I took on Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language and unleashed a decade of debate and ridicule. But is my argument wrong? | 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
Warning: This video features numerous instances of animals being killed and butchered.I Kill follows an unnamed New Zealand slaughterman as he travels from farm to farm, killing pigs, sheep and cattle with a single gunshot to the skull, and dressing their carcasses before deliver … | 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
Modern self-help draws heavily on Stoic philosophy. But Aristotle was better at understanding real human happiness | 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
Parents have many reasons for raising their children with multiple languages. Some hope for better career opportunities for their offspring, while others focus on the reported cognitive and intellectual benefits of learning an additional tongue, i... | 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
'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
‘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 distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom | 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
The distributed network has gobbled the hierarchical firm. Only by seizing the platform can workers avoid digital serfdom | Continue reading
Nations come with a vast array of peoples, languages and histories, but the strong ones share three simple things | 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
Jill is born with a normal visual system. Green light activates the same mechanism in her brain as it does in all normal people; ditto for red. However, her twin brother Jack is born with the connections crossed so that green light activates his ‘... | 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
For thousands of years before modern science-based medicine became the norm, bloodletting, frequently by leeches, was considered something of a medical cure-all. The treatment’s persistence was at least partially attributable to the Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates’ ‘four humo … | Continue reading
Nations come with a vast array of peoples, languages and histories, but the strong ones share three simple things | 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
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
In 480 BCE, the citizens of Athens were in more trouble than it is possible for our modern minds to fathom. Xerxes, the seemingly omnipotent son of Darius the Great, had some unfinished business left to him by his father. A decade earlier, at the ... | 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
We know that the universe is awash with watery moons and planets. How can we pinpoint which of them could support life? | 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
The modern idea that nature is discrete originated in Ancient Greek atomism. Leucippus, Democritus and Epicurus all argued that nature was composed of what they called ἄτομος (átomos) or ‘indivisible individuals’. Nature was, for them, the totalit... | 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
The Romantic stereotype that creativity is enhanced by a mood disorder is dangerous, and dissolves under careful scrutiny | Continue reading
Liberating oneself from rebirths might seem irrelevant to the non-believer. But nirvana is also a profound psychological goal | Continue reading
Some of the most important decisions you will make in your lifetime will occur while you feel stressed and anxious. From medical decisions to financial and professional ones, we are often required to weigh up information under stressful conditions... | Continue reading
In a warming world, ticks thrive in more places than ever before, making Lyme disease the first epidemic of climate change | Continue reading
Tech flourished in communist Bulgaria and so did a body of science fiction asking vital philosophical questions | Continue reading
The Greeks didn’t have modern ideas of race. Did they see themselves as white, black – or as something else altogether? | Continue reading
In 2015, Niamh Geaney, a 28-year-old Irish woman, was approached by a TV production company to participate in an unusual competition: a race to find her twin stranger, a stranger who looks exactly like her. Within two weeks of scouring social netw... | Continue reading
Rather than a golden ratio or a moral judgment, beauty is more like a radical jolt that awakens us to the world | Continue reading
Neuroscience gives us invaluable, wondrous knowledge about the brain – including an awareness of its limitations | Continue reading
Namibian hunter-gatherers deride those who stand out. What does this tell us about why, and how, we care about fairness? | Continue reading
A growing number of philosophers are conducting experiments to test their arguments. Is this the future for philosophy? | Continue reading
Urbanisation might be the most profound change to human society in a century, more telling than colour, class or continent | Continue reading
Just one in five people will be lucky enough to avoid mental health problems throughout their life. How do they do it? | Continue reading
In 1890 William Morris imagined a world free from wage slavery. Thanks to technology, his vision is finally within reach | Continue reading
More and more companies, government agencies, educational institutions and philanthropic organisations are today in the grip of a new phenomenon. I’ve termed it ‘metric fixation’. The key components of metric fixation are the belief that it is pos... | Continue reading