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Ultrafinitism says infinity doesn't exist — and the most interesting thing about that position is what it forces you to build instead.

Knot theory sits at a strange intersection of mathematics and identity — a knot only becomes itself once you can't tell it apart from anything else.

A cipher that outlasted everyone who could have explained it — and what finally cracked it open.

A 1,000-year-old musical setting of Boethius has been reconstructed and performed — and what's strange isn't that it survived, but what it survived as.

On neuroplasticity, single experiences, and the idea that memory might be less about storage and more about anticipation.

Medieval manuscripts are full of bizarre, wrong-looking animals — and the reason why tells you something about what happens when knowledge travels without the thing it describes.

Treetops glow during storms. We just filmed it for the first time. That's not the interesting part.

On how builders constructed cathedrals and aqueducts for centuries before anyone could explain why their methods worked.