They are spreading like branching plants across the globe. Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic potential? | Continue reading
Instead of treating Mars and the Moon as sites of conquest and settlement, we need a radical new ethics of space exploration | Continue reading
Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings | Continue reading
Instead of treating Mars and the Moon as sites of conquest and settlement, we need a radical new ethics of space exploration | Continue reading
An interactive theatre performance explores what touch means in an age of lockdown, and what we lose when we don’t touch | Continue reading
Modern biomedicine sees the body as a closed mechanistic system. But illness shows us to be permeable, ecological beings | Continue reading
A Viking axe and solar flares – how scientists know when the first Europeans crossed the Atlantic and settled in North America | Continue reading
They are spreading like branching plants across the globe. Should we rein cities in or embrace their biomorphic potential? | Continue reading
Meet the ‘shock troops of gay liberation’: how the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence canonised the filmmaker Derek Jarman | Continue reading
Some see Plato as a pure rationalist, others as a fantastical mythmaker. His deft use of stories tells a more complex tale | Continue reading
Strange entanglements of politics and romantic love marked England’s conquest of Ireland and still haunt the Irish today | Continue reading
If humans were to disappear from the face of the Earth, what might dogs become? And would they be better off without us? | Continue reading
An ethereal animation evokes the personal loss that led an end-of-life doula to find value in being there for the dying | 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
‘This is a really beautiful roach.’ What’s it like to love an insect? Ask the Florida farmers who work with them every day | Continue reading
Correct information doesn’t always come with its own bright halo of truth. What makes something worth believing? | Continue reading
How can brain damage make people ‘better’ artists? What neuroaesthetics reveals about the complexity of artistic creation | Continue reading
If humans were to disappear from the face of the Earth, what might dogs become? And would they be better off without us? | Continue reading
There’s a new plan to find extraterrestrial civilisations by the way they live. But if we can see them, can they see us? | Continue reading
Too dense, too abstract, too suspect, Hegel was outside the Anglophone canon for a century. Why is his star rising again? | Continue reading
Imagination isn’t just a spillover from our problem-solving prowess. It might be the core of what human brains evolved to do | Continue reading
What’s real and what’s artifice in gentrifying Chinatown? A ‘fever dream’ walk through a formerly working-class part of LA | Continue reading
Must we simply accept the loss of beloved buildings and cities to the floods and rising seas of the climate crisis? | Continue reading
Work in the 21st century, as experienced by a group of fifth-graders in Portland, Oregon, on a field trip to the ‘real world’ | Continue reading
Too dense, too abstract, too suspect, Hegel was outside the Anglophone canon for a century. Why is his star rising again? | Continue reading
Do babies know other minds exist or do they have a knack for patterns? Philosophers and psychologists are still working it out | Continue reading
Radio signals is old hat: now it’s all about hunting for extraterrestrial technosignatures. But do we want to be found? | Continue reading
How virtual reality and artificial intelligence can illuminate the metaphysics of the ancient philosophy of Vedanta | Continue reading
World government is back, in geopolitics and in the academy, but what does the future hold for it? | Continue reading
The British Empire was first built on slavery and then on the moral and economic self-confidence of antislavery | Continue reading
Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years | Continue reading
Watch the mesmerising patterns that emerge from nature’s fundamental forces as sound waves meet salt and water | Continue reading
Cognition did not appear out of nowhere in ‘higher’ animals but goes back millions, perhaps billions, of years | Continue reading
When Dutch students learn about sex, love and relationships, there’s no shame but plenty of giggles and camaraderie | Continue reading
It started as a fringe philosophical theory about humanity’s future. It’s now richly funded and increasingly dangerous | Continue reading
The optical illusion known as persistence of vision bursts to vivid life in this Palme d’Or winner from 1955 | Continue reading
You might think that horror movies are a delicious, trashy pleasure. But watching them has surprisingly wholesome effects | Continue reading
Instead of letting waves of exploitation sweep through the deep ocean, we could choose to protect this vast living realm | Continue reading
The animated story of the autistic, self-taught artist Gregory Blackstock who mines creativity from life’s endless variations | Continue reading
You might think that horror movies are a delicious, trashy pleasure. But watching them has surprisingly wholesome effects | Continue reading
Unearthing stories of trauma, struggle and love among the hobbyist miners at the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas | Continue reading
Looking past conventional histories of medicine we see that women delivered much of medieval healthcare. Just as today | Continue reading
Does the existence of a multiverse hold the key for why nature’s laws seem so simple? | Continue reading
The ‘Rashomon effect’ is real. Learn how hidden factors including biases can influence your view of reality and truth | Continue reading
Does the existence of a multiverse hold the key for why nature’s laws seem so simple? | Continue reading
What if emotions are not universal and hardwired but exquisite acts of meaning-making specific to context and culture? | Continue reading
What if emotions are not universal and hardwired but exquisite acts of meaning-making specific to context and culture? | Continue reading
To be Persian before nationalism was to belong to a generous, plural identity woven through language, kin and manners | Continue reading