Mauritania, on the northwest coast of Africa, is characterised by arid desert plains that make most of the country non-arable. Beneath the surface, however, the land is rich in the iron ore that sustains the Mauritanian economy. Since 1963, the Mauritania Railway, running 704 kil … | Continue reading

Mothers – in nature and in human societies – are typically thought to have some sort of essential 'maternal instinct'. Enter the irrepressible Italian artist, writer and actress Isabella Rossellini, who asks, 'But is this true? What is this trait, this characteristic, common to a … | Continue reading

Is politics driven by pragmatic self-interest or by identities and ideals? The self-harming voter offers a clue | Continue reading

Today, there is a crisis of trust in science. Many people – including politicians and, yes, even presidents – publicly express doubts about the validity of scientific findings. Meanwhile, scientific institutions and journals express their concerns... | Continue reading

‘More and more I have come to admire resilience...’A collaboration between the US poet Jane Hirshfield, the US animator Kelli Anderson, and Bulgarian-born, US-based writer Maria Popova, Optimism is a brief yet powerful celebration of ‘the persistence of life against all odds’. In … | Continue reading

‘If you build it, they will come.’ It’s a Latin saying – Si tu id aeficas, ei venient – but it’s probably more recognisable because it sounds like what that disembodied voice says to Kevin Costner in the film Field of Dreams (1989). And in the fil... | Continue reading

A few years ago, I proposed that the feeling of cold in one’s spine, while for example watching a film or listening to music, corresponds to an event when our vital need for cognition is satisfied. Similarly, I have shown that chills are not solel... | Continue reading

'We'll go wash windows in heaven so that heaven is clean.'Dangling from the towering buildings that mark Chicago’s iconic skyline, three men wash windows for a living when they're not on construction jobs. Sergio and Jaime Polanco from the Mexican state of Zacatecas and their US- … | Continue reading

You probably take bananas for granted. In the United Kingdom, one in four pieces of fruit consumed is a banana and, on average, each Briton eats 10 kg of bananas per year; in the United States, that’s 12 kg, or up to 100 bananas. When I ask people... | Continue reading

You probably take bananas for granted. In the United Kingdom, one in four pieces of fruit consumed is a banana and, on average, each Briton eats 10 kg of bananas per year; in the United States, that’s 12 kg, or up to 100 bananas. When I ask people... | Continue reading

Until recently, mainstream thinking in biology had long held that sponges were the first animal to emerge on the evolutionary tree. But over the past decade, a new wave of research argues that ctenophores, a phylum of sea invertebrates found in saltwater around the world, might b … | Continue reading

It’s no surprise that mathematics has influenced music. But did you know that the influence goes both ways? | Continue reading

‘What is life?’ In 1943, Erwin Schrödinger posed this question in a series of lectures at Trinity College, Dublin. Already famous as a hero of the quantum revolution, he charged scientists with a new mission: to begin to account for the activity o... | Continue reading

Modern self-help draws heavily on Stoic philosophy. But Aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness | Continue reading

The cliché that life transcends the laws of thermodynamics is completely wrong. The truth is almost exactly the opposite | Continue reading

‘The dove fills me. What else can I say?’Cucli is the story of the relationship between Ramon, a recently widowed Catalan truck driver, and the female dove he nursed to health and befriended following his wife’s death. Ramon isn’t quite sure whether Cucli is his wife reincarnated … | Continue reading

Today, there is a crisis of trust in science. Many people – including politicians and, yes, even presidents – publicly express doubts about the validity of scientific findings. Meanwhile, scientific institutions and journals express their concerns... | Continue reading

New York City’s legendary, and recently much-beleaguered, subway is one of the largest, oldest and most heavily trafficked urban commuter systems in the world. In her collage video Underground Circuit, the Chinese-born, Chicago-based artist Yuge Zhou brings a very unusual – and h … | Continue reading

Forensics can't be sure. Provenance can be fudged. This is why the expert eye still rules the game of art authentication | Continue reading

Nations come with a vast array of peoples, languages and histories, but the strong ones share three simple things | Continue reading

Japan’s elderly population is surging, and its birthrate is one of the lowest in the world. Concurrently, more women than ever are entering the workforce, making households with two working parents the norm rather than the exception. This confluence of demographic and societal ch … | Continue reading

The idea that ‘gender is a spectrum’ is supposed to set us free. But it is both illogical and politically troubling | Continue reading

One astronomer’s dimpled pie is another’s cratered moon. How can our mind’s eye learn to see the new and unexpected? | Continue reading

Do we have the right to believe whatever we want to believe? This supposed right is often claimed as the last resort of the wilfully ignorant, the person who is cornered by evidence and mounting opinion: ‘I believe climate change is a hoax whateve... | Continue reading