Trampling culture, destroying history

Deliberate destruction and looting threaten antiquities. Is this the rule or the exception through history? Why destroy culture? More »

Ebola’s end: History’s lessons

As Ebola ravages West Africa, we seek answers in past epidemics. How did cholera, plague, smallpox end? Lacking drugs or a vaccine, how More »

Spears helped our ancestors eat and defend themselves. Spearmaking required ingenuity, experiments and communication. Symmetrical stone More »

How do patents work? What is “new, non-obvious and useful”? What will happen after the biggest change in patent law in 60 years? More »

A “permanent” calendar could finally answer the annual, “Uh, what day is New Year’s eve this year?” question. This calendar would place More »

If (gasp!) the subject is too big for a Whyfile, hit the books. More »

Experiment: Earth “drags” spacetime, as Einstein predicted. What else did Einstein get right? (Hint: Lots and lots!) More »

The Americans who made Clovis-style spear-points were not the first Americans — despite heavy archeological skepticism. More »

Which came first: The empire or the administration? Conventional wisdom says the demands of empire led to the rise of bureaucracy. But More »

Obama decides that current and new grant applications at the National Institutes of Health are an effective economic stimulus. People More »

Did the arrival of 4,000,000,000,000,000,000 tons of space junk start the formation of organic molecules roughly 4 billion years ago? More »

Archeologists thought Middle-Eastern cities grew through remote “daughter” villages. A new study paints a different picture. More »

Art, like fossils, can be stolen. What’s at the story on looting art, antiques, and fossils? More »

Edward Teller helped invent the hydrogen bomb, then pushed missile defense. He changed the 20th century. More »

What did the losing World Trade designs look like? What is the significance of a city skyline? More »