This interview traces Professor Jayadeva Uyangoda’s journey from JVP revolutionary to political scientist, examining his early experiences of poverty, caste and inequality, his role in the 1971 uprising, imprisonment at Welikada, and
No one knows why we dream. It stands to reason that dreams have some purpose because nearly everyone dreams, and we dream 3 to 6 times every night. People typically have several
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Most people learn to count and do basic arithmetic at a young age and don’t give these skills a second thought. But numerosity or numeracy, the ability to think about and use
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The striking paradox is that science tells us both that we’re peripheral in the cosmic scheme of things and central to the reality we uncover. Unless we understand how this paradox arises
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We used to have “balloon” debates in school: The hot-air balloon is losing height and, to avoid disaster, people must be jettisoned. To avoid this fate, everybody must justify why they should
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A recent investigation of human remains found in the UK’s Cheddar Gorge has once again brought a particularly unsavory aspect of our human story into the light: human consumption of other humans.
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Numeracy or numerosity, the ability to think about and use numbers, varies among human cultures and within populations, much like intelligence does. Many known languages, for example, have no words for numerals
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The migration and spread of ancient humans across the Eurasian continent after leaving Africa were significantly influenced by climate change and landscape evolution, according to a new study published in the journal
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It is worth recalling that the Crusades were largely a reaction to the rapid and triumphant rise of Islam. Within a single generation, Islam had emerged as the third great monotheistic faith,
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There is a great deal of attention in modern societies to inequality and the social problems it causes. Often inequality is considered to be the unavoidable consequence of how society operates in many cultures,
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Prehistory is a modern idea. The word was “coined” only in the 1830s. Before the 19th century, we didn’t know much about dinosaurs or cavemen, and fossils remained a scientific curiosity. When
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Is the order of the modern alphabet connected to how our shared ancestors counted the phases of the moon and its effect on tides 50,000 years ago? Did the first stirrings of
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A set of five fossilized small dinosaur footprints from the Cretaceous period has been discovered in northwest China’s Gansu Province, believed to be among the smallest known dinosaur tracks in the world.
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Ancient human retrovirus DNA could be one of the markers of susceptibility to mental illness—specifically schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and major depressive disorder, a new study suggests. An international team of researchers examined
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A glance at recorded history shows us that humans have “always” felt a need to explain phenomena perceived to exist beyond our comprehension. Today, we turn to science to seek answers to
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The fossil record of our ape ancestors in Africa is almost nonexistent for a period of about 8 or 9 million years. This long gap lasted from about 16.5 million to 7
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