We treat pet dogs with such sentimentality while their wild, endangered relatives are feared and persecuted. Why? | Continue reading
In play an adult can become like a child, fully absorbed in the here-and-now. Play, not work, brings us fully to life | Continue reading
Philosophy has long made a virtue of difficulty and obscurity but why can’t it be as clear as any other form of writing? | Continue reading
The vagaries of autocomplete are well known, but this work by the always inventive London-based, Turkish-born visual artist Memo Akten, might be the first poem co-composed with Google Search. To make Keeper of our collective consciousness: I need to understand myself (2016), Akte … | Continue reading
On the strange paradox of making commitments to oneself: or why we nearly always break our resolutions, and why that’s OK | Continue reading
The majority African-American enclaves found in every major US city are no accident of history. And, although societal racism certainly played its part, de facto segregation isn’t the prime culprit for the urban divide. In this animation, adapted from his book The Color of Law (2 … | Continue reading
Beauty is a deeply moral matter that makes kindness, empathy and honesty attractive, while vice warps into ugliness | Continue reading
Part-time workers are not unfortunate exiles from the economic mainstream but savvy women (mostly) who do more in less time | Continue reading
The Universe’s biggest galaxies could hold the key to the birth of the cosmos. Why are these behemoths so hard to find? | Continue reading
Childhood offers no shortage of potential anxieties, from fitting in with peers, to succeeding in school, to dealing with parents. Eleven-year-old Sam's hopes, fears and interests, however, are rather different from those of most of his classmates: Hinkley Point C, Britain’s larg … | Continue reading
To build brains and bodies capable of relationships, humans needed to move: dance shaped our culture and created the mind | Continue reading
The story of American beef is like the story of the nation as a whole: a mashup of history and myth, bloody and contested | Continue reading
Far from being a touchstone of the truth, knowledge is a stone-age concept that harms our dealings with the modern world | Continue reading
Capitalism excels at innovation but is failing at maintenance, and for most lives it is maintenance that matters more | Continue reading
Images of space and the solar system have a powerful appeal, and amaze with their vibrant otherworldly vistas. But it's easy to forget just how processed they are: the colours are often added for effect, and digital editing makes these pictures pop. So it's worth remembering the … | Continue reading
Far from being a touchstone of the truth, knowledge is a stone-age concept that harms our dealings with the modern world | Continue reading
How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road and other conundrums of artificial intelligence | Continue reading
A man gets off a boat, walks into a restaurant, orders albatross soup, takes one bite, and pulls out a gun and kills himself. Why did he do it? The classic riddle (from the family of lateral thinking puzzles) gets a trippy animated adaptation in this inventive and darkly delightf … | Continue reading
How do you teach a car that a snowman won’t walk across the road and other conundrums of artificial intelligence | Continue reading
In 1973, near the height of the ‘population bomb’ panic, a computing programme called World1 offered up some predictions for the future. It anticipated a grim picture for humanity based on current trajectories. Tracing categories such as population, pollution and natural-resource … | Continue reading
Feminists never thought of the mind as a computer set free from its body. Now cognitive science is finally catching up | Continue reading
For centuries, Europeans in Asia were guests, trading partners and subordinates. Only much later did Empire seem imaginable | Continue reading
Capitalism is in crisis and needs help. Setting a maximum wage for corporate CEOs would be a good measure | Continue reading
The prescience of art: Erasmus Darwin’s poetry anticipated the theory of evolution before his grandson Charles was even born | Continue reading
For centuries, Europeans in Asia were guests, trading partners and subordinates. Only much later did Empire seem imaginable | Continue reading
NASA has tentative plans for a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Between now and then, there’s still much that needs to be sorted. To start, massive dust storms, high levels of radiation, low temperatures and a lack of water make the Martian surface an unfriendly plac … | Continue reading
You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health | Continue reading
The stilted routines and formalities of the job interview can provoke a particular kind of anxiety in most people seeking employment. But coming to the table with a criminal record can make those tensions razor-sharp. In this observational short documentary, the Québécois filmmak … | Continue reading
You might think they are disgusting. But our war against intestinal worms has damaged our immune systems and mental health | Continue reading
In a time of accelerating climate change, nuclear power is touted as a solution, but it is now more dangerous than ever | Continue reading
Cultural heritage is an ideal imposed from above. It’s time to listen to what communities value about their own histories | Continue reading
Since 2014, the experimental Swedish band Wintergatan has gained a robust online following by chronicling their efforts to assemble mindbogglingly intricate music boxes powered entirely by hand. In this video, Wintergatan’s Martin Molin unveils the band’s most ambitious creation … | Continue reading
Cultural heritage is an ideal imposed from above. It’s time to listen to what communities value about their own histories | Continue reading
Investigating the unclean is as useful, philosophically, as examining the highest ideals of justice, morality and metaphysics | Continue reading
Disagreeing about simple facts is one thing. But deep disagreements have social identity at stake: there’s no middle ground | Continue reading
NASA has tentative plans for a manned mission to Mars sometime in the 2030s. Between now and then, there’s still much that needs to be sorted. To start, massive dust storms, high levels of radiation, low temperatures and a lack of water make the Martian surface an unfriendly plac … | Continue reading
Success won’t make you happy – but happiness will improve your career: why happier people are more successful at work | Continue reading
Relativity says we live in four dimensions. String theory says it’s 10. What are ‘dimensions’ and how do they affect reality? | Continue reading
Muslims came to America more than a century before Protestants, and in great numbers. How was their history forgotten? | Continue reading
The artifacts that underlie so much of our understanding of the ancient world can often feel like brittle remnants of a dim and dusty past that's hard to access without context and extensive knowledge. But sometimes just a little kineticism can transform a bit of pottery into a l … | Continue reading
A century ago, a team of scientists chased the arc of starlight across a total eclipse to prove Einstein right on relativity | Continue reading
Civilisation collapse in the past often resulted in creative reorganisation. Do we have what it takes to survive a fall? | Continue reading
Elementary, my dear Sherlock: it’s moral failure to see people as objects to be studied or as evidence to be interpreted | Continue reading
Commonsense tells us that both dogs and cats experience jealousy. Are we being anthropomorphic or can we know for sure? | Continue reading
If you tied a rope tight around the Earth’s equator and then added a single yard of slack, would the extra material make any noticeable difference to someone standing on the ground? Yes, actually. The answer comes as a surprise to most people, but the additional bit of rope raise … | Continue reading
Just a decade after the first surviving photograph was taken, photography became widespread enough that, today, the Canadian film archivist and YouTuber Guy Jones could assemble this parade of streets worldwide – one photograph for each year from 1838 to 2019. The resulting monta … | Continue reading
Evolved human capacities for vigilance and worry are both exacerbated and rewarded by the intense pressure of modern life | Continue reading
Civilisation collapse in the past often resulted in creative reorganisation. Do we have what it takes to survive a fall? | Continue reading