Central banks created trillions during the pandemic by pressing keys on a computer. Understanding the quantitative easing mechanics behind that process reveals why unwinding it is proving far harder than starting it.
Explainers Geopolitics & ConflictYour adult brain can change, but not the way pop science claims. Four decades of neuroscience reveal a picture more nuanced than either the old "fixed brain" dogma or today's "rewire anything" hype.
Explainers Science & MedicineThe mRNA technology platform that produced COVID-19 vaccines in record time is now being deployed against cancer, influenza, RSV, and pancreatic tumors. With 280 candidates in development and the first cancer vaccine approvals expected by 2027, here is how the science works and where it is heading.
Explainers Science & MedicineThe UN General Assembly voted 123-3 to declare the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity and called for reparations. The United States, Israel, and Argentina voted no. The reasons why expose a fundamental tension in international human rights law.
Geopolitics & Conflict News & AnalysisData center energy demand is driving the fastest U.S. electricity growth in two decades, pushing capacity prices up elevenfold in one grid region alone. Congress, state legislatures, and the White House are now racing to decide who pays the bill.
Artificial Intelligence ExplainersFive independent lines of dark matter evidence converge on the same conclusion: 85% of the universe's mass is invisible. After 93 years and detectors three million times more sensitive than the originals, we still have not caught a single particle.
Explainers Physics & EngineeringThe U.S. and Israel struck Iran's nuclear facilities but left 400 kilograms of enriched uranium buried underground and beyond reach. With the IAEA locked out and diplomacy collapsed, Tehran's stockpile is the crisis no bomb could solve.
Geopolitics & Conflict News & AnalysisThe physics behind nuclear weapons explains why a few kilograms of metal can level a city, how fusion multiplies that force a thousandfold, and why making a bomb ten times more powerful does not make it ten times more destructive.
Explainers Physics & EngineeringThe federal workforce purge gutted the very agencies now essential to the Iran war. From FBI counterintelligence teams fired days before strikes to Pentagon IT systems facing "extreme risk," the cost of DOGE is becoming clear.
Opinion Policy & GovernanceThe blood-brain barrier rejects 98% of drugs and nearly all antibodies. It is the structural reason neurology lags decades behind every other branch of medicine, and new approaches are finally starting to crack it open.
Explainers Science & MedicineTuring Award winner Yann LeCun left Meta and raised $1.03 billion for AMI Labs, betting that large language models are a dead end and that world models AI is the only path to genuine machine intelligence.
Artificial Intelligence ExplainersYour cells accumulate damage through 12 distinct biological pathways, from telomere erosion to mitochondrial decay. The science of aging now has a precise molecular framework, but the gap between understanding these mechanisms and actually slowing them remains wider than most headlines suggest.
Explainers Science & Medicine
