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Science has forgotten that the greatest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who are able to take a fresh perspective.

We disinfect water before we drink it.

Chinese dams will hold billions of people downstream to ransom.

Systems thinking promises to give us a toolkit to design complex systems that work from the ground up.

France built 40 nuclear reactors in a decade.

Commuter trains often stop at the edge of cities.

Japan faced some of the world’s toughest planning problems.

Inflation targeting is now standard in central banking.

Animal drugs are approved much faster than human drugs.

Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world.

Brain implants are letting people move, speak, and interact with machines using only their thoughts.

How a dubious theory of radiation damage based on fruit flies and a secretive weapons testing program came to be – and why its time may now be up.

We’re looking for new authors and article pitches.

The Hanseatic League united merchants to bargain with kings, blockade cities, and even win wars.

Life in the state of nature was less violent than you might think.

Land value taxes are once again becoming a popular all-purpose solution to housing issues.

Ordinary yellow pineapples were once so precious they were rented for display at dinner parties, but centuries of innovation made them commonplace.

Many women face a choice between career advancement or motherhood.

New York’s skyscrapers soar above a century-old steam network that still warms the city.

China builds towers in a park, while America, and nearly everyone else, builds squat mid-rise blocks.

Why do high-cost cities have more homelessness?

Madrid tripled the length of its metro system in just 12 years — faster and cheaper than almost any other city in the world.

When the future arrived, it felt… ordinary.

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk.

What do cryogenics, butterfat tests, and genetic data have in common?

Airports and cities may face delays and rising costs, but cruise ships keep breaking records.

Buildings are not just art – they are the places people live in, work in, and experience every day.

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force.

Pour-over coffee has long been popular with coffee enthusiasts, but it frustrated coffee shops because it takes so long to make.

How we calculate inflation has always been a subject of debate.

Synthetic diamonds are now purer, more beautiful, and vastly cheaper than mined diamonds.

We may be close to rediscovering thousands of texts that had been lost for millennia.

Libraries contain books, yes.

Advance Market Commitments allow us to buy technology from the future to support its development: vaccines, carbon capture technology, and even spacecraft.

Prediction markets are legal, contrary to popular belief.

It has taken almost 60 years to bring traffic congestion pricing to New York.

Why are buildings today simple and austere, while buildings of the past were ornate and elaborately ornamented?

Deterrence alone might not stop crime.

Inventing new materials is only the first step.

Gentrification can be a real problem for people it pushes out.

Britain had its fastest ever house price growth not in the 2020s but in the 1970s.

Unwinding Russian serfdom took half a century.

Too few people donate their organs, dead or alive.

I was deliberately infected with Zika to test a vaccine.

Homeowners are often the biggest opponents of building new homes.

We used to dig up roads to put trains underneath – cheaply.

Silk is stronger than steel or kevlar.

SGLT2, a protein in the kidney, takes glucose out of the urine and puts it in the blood.

Asbestos was a miracle material, virtually impervious to fire.

The earth’s core is hot.