Catégories

The regulation of pollution, resources and land, and the treaties that try to do the same thing across borders where no single state has jurisdiction.

People and their surroundings: how a built or natural setting shapes behaviour, and what moves anyone to act on an environmental problem.

The environment studied as one system, drawing on biology, chemistry and the earth sciences: pollution, resources, and the human pressure on all of them.

The relationship between societies and their environment: who bears the cost of degradation, how risk is perceived, and how environmental politics is made.

Disease measured in populations rather than patients: who gets it, what raises the risk, and what the evidence for that actually supports.

Heritable changes in gene expression that do not alter the DNA sequence, such as methylation and histone modification.

Knowledge itself: what it is, where it comes from, how far it reaches, and what separates it from mere true belief.

Designing tools, workplaces and interfaces around the body and mind that will use them, so that the error the design invites never happens.

The scholarly study of Western esoteric currents -- hermeticism, alchemy, occultism, modern spiritual movements -- as historical and social phenomena. It studies what people believed and why; it does not endorse the claims, and the practices themselves are not categories here.

What is right and wrong, and how one ought to act: the standards of conduct and the arguments that support them.

Anthropology's distinctive method and the writing it produces: long-term fieldwork, participant observation, and the account of a way of life that comes out of them.

Music as culture, studied in the field: traditions outside the Western canon, and music as something people do rather than something they write down.

Animal behaviour studied in natural conditions, and the evolutionary reasons a behaviour persists.

What a court may hear and what it may conclude: admissibility, burdens and standards of proof, and the long argument about expert testimony.

The study of the origin and change of species over time through processes such as natural selection.

Mind and behaviour explained as adaptations: which problems our ancestors faced often enough to have been shaped by them, and what evidence could show it.

Planets around other stars: how to detect them, how to measure their atmospheres, and how common a world like the Earth turns out to be.

Testing economic theory in the lab and the field: controlled games, incentives that are real, and the replication of results that were assumed rather than checked.

Psychology done by controlled experiment: the design, the measurement, and the inference from a laboratory task to a mind.

Everything outside the Milky Way: other galaxies and how they evolve, active galactic nuclei, clusters, and the large-scale structure they trace.