Pompeii is famous for being destroyed by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, which buried the once-thriving ancient Roman city under some 5 m of volcanic debris. With a dark irony, it was this ...

‘Know thyself’ is one of philosophy’s most ancient aphorisms. But is there such a thing as the self and, if there is, can it be empirically investigated through scientific methods? Antirealists deny ...

In late 2016, a team of palaeontologists, led by Julia Clarke from the University of Texas at Austin, confirmed they had discovered the oldest known fossil of a bird’s voice box, known as a syrinx. It ...

Warning: this film features rapidly flashing images that can be distressing to photosensitive viewers. Since 2012, the video billboards in Times Square have synchronised each night – with the ...

Far from turning its back on the sea, the fate of Qing China was tied as much to tides and storms as to cavalry and walls ...

is a professor at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and director of the Collective Computation Group at SFI. is the Davis Professor of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute in New Mexico and ...

At Wat Doi Kham, my local temple in Chiang Mai in Thailand, visitors come in their thousands every week. Bearing money and garlands of jasmine, the devotees prostrate themselves in front of a small ...

In this 1976 clip from the long-running BBC children’s show Blue Peter, the UK presenter Valerie Singleton travels to the now-famous Amsterdam house where the teenage Anne Frank hid from Nazi ...

In the US, long-term solitary confinement is still widely practised, with an estimated 122,000 people isolated in small prison cells for 22 to 24 hours a day. This persists despite movements across ...

is the author of The Moral Economists: R H Tawney, Karl Polanyi, E P Thompson and the Critique of Capitalism (2017). He lives in Sydney. Critiques of capitalism come in two varieties. First, there is ...

Youthful joy and civil unrest collide in this epic road trip tale ...

Political philosophy – a discipline we trace back to Plato and Aristotle – is reasoning about how we live together in political units. It is about states, government, laws, institutions and ...