Boned, spined, spiked, corkscrewed or double-headed: why did so much variety arise when a simple tube would do? | Continue reading
Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation might be invented. How far would we go to stop it? | Continue reading
‘It’s a trip just being out’: at the local Greyhound bus station with newly released men from the Texas State Penitentiary | Continue reading
Susan Stebbing’s little Pelican book on philosophy had a big aim: giving everybody tools to think clearly for themselves | Continue reading
One aimless summer in Colorado, two brothers talk about girls, death and leaving home in the shadow of their fractured family | Continue reading
Americans liked to believe that Japan was Westernising through the 20th century but Japan was vigorously doing the opposite | Continue reading
Oscillating atoms and international committees – the peculiar history of how we arrived at the standardised second | Continue reading
A grand research project created our origin myth that early human societies were all egalitarian, mobile and small-scale | Continue reading
From fire-walking to the ice-bucket challenge, ritual pain and suffering forge intense social bonds | Continue reading
Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world | Continue reading
Can a robot pray? Does an AI have a soul? Advances in automata raise theological debates that will shape the secular world | Continue reading
Captive orcas are tormented by boredom and family separation, but they cannot be simply released. What’s the solution? | Continue reading
Incredible cameraphone and drone footage from Hong Kong reveals the combustible, contested reality of street protest | Continue reading
In a clinical setting, playful activities are not distractions; they take patients deep into trauma – and out the other side | Continue reading
‘I am beside myself, beside the world’: what it’s like to slip into the acute unreality of depersonalisation disorder | Continue reading
Captive orcas are tormented by boredom and family separation, but they cannot be simply released. What’s the solution? | Continue reading
Is a great team more than the sum of its players? Complexity science reveals the role of strategy, synergy, swarming and more | Continue reading
Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions? | Continue reading
Visualising the unseeable – awesome ‘moving paintings’ inspired by quantum weirdness at the Large Hadron Collider | Continue reading
Why the finest minds in 1930s Europe believed that scientists must engage with citizens or risk losing their moral compass | Continue reading
The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies | Continue reading
Human rights, health, the rule of law – why are these concepts inflated to the status of totalising, secular religions? | Continue reading
Jobs have become, for so many, a relentless, unsatisfying toil. Why then does the work ethic still hold so much sway? | Continue reading
Each memory is in different strokes: how four siblings remember their dissident parents during Brazil’s military dictatorship | Continue reading
Jobs have become, for so many, a relentless, unsatisfying toil. Why then does the work ethic still hold so much sway? | Continue reading
Watch as commonplace visuals in a binary, hard-edged world melt and expand into a full-rainbow spectrum of reality | Continue reading
Watch as commonplace visuals in a binary, hard-edged world melt and expand into a full-rainbow spectrum of reality | Continue reading
Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think | Continue reading
I travelled the world and trawled the archive to unearth the hidden lessons from history’s most brilliant people | Continue reading
I travelled the world and trawled the archive to unearth the hidden lessons from history’s most brilliant people | Continue reading
The Plotlands are a place of makeshift beauty, more like the American frontier than the traditional, orderly English landscape | Continue reading
Cognitive scientists and corporations alike see human minds as predictive machines. Right or wrong, they will change how we think | Continue reading
The glittering city-states of the Persian Gulf fit the classicist Moses Finley’s criteria of genuine slave societies | Continue reading
With fewer than 70 wolves left in Norway, the debate over their protection is dividing communities | Continue reading
A pang of hunger, a stab of pain, a sense of dread – these experiences emerge on the shore where biology and culture meet | Continue reading
Free like a street dog: cynicism evolved from ‘dog philosophers’ such as Diogenes who rejected materialism and manners | Continue reading
‘Natural’ remedies are metaphysically inconsistent and unscientific. Yet they offer something that modern medicine cannot | Continue reading
Samuel Beckett turned an obscure 17th-century Christian heresy into an artistic vision and an unusual personal philosophy | Continue reading
The immersive exhibition populating London with surreal digital sculptures by Olafur Eliasson, KAWS, Cao Fei and more | Continue reading
Samuel Beckett turned an obscure 17th-century Christian heresy into an artistic vision and an unusual personal philosophy | Continue reading
Organisms do not evolve blindly under forces beyond their control, but shape and influence the evolutionary environment itself | Continue reading
The skilful manipulator casts a shadow of doubt over everything that you feel or think. Therapy can bring the daylight in | Continue reading
How do ants that can’t chew their own food survive? They kidnap other ant species and commit them to a life of servitude | Continue reading
The exclusion of poorer people from their own neighbourhoods is not just a social problem but a philosophical one | Continue reading
Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived? | Continue reading
An intimate discussion between the pianist Kris Bowers and his grandfather Horace about ambition, race, success – and music | Continue reading
Not all Neanderthals were ‘cavemen’: half were women. What can archaeologists tell us about how they lived? | Continue reading
‘I come into the peace of wild things’ – how the poet Wendell Berry finds respite in the awesome now of nature | Continue reading