FEATURED STORYNEW10 MIN READ
The Real Reason You Feel Better After Crying (It's Not What the Internet Says)
The viral version says your tears contain a painkiller six times stronger than morphine. The actual research — conducted across 35 countries, published in peer-reviewed journals, involving thousands of participants — is more nuanced, more honest, and considerably more interesting.
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VIRAL RESEARCH · INSIGHTS
"In 2013, a team of Finnish researchers gave 701 people a blank outline of a human body and asked them to colour where they felt each emotion. The resu..."
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The Real Reason You Feel Better After Crying (It's Not What the Internet Says)
Science · 10 MIN READ02
Scientists Actually Mapped Where Emotions Live in the Body. Here's What They Found.
Science · 11 MIN READ03
In 1929, Virginia Woolf Stood Up at Cambridge and Said What No One Had Said Before
History · 15 MIN READLatest Stories
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History·15 MIN READ
In 1929, Virginia Woolf Stood Up at Cambridge and Said What No One Had Said Before
In October 1928, Virginia Woolf delivered two lectures to the women students of Cambridge University. A year later she published them as a single essay. Ninety-six years on, the argument she made that evening — that literature had been catastrophically impoverished by the doors shut on women — has never been seriously refuted
History·14 MIN READ
They Admitted Everything. Here's What Happened Next
Saint Augustine admitted his sins to God and changed Western civilisation. Jean-Jacques Rousseau admitted his failings to the world and invented modern autobiography. Oscar Wilde admitted everything to the man who had destroyed him — and the man burnt the letter without reading it. Confession, it turns out, does not always go as planned
Science·12 MIN READ
You Would Need Wings the Size of a Bus. The Science of Why Humans Can Never Fly — and What It Reveals About the Most Extraordinary Bodies That Ever Existed.
Scientists have calculated that an average human would need a wingspan of at least 6.7 metres — roughly 22 feet — to generate enough lift to fly. That's the wingspan of a small aircraft. And wings would be the least of your problems.
Human Interest·11 MIN READ
He Never Asked for Credit. That's the Whole Point. The Real Story of Keanu Reeves
The internet has invented a dozen versions of Keanu Reeves — viral stories that are touching but fabricated. The verified truth is more interesting than any of them. And it involves a private foundation he has never put his name on, a house he sold to be closer to his sister, and twelve Harley-Davidsons
Science·14 MIN READ
The Science of Why Volcanoes Don't Explode Immediately — and What That Has to Do With Everything That Eventually Does
Mount St. Helens shook for two months and recorded more than 10,000 earthquakes before it exploded. The pressure had been building for 123 years. The science of why volcanoes don't erupt immediately turns out to be one of the most precise explanations in nature for why nothing that eventually breaks does so without warning.
Science·14 MIN READ
Why the Human Brain Is Wired to Avoid Admitting Mistakes — and What History's Biggest Cover-Ups Reveal About It
In 1957, a psychologist named Leon Festinger proved that human beings will rewrite reality rather than admit they are wrong. History's greatest cover-ups didn't happen because powerful people were uniquely evil. They happened because the human brain was designed to protect itself from a very specific kind of pain
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