Anonymous users generate most toxic abuse and conspiracy theories online. The right to be anonymous should be curtailed | Continue reading
Sweeping the human story into a cosmic tale is a thrill but we should be wary about what is overlooked in the grandeur | Continue reading
The modern world is disenchanted. God remains dead. But our need for transcendence lives on. How should we fulfil it? | Continue reading
‘Your action upon the world becomes the world’s way of perceiving you’: the many strange ‘flavours’ of embodied cognition | Continue reading
Sweeping the human story into a cosmic tale is a thrill but we should be wary about what is overlooked in the grandeur | Continue reading
A provocative, unflinching look at a zoo’s controversial public dissection programme asks: is it educational? Is it ethical? | Continue reading
Some twists infuriate; others are brilliant. But they both use the surprise story as a self-exploding confidence game | Continue reading
What happens when stars cross paths with a black hole? Computer models offer a new view of these distant, violent encounters | Continue reading
Human roads have utterly fragmented the world of wild animals but the engineering to reconnect the pieces is in our grasp | Continue reading
Archaeologist Eilat Mazar dug with a spade in one hand and a Bible in the other. Should her theories be taken seriously? | Continue reading
An unguarded portrait of the artist Bill Blaine reflecting on what it takes to be great – and why he never quite made it | Continue reading
How did certain French intellectuals get away with preying upon young girls, shamelessly, in public and over decades? | Continue reading
The cliché has it that the Copenhagen interpretation demands adherence without deep enquiry. That does physics a disservice | Continue reading
No wonder we cannot agree on how globalisation works and whether it’s a good thing. All the stories we have are flawed | Continue reading
Exploring natural surfaces at a range of scales – from the microscopic to the cosmic – finds astonishing resonances in pattern | Continue reading
From Tallis’s choral beauty to the unnerving bells of Mexico City, early modern power created a whole new world of sound | Continue reading
Cutting-edge physics holds that time doesn’t exist. If this is true, then it’s impossible for anyone to actually die | Continue reading
The power of cognitive diversity is profound. In the workplace, it’s a tool for innovation that offers a competitive advantage | Continue reading
The cliché has it that the Copenhagen interpretation demands adherence without deep enquiry. That does physics a disservice | Continue reading
In 1900 my grandfather’s generation imagined a modernising Arab world, multireligious and progressive. What happened? | Continue reading
Science has become extraordinarily technocratic and complex. Is the simple and decisive experiment still a worthy ideal? | Continue reading
Diving into the literal and figurative layers behind that mysterious smile to explain why the Mona Lisa still matters | Continue reading
Science has become extraordinarily technocratic and complex. Is the simple and decisive experiment still a worthy ideal? | Continue reading
A golden bowl of porridge after a long famine – how the Hindu legend of Annapurna connects nourishment with spirituality | Continue reading
The week is the most artificial and recent of our time counts yet it’s impossible to imagine our shared lives without it | Continue reading
The p-factor is the dark matter of psychiatry: an invisible, unifying force that might lie behind a multitude of mental disorders | Continue reading
One of the great buildings of the Renaissance reminds us that buildings are made to be explored, smelled and even tasted | Continue reading
To make this version of ‘Vertigo’, an artificial intelligence computer watched Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film 20 times | Continue reading
Diagnosing men as violent and oversexed beasts is tempting but it’s a regressive idea built on dubious analogies | Continue reading
How the rebellious novelist left behind her provincial self to learn about life, charging around Paris dressed as a man | Continue reading
One of the great buildings of the Renaissance reminds us that buildings are made to be explored, smelled and even tasted | Continue reading
Retired LGBTQ+ people celebrate their hard-earned self-acceptance at a belated senior prom night in Los Angeles | Continue reading
Far from being hardwired to flee fire, some animals use it to their own ends, helping us understand our own pyrocognition | Continue reading
High-definition microscopy brings the strange beauty and wide variety of single-celled plankton into view | Continue reading
High-definition microscopy brings the strange beauty and wide variety of single-celled phytoplankton into view | Continue reading
As a society we are failing people with severe, persistent mental illness. It’s time to reimagine institutional care | Continue reading
In 1960s Liverpool, four friends started a rock band. The rest is not the history you’re expecting. Meet the Liverbirds! | Continue reading
How the rebellious novelist left behind her provincial self to learn about life, charging around Paris dressed as a man | Continue reading
Being an employee is a threat to your liberty. But while firms exist, compulsory unions are a basic safeguard of freedom | Continue reading
Dream-hacking techniques can help us create, heal and have fun. They could also become tools of commercial manipulation | Continue reading
How to diagnose and then counter ‘limerance’, or the debilitating psychological disorder suffered by hopeless romantics | Continue reading
There’s no rhythm to mass extinctions, no pattern to evolutionary recovery. Life bursts forth, in cacophonous adaptation | Continue reading
Take in the sounds of silence via this collaborative, crowdsourced performance of John Cage’s infamous composition, 4’33” | Continue reading
We should be able to acknowledge that disabilities can cause pain and suffering without disabled people feeling dehumanised | Continue reading
The world is a black box full of extreme specificity: it might be predictable but that doesn’t mean it is understandable | Continue reading
A vintage travelogue looks beyond picture-postcard beaches to the thriving industries of Trinidad on the cusp of independence | Continue reading
The world is a black box full of extreme specificity: it might be predictable but that doesn’t mean it is understandable | Continue reading