Author: Frederick Stankus

Exotic ultra-compressed matter can look like pasta, among other things.

Whether it’s our country or our football team, we need to belong.

Why you laugh with your friends.

The staple fish is having an identity crisis.

When Arne Hendriks, a 6” 4’ Dutchman, faced audience members at TEDxBrainport in 2012, he smiled apologetically. “I have some bad news for you,” he said. “You’re not short enough.” Hendriks believes that the planet’s growing population—currently at 7 billion—is unsustainable. His solution? We should shrink ourselves to 50 cm, around the height of a […]

How place names encode ecological change.

I would cut off my right hand if you find it.” That was the guarantee retired Columbia history lecturer Jens Ulff-Møller made that there was no word for “million” in Old English, a medieval predecessor of the language you’re currently reading. Some Anglo-Saxon writers understood the idea of a million, and they had a term for it: a “thousand […]

Say goodbye to stable orbits and knotted shoelaces.

Vitalism in the age of modern science.

Harvard’s David Edwards talks to Nautilus about how ideas can change the world.