In 1856, quarry workers in the Neander Valley in the west of Germany stumbled on 16 humanlike – yet not quite human – bones that would upend our understanding of our species. The finding, which was ...

Morality is rooted in love rather than institutions: the enduring impact on theology and philosophy of Héloïse’s 12th-century ...

Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers. Impromptu is at once a transfixing audiovisual experience and a whirlwind visual history. In the ...

Between 1603 and 1868, Japan entered an era of unified rule and isolation known as the Edo period, named after the city of Edo – modern-day Tokyo – which was the seat of government. This TED-Ed ...

Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

For the vast majority of human history, we’ve relied on the Sun to tell time – a reliably unreliable method, given the body’s tendency to disappear behind clouds and the horizon. This animation from ...

is professor of early modern British history at Sorbonne University in Paris, France. She is the author of The Paradoxes of Ignorance in Early Modern England and France (2023). Yet Descartes was not ...

Listening is the dark matter of conversation, a mysterious activity that shapes the cosmos of any society or relationship. A friend who is a good listener can turn an ordinary conversation into a life ...

The famed ‘Christmas truce’ of 1914 occurred some five months after the outbreak of the First World War when widespread, unofficial ceasefires arose on the Western Front on Christmas Eve and Christmas ...

The Sun rises every day. Water boils at 100°C. Apples fall to the ground. We live in a world in which objects behave the same given the same circumstances. We can imagine living in a different world: ...

While the small northern Italian city of Cremona is considered the world’s cultural centre for the production of stringed instruments, this video from the YouTube channel ProcessX shows that there is ...

While we have never been closer to becoming an interplanetary species, any hopes humanity has for inhabiting planets beyond our solar system – let alone solar systems beyond it – remain a distant ...