Reconstructions

  1. Humans

    What ancient mummies have to tell us about the perils of modern life

    Once you hit a certain age, visiting a doctor is basically a guilt trip. All that satisfying stuff you eat, drink or smoke is killing you, a white-coated overachiever tells you. You need to exercise and lose weight, or the grim reaper will be at your door long before you’re ready. And it will all […]

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  2. Archaeology

    What the Maya really have to tell us about the end of the world

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  3. New research on Native American origins takes anthropologists down memory lane

    In school we learn that science proceeds logically from one experiment to the next, leaving in its wake a complete and certain body of knowledge. But science isn’t like that. It twists and turns, careens and tumbles and gets stuck in deep, sticky mudholes. And sometimes, science backtracks. That’s happened in cosmology recently, as observations […]

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  4. Anthropology

    Scientists can’t decide if shoulders of giants were broader or just better organized

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  5. Anthropology

    Maya calendar savvy suggests apocalypse is farther in the future than December

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  6. Science & Society

    Rich caveman, poor caveman: Economic inequality wasn’t born last election cycle

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  7. Genetics

    Today’s information revolution illuminates diseases spread in the age of discovery

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  8. Science & Society

    Aftermath of ancient eruption offers lessons in adapting to disaster

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  9. Climate

    Matt Crenson, Reconstructions

    In ancient Southwest droughts, a warning of dry times to come.

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  10. Humans

    Matt Crenson, Reconstructions

    Tools tell a more complicated tale of the origin of the human genus.

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  11. Too smart to fail: Why people think they’re so great

    A lot of the world’s biggest problems are what you might call crises of overconfidence. Big, powerful nations conquer small, unstable ones expecting that invading troops will be greeted as liberators. On Wall Street, people who should know better buy dubious investments under the assumption that they’ll be able to unload them before the bubble […]

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  12. Tools tell a more complicated tale of the origin of the human genus

    The first animals that could arguably be called “human” made the evolutionary scene a little less than 2 million years ago. These aren’t folks you’d mistake for modern-day Homo sapiens, or even the GEICO caveman. But they were clearly distinct from their more apelike predecessors. They had bigger brains, for one thing, and walked fully […]

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