Country music has long shed its Bible-bashing image. Today, bluegrass is helping to heal America’s deep divides ...

Academics Aaron Reeves and Sam Friedman believe they have finally arrived at an answer. In Born to Rule: The Making and ...

In William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, the character Mariana claims, “No legacy is so rich as honesty.” Morgan ...

How should we represent humankind to aliens? With Pioneer 10 and 11, Nasa fell short. Next time, we must do better ...

This piece accompanies Marcus Chown's feature on the discovery of cosmic background radiation, from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. Perhaps the most famous accidental discovery of all is ...

For many generations in societies shaped by Christianity, monogamy has been the almost undisputed champion of relationship norms. In Britain and the US, it has been held up as the dominant – really ...

The 'Super-K' detector is built 3,000 feet down in a mine beneath Hida in Japan. This is one of its most famous images. Marcus Chown explains This picture of the Sun is hardly high-definition. But, in ...

A century ago, European empires dominated much of the planet. Gurminder K Bhambra and Charlotte L Riley ask what we can learn from the past. The British Empire – and the people who lived under British ...

Mycorrhizal fungi growing with a plant root. Credit: Dr Yoshihiro Kobae As Giuliana Furci picks her way through the dense, dripping greenery of Chile’s Patagonian forest, her keen eyes are seeking out ...

As Ernest Hemingway famously claimed, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” In his latest novel, James, Percival Everett reimagines Twain’s ...

This article is a preview from the Spring 2015 edition of New Humanist. You can find out more and subscribe here. I’d arranged to meet the sorceress at 4pm, but I was running late. Hurrying past ...