleep, yet many adults can’t seem to get enough of it. […]
National Library of Australia: 31258061 The new Netflix series Shadow and Bone opens with cartographer Alina Starkov crammed into the back of a rumbling wagon, sketching a war-torn landscape. A flashback to her childhood in an orphanage shows her looking at a map of a conflict zone. A guardian tells […]
Shutterstock/Lava images Imagine you’re in the middle of watching a riveting episode of your favourite TV show. You decide the situation calls for popcorn, so you get up and head to the kitchen. But when you arrive in the kitchen you suddenly stop and think to yourself: Why did I […]
Credit: Cultura Creative RF / Alamy Globally, households are shrinking—more and more people are living alone. In 2016, almost two thirds of all households in the EU were composed of one or two people, with shrinking households also prevalent around the world. As countries move up the human development index, households are […]
The brains of musicians have stronger structural and functional connections compared to those of non-musicians, regardless of innate pitch ability, according to new research from JNeurosci. Years of musical training shape the brain in dramatic ways. A minority of musicians — with Mozart and Michael Jackson in their ranks — also […]
Your guess is as good as anyone’s. (Image: © Peter Adams) Stonehenge is perhaps the most famous of all the henges, vast circular monuments constructed from wood or stone that litter the British countryside. The prehistoric monument was most likely erected in what is now England sometime between 3000 B.C. and […]
AP/Terrance Siemon The three recent appearances (and two subsequent removals) of “monoliths” in Romania, Utah and California are intriguing examples of what can capture the public’s imagination. These constructions are metallic-looking structures about three or four metres tall, with a simple geometric design and reflective surface. They’ll look familiar to fans of […]
Artist Udo J. Keppler’s visualization of the long reach of John D. Rockefeller and his mega company, Standard Oil. Credit: Udo J. Keppler, Wikimedia Commons The world’s richest man and the world’s largest oil company dominated the petroleum market in Norway long before landmark finds on the Norwegian continental shelf […]
Does social media really cause high rates of depression among teens? By Peter Gray Ph.D. Freedom to Learn For years now, the popular media have been publishing overblown articles, with scare headlines, about the dangers of “screen time.” At first the main demon was video games. Claims were made that […]
Charles Deluvio/Unsplash, CC BY-SA Social media algorithms, artificial intelligence, and our own genetics are among the factors influencing us beyond our awareness. This raises an ancient question: do we have control over our own lives? This article is part of The Conversation’s series on the science of free will. Have you […]