Social Sciences

A riveting quest to map the world; quantum physics in a four-act drama; climate solutions that show what we’re doing right

Letters to the editors for the March 2024 issue of Scientific American

A new book about tree collectors shows how arboreal curation is an outlet for art and activism

Death rays; the sawfly’s barf defense

Call off the pest control and learn to live with wildlife

Brawls over the honesty of online and cable news today owe their origins to World War I and a debate that divides us still

We still expect children to express emotions in gendered ways. It’s harmful and needs to stop

Lucy, a 3.2-million-year-old fossilized hominin, may have been much less hairy than we imagine—a perhaps shocking revelation for our modern sense of nakedness

An ancient shipwreck lost in deep waters has yielded its first clues: amphorae from a lost age of international trade and civilization

We are living through a terrible time in humanity. Here’s why we tend to stick our head in the sand and why we need to pull it out, fast

The advent of “cumulative culture”—teaching others and passing down that knowledge—may have reached an inflection point around the time Neandertals and modern humans split from a common ancestor

A philosophy department chair arrested at a campus protest offers university presidents a lesson in democracy