The Conversation

Female farm managers are hidden in plain sight in ancient Roman texts, mentioned in laws, literature and grave inscriptions across five centuries.

Simonetta Vespucci is probably one of the most painted women of the Italian Renaissance. Sandro Botticelli is widely believed to have used her as his model for Venus, and she appears, transformed and idealised, across several of his most famous works. She died in 1476, aged just 23.

It wouldn’t make much sense to prohibit people from shooting a threatened woodpecker while allowing its forest to be cut down, or to bar killing endangered salmon while allowing a dam to dry out their habitat.

In the 1980s, universities lobbied Congress to make student loans unlimited, so everyone could get a college education and have higher earnings. Now, college is more unaffordable than ever.

Melatonin – a go-to sleep aid for kids and adults alike in many households in America – continues to create media buzz, with conflicting messages that leave people uncertain about its safety.

Images of families displaced by floods, prolonged droughts or extreme storms have become a distressingly regular feature of the daily news. As the impact of climate change intensifies, so does concern over its effects on human mobility.

Your child’s small, delicate, chalk-white baby teeth fall out. In their place grow yellowish-brown, fragile teeth – much to everyone’s surprise.

You might think of cancer as a mass of rogue cells that grow uncontrollably. But cancer is more organized and strategic than that. Rather, cancer is a tightly controlled cellular neighborhood that can keep the body’s defenses out or weaken them once they get in.

Soccer purists have long feared the “Americanization” of the game. But in one key respect, it is already happening: ownership.

Have you heard someone say online or in casual conversation, when responding to someone’s struggles, “well, the body keeps the score”? For many people, this phrase is a useful way to name the physical toll stress and trauma can take when the body is in “fight or flight” mode.

Football fans everywhere are gearing up to celebrate the sport’s most skilled athletes as they prepare for the start of another Fifa World Cup. But few get to see how the next generation of Messis and Ronaldos are discovered.

For four decades, a controversial idea has shaped how autism is understood by researchers, healthcare professionals and the public: the claim that autistic people are “mind blind”. The phrase suggests an inability to grasp what others think or feel. It is simple, memorable – and wrong.The claim rests on a concept called “theory of mind”. In everyday terms, theory of mind is the ability to recognise that other people’s thoughts, beliefs and emotions may differ from your own. This idea explains why someone understands that a joke can fall flat, that a promise can be broken, or that a friend can be mistaken without lying. It is often presented as the key to how people make sense of one another.