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
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
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