When you think of AI, do you picture a multi-skilled C-3PO droid? A cupboard of appliances might be nearer the mark | Continue reading
Dandies in the age of decadence favoured synthetics over nature, nowhere more so than in perfumery’s fabulous counterfeits | Continue reading
Do psychedelics give access to a universal, mystical experience of reality, or is that just a culture-bound illusion? | Continue reading
In what looks like an austere, water-filled room, the French free-diver, dancer and underwater filmmaker Julie Gautier performs a breathtaking aquatic dance for several extended minutes before rising to the surface to release a blossoming bubble of air. Titled Ama, which is the t … | Continue reading
Do psychedelics give access to a universal, mystical experience of reality, or is that just a culture-bound illusion? | Continue reading
The rhetoric of hope was everywhere in politics yet now it’s rarely seen or heard. That’s why we need it more than ever | Continue reading
Envy is the dark side of love, but love is the luminous side of envy. Is there a way to harness envy wisely, for growth? | Continue reading
After 378 pages of intensely intricate logical proofs, one comes upon a triumphant sentence: 'From this proposition it will follow, when arithmetical addition has been defined, that 1 + 1 = 2.' The purpose of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica (1910-13), co-authored with Al … | Continue reading
Traditional halal practices seem to be converging with modern beliefs about clean and green eating. Is the future halal? | Continue reading
Envy is the dark side of love, but love is the luminous side of envy. Is there a way to harness envy wisely, for growth? | Continue reading
The elderly have always been with us: what do their ancient remains say about the human lifespan and ‘invisible’ old age? | Continue reading
After spending billions trying (and failing) to support beautiful ideas in physics, is it time to let evidence lead the way? | Continue reading
In Tears of Inge, the Mongolian-born, Montreal-based filmmaker Alisi Telengut explores a nomadic Mongolian ritual in which songs are used to coax a mother camel into bonding with a newborn she has rejected, generally in response to the pain of giving birth. Telengut’s 'little gra … | Continue reading
The truly resilient can reframe tragic experiences with humour and are able to shift from one strategy to the next | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence promises ever more control over the highs and lows of our emotions. Uneasy? Perhaps you should be | Continue reading
The ‘Pizzagate’ conspiracy theory of 2016 claimed that Hillary Clinton and other high-ranking US Democratic Party officials were operating a child sex-trafficking ring from a popular pizzeria in Washington, DC. The conspiracy had migrated from internet message boards to the natio … | Continue reading
Artificial intelligence promises ever more control over the highs and lows of our emotions. Uneasy? Perhaps you should be | Continue reading
No, English isn’t uniquely vibrant or mighty or adaptable. But it really is weirder than pretty much every other language | Continue reading
In the tapestry of diverse social groups, the loudest and most extreme get heard. To whom should we actually listen? | Continue reading
After spending billions trying (and failing) to support beautiful ideas in physics, is it time to let evidence lead the way? | Continue reading
It’s hailed as the panacea for everything from cancer to war. Does research into its efficacy meet scientific standards? | Continue reading
Lightning can strike twice and people do call just when you’re thinking of them – but are such coincidences meaningful? | Continue reading
The foot is a most easily accessible tool and it had a lengthy history as a means of measuring before the introduction of national and international standards. So how were earlier standards created? In this short video from 1981, the British physicist Reginald Victor Jones demons … | Continue reading
Lightning can strike twice and people do call just when you’re thinking of them – but are such coincidences meaningful? | Continue reading
Private schools do not serve the public good – they are fortresses of status. Here’s how they could redeem themselves | Continue reading
Temperance was one of the four virtues identified by Plato's Republic as essential to an ideal state – a framework that was later adapted by Catholicism and Thomas Aquinas. Meanwhile, one of the five articles of faith of the Sikh religion is the kacchera – a drawstring undergarme … | Continue reading
You might have seen the cartoon: two cavemen sitting outside their cave knapping stone tools. One says to the other: ‘Something’s just not right – our air is clean, our water is pure, we all get plenty of exercise, everything we eat is organic ... | Continue reading
It’s hailed as the panacea for everything from cancer to war. Does research into its efficacy meet scientific standards? | Continue reading
A new interpretation of a classic psychology experiment will change your view of perception, judgment – even human nature | Continue reading
Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams? | Continue reading
From tools to language to brainpower, there’s no shortage of theories positing why humans went from the savannah to megacities, while, despite very similar DNA, other hominins have more or less stayed put. This video from NPR details an emerging theory of how human societies evol … | Continue reading
Was writing invented for accounting and administration or did it evolve from religious movements, sorcery and dreams? | Continue reading
Milagro Cunningham was 17 when he abducted, beat and raped an eight-year-old girl in Florida in 2005. He then placed her in a recycling bin, piled it with rocks, and left. Miraculously, she survived. If Cunningham had been 30, or even 19, we wo... | Continue reading
‘When will we have it better? Just like everyone else?’Sand Men is a distinctly different take on the artisan short-documentary genre. It follows Raj, Neculai and Aurel as they practise an unusual craft that has been passed around the Romanian immigrant community in London. With … | Continue reading
A new interpretation of a classic psychology experiment will change your view of perception, judgment – even human nature | Continue reading
In a recent Nature Sustainability paper, a team of scientists concluded that the Earth can sustain, at most, only 7 billion people at subsistence levels of consumption (and this Ju... | Continue reading
Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect | Continue reading
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only aro... | Continue reading
This striking and almost entirely wordless video from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London beautifully conveys the work of Sachio Yoshioka, the fifth-generation owner of the Somenotsukasa Yoshioka dye workshop in Fushimi, southern Kyoto. Since taking over the business in 1988 … | Continue reading
Aztec moral philosophy has profound differences from the Greek tradition, not least its acceptance that nobody is perfect | Continue reading
The world of scholarly communication is broken. Giant, corporate publishers with racketeering business practices and profit margins that exceed Apple’s treat life-saving research as a private commodity to be sold at exorbitant profits. Only aro... | Continue reading
Neuroscience is in the midst of a revolution: aided by increasingly sophisticated brain-scanning technologies, it offers more insights into the inner working of our brains than we’ve ever had before. But as this animated short featuring the musings of the comparative neuroscienti … | Continue reading
Black life is world-making, born of gaps and dislocations, imaginative leavings and returns, generative escapes and arrivals | Continue reading
Many of our choices have the potential to change how we think about the world. Often the choices taken are for some kind of betterment: to teach us something, to increase understanding or to improve ways of thinking. What happens, though, when ... | Continue reading
After centuries searching for extraterrestrial life, we might find that first contact is not with organic creatures at all | Continue reading
The hacker ethos is wild and anarchic, indifferent to the trappings of success. Or it was, until the gentrifiers moved in | Continue reading
The glass of orange juice at the breakfast table tells a tale about what’s natural, what’s whole and what’s healthy for us | Continue reading
Despite dating from millennia ago, Sisyphus and his eternal plight, Narcissus and his lethal vanity, and Midas and his deadly golden touch are still familiar stories today. The Greek myths came out of a pagan belief system vastly different to today's dominant religions and though … | Continue reading