Writing about insect life by Edmund Gordon, James Meek, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Fortey, Hugh Pennington, Inga Clendinnen, Thomas Jones and Ange Mlinko.
During the 18th century dentures became increasingly popular. George Washington consulted eight dentists over his lifetime and had a mouth like a battlefield. When the dental pathologist Reidar Sognnaes analysed four surviving sets of his dentures in 1976, he found teeth from elephants, hippos, walruses and cows alongside Washington’s own.
Not many Edinburgh residents collect beach-cast seaweed, but when a winter storm leaves a strandline deposit on Portobello beach, it feels to me like a gift or a visitation from another world. Seaweed . . .
Many fairy tales begin something like this: a woman is alone in a garden, or under a tree, or bathing in a pond. She longs for a child and prays. She might carve an apple, spill a few drops of blood . . .
When DeepSeek announced the release of its chatbot in January, there was widespread bewilderment. How had a Chinese company been able to develop something that could compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT . . .
When I started developing software for the management consulting firms I worked for in the mid-1990s, we still had to connect to the World Wide Web on slow and clunky lines to access our coding work . . .
Octopuses frustrate the neat evolutionary division between clever vertebrates and simple-minded invertebrates. Their intelligence is like ours, and utterly unlike ours. Octopuses are the closest we can come, on earth, to knowing what it might be like to encounter intelligent aliens.
I am scared of Facebook. The company’s ambition, its ruthlessness, and its lack of a moral compass scare me.
The time-travel story literally depicts the physical conditions of ‘the Place’ where the ‘points’ from which we ‘view’ plots unfolding must be presumed to abide. But modernity has in fact invented such a hyperspace from which to observe the observer: it is called the camera.
It was exciting to think that no novel had ever captured this new kind of history, where military lies on a global scale were revealed by a bunch of sleepy amateurs two foot from an Aga.
The blowout was not only the biggest oil spill in American history by far: it’s a story that touches on everything else – taints everything, like the black glop on sandy beaches, on pelicans, terns, boats, sea turtles, marshlands and dolphins. It’s about climate change, peak oil, the energy future, the American presidency, about corporate power and the corrosive effect of Big Oil on global politics.
The descent to the tunnels through which the deep lines run is a tax on the spirit that is paid willingly because it makes it easier to live in an old, tight-packed city. But when the system fails it is strongly resented.
I don’t know where I heard of her first: a woman whose cells are bred in culture dishes in labs all over the world; a woman whose cells were so prolific that there is more of her now, in...
It is now a century and a third, almost exactly, since the publication in 1859 of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. In this period the view of evolutionary progress introduced by Darwin...
The scientific study of the relationship between brain and mind began in 1861, when Broca, in France, found that specific difficulties in the expressive use of speech (aphasia) consistently...
Writing about insect life by Edmund Gordon, James Meek, Miriam Rothschild, Richard Fortey, Hugh Pennington, Inga Clendinnen, Thomas Jones and Ange Mlinko.
Writing about climate change by Meehan Crist, McKenzie Funk, Malcolm Gaskill and Francis Gooding.
All fossil fuel projects are politically constituted. Either they are state projects, controlled and administered by state-owned enterprises such as Equinor, Saudi Aramco or Sinopec, or they depend on...
An honest account of energy history would conclude not that energy transitions were a regular feature of the past, but that what we are attempting – the deliberate exit from and suppression of the energetic...
The only certainty about the picture is that it shows Francis Williams. No one has ever been able to discover who painted it, when, where or why. And then, a few months ago, everything changed.
It’s true that hackers are usually intelligent and highly educated. Yet the success of a hack relies less on mathematical prowess or coding pizzazz than on a keen understanding of human psychology. We...
In early modern England, numbers were something you could touch. On tally-sticks and abacuses, counting boards and jettons, arithmetic was a feat of hand-eye coordination. Thinking numerically was a matter...
How has the widespread assumption of water’s neutrality come about? Who gets to say what water does taste like, how it ought to taste, whether its sensory aspects do or do not testify to its quality?...
The nightingale’s song is punctuated by rich, almost painful pauses. In the silence, one imagines the bird has come to the end of a verse and is considering, with the ease and confidence of a seasoned...
What if dark matter is just ordinary matter locked inside black holes – from which, after all, light cannot escape. Such massive, dark objects would trundle around the cosmos, nudging the motion of visible...
The liminal terrain of Gulag medicine complicates the popular binary between ‘perpetrators’ and ‘victims’ in states that use terror against their citizens. Alexander Solzhenitsyn would have it...
As the shadow of the Moon swept across the surrounding cornfields, engulfing the crowd that had gathered to watch the total solar eclipse, we were transported, briefly, to a place unlike anywhere else...
When it’s capitalism that’s the problem, and not markets, the only alternative is post-capitalism. But the central fact of the climate crisis is that there is very little time, and the scale of the...
Across the life sciences in the 19th century, sleep was generally considered to be a vestige of our deep evolutionary past with no present value. Given its obvious disadvantages so far as economic productivity...
A great deal of importance seems to be attached to preventing models from generating harmful content if used inappropriately, but many of the most worrying consequences of AI will stem from it being used...
A recycling centre is a good place to go for a glimpse into the 21st-century industrial sublime. Standing above the maze of conveyor belts, you can watch as the relics from a thousand domestic scenes –...
Artificial life could be both mechanical and magical. The term ‘automaton’, referring to a self-moving machine, was first used in Europe in 1531 in a catalogue of magic, De Occulta Philosophia. Automata...
Linnaeus’s personal contradictions do not make him a historical chimera. If he sounds odd to those who hold a view of Enlightenment science as rational and orderly, perhaps that’s because real Enlightenment...
I don’t know whether these billionaires know what a city is, but I do know that they have laid their hands on the city that’s been my home since 1980 and used their wealth to undermine its diversity...
Like sculptures, fossils need curators. A raw lump of stone must be prepared and cleaned before it can be studied as a fossil; scientists of the past may well have inadvertently destroyed interesting surface...
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