Categories
Special and general relativity and the physics of spacetime and gravity.
Moral thought inside religious traditions, and what happens when their answers meet secular ethical argument.
The academic study of religion from outside any tradition: what people believe and do, how religions form and change, and what the texts meant to those who wrote them.
Measuring the surface of the Earth from a distance, mostly from satellites and aircraft, and turning the raw radiance into something a scientist can use.
The study of abstract algebraic structures by realizing their elements as linear transformations of vector spaces.
Joints, connective tissue and the autoimmune diseases that attack them, from rheumatoid arthritis to lupus.
Manifolds carrying a metric, which gives them length, angle, and curvature.
The study of rings: sets with addition and multiplication, from the integers to polynomial and matrix rings.
Ritual as an object in its own right: what a rite does for the people performing it, and why the form so often outlives the belief behind it.
Machines that sense, plan and act in the physical world: kinematics, control, perception and autonomy.
The languages descended from spoken Latin: French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian and their relatives.
The law of Rome and its long afterlife: the texts, their rediscovery, and the civil-law codes that still carry their structure.
Social life outside cities: agricultural communities, land, depopulation, and the economies that hold villages together or fail to.
Russian as an object of study: its grammar, its history, its dialects, and the making of the modern standard.
Science and technology examined as social practice: how facts get settled, how instruments and institutions shape what is knowable, and how technologies and societies make each other.
How the natural sciences are taught: conceptual change, laboratory work, and the stubborn everyday intuitions that instruction has to argue with.
How a language is learned after the first one, and why the outcome varies so much more widely than it does for children.
Threat, force and defence as objects of study: what makes a state or a people secure, and what the pursuit of security costs.
How sediment is produced, carried and deposited, and how a sedimentary rock preserves the environment that laid it down.
Earthquakes and the elastic waves they send through the Earth. Those waves are also the main probe of the deep interior, which nothing can reach directly.