Over more than a thousand years, Venice transformed from a modest refuge into a dominant Mediterranean power. Despite various crises and encircling empires, the Venetian Republic avoided foreign rule, revolution, and collapse. ...

The ocean absorbs 90 percent of the excess heat generated by burning fossil fuels and deforestation. Climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions is the primary driver of long-term global warming. Today, humanity is officially in uncharted waters. According to the Copernicus Climate Change...

“Under racial capitalism, land is treated as nothing more than a natural resource to be extracted, and violence is committed against the climate and the waters,” said Leah Penniman, who runs Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York and is the author of the acclaimed...

Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use numbers, is more than a basic skill: It is what underlies the human...

Farmed animals in the United States have minimal legal protections, and much of the abuse they endure is legal. Unfortunately, the federal Animal Welfare Act—which establishes protections for pets and nonhuman animals used for exhibition (like in zoos) and research—does not apply to farmed...

Societies survive and grow when they successfully navigate their contradictions. Eventually, however, accumulating contradictions overwhelm existing means of navigating them. Then social problems arise that persist or worsen inside such societies because they are unsuccessfully navigated or go unattended. Sometimes, the dominant conscious reaction to...

The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises and what it means, we will never be able to understand science as...

We used to have “balloon” debates in school: The hot-air balloon is losing height and, to avoid disaster, people must be jettisoned. To avoid this fate, everybody must justify why they should remain on board and their classmates then vote them “on” or “off.” ...

Many species of birds face a deadly threat: window collisions. They cannot distinguish a clear pane of glass from the open sky, and hummingbirds, among the smallest birds, are particularly at risk. The good news is that we now understand this danger and can protect...

Anthropogenic climate change and biodiversity loss are the most pressing issues for our planet. Carbon dioxide emissions in the atmosphere continue to rise due to the burning of fossil fuels and land use change, with the latter occurring primarily in the form of animal...