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Many scientific papers receive little attention initially but become highly cited years later.

War is hell.

Mathematics was the cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution.

New Zealand passed the most ambitious upzoning reforms in the world.

Cocktails aren’t what they used to be – and that’s a good thing.

Unlike nearly all other arts, architecture is inherently public and shared.

Local government faces incentives just like everything else.

Today’s world requires vastly more copper than you could imagine, and the world of electric vehicles will require even more.

Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it.

Houston was notorious for its sprawl.

Building a state is not a matter of copying first world institutions.

The West has been below replacement fertility once before.

The history of attempts to reform planning in Britain is proof that political willpower is not enough: you need to be smart, not just brave.

Thomas Edison is often accused of not having invented the things he gets credit for.

Washington, DC, has avoided the worst price rises that have plagued many other growing American cities.

Olivine is a green mineral that reacts with CO2 in the ocean to form a harmless silt.

Cheap, safe nuclear power is possible, but is all but prohibited in most Western countries.

Ending acid rain was one of humanity’s greatest environmental successes.

As climate change threatens crop yields, we need a second Green Revolution – one that, this time, is driven by genetic engineering.

Samuel Hughes, a contributing editor at Works in Progress, visits cities around to learn about gentle density.

We’ve learnt to see the world through the eyes of our prey.

Building infrastructure doesn’t need to come at the cost of the environment.

Power outages force businesses across Africa to rely on expensive, dirty diesel generators.

France was once Europe’s superpower, thanks above all to its enormous population.

We have learned to fear plutonium – one of the world’s most useful materials.

Plastic is eating the roads.

Exposing misinformation online is hard to do at scale and can veer into outright censorship.

ARIA is the UK’s visionary new scientific funding body.

Nobody had a plan to get vaccines out of freezers and into Americans’ arms – except VaccinateCA.

International development was revolutionized by experiments and evaluations of its methods.

Fire has almost disappeared as a cause of death in the developed world.

Snakebites kill between 80,000 and 140,000 people every year.

Though we tend to see history as just one political event after another, it’s technology and ideas, not politics, that change our lives the most.

Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are forcing skeptics to eat their words.

Scientific papers are dense, jargon-filled, and painful to read.

Is a build up of generic regulations together causing us to be three times poorer than we need to be?

Stripe Press’s Tamara Winter sits down with J.

The great slowdown began when we started rationing energy.

Nanotechnology sometimes sounds as much like science fiction as artificial intelligence once did.

We may not have flying cars but we do have incredible information technology.

Americans famously love to sue one another.

A documentary from Stripe Press that follows the evolution of a rudimentary gaming network between friends in Cuba into a DIY internet that serviced most of the island.

The world’s first round-the-world solo yacht race was a thrilling and, for some, deadly contest.

When America’s economy overtook Britain’s a century ago, it remade the world order.

Outdated forms of peer review create bottlenecks that slow science.

Behavioral economics has identified dozens of cognitive biases that stop us from acting ‘rationally’.

Until recently, roads were shared between a messy mix of cyclists, stagecoaches, carts, horses, and pedestrians, with no dominant user.

Bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacterial cells – were almost forgotten in the age of antibiotics.

History’s most famous innovation prize—the longitude rewards—is misunderstood.

Gas heating is bad for the environment.