The problem of explaining consciousness is the joint property of philosophy, psychology and neurobiology, though there have been times when none of these fields much wanted it. In philosophy,...
A gloomy headline for early January: four million people in the UK have diabetes. There are 700 new diagnoses every day, the overwhelming majority (90 per cent) with type 2 diabetes, the...
From God’s point of view, the problem with the Tower of Babel was an excess both of hubris and of technological power. God had designed human beings to recognise the limits of what they...
One of the services Twitter provides for misogynists and stalkers is anonymity.
Large categories of work, especially work that is mechanically precise and repetitive, have already been automated; technologists are working on the other categories, too.
The Earth’s atmosphere contains about 21 per cent oxygen. What would happen if it contained half, or twice, as much? With half as much, animals like us would struggle to move around and...
The Ebola virus is terrifying because it infects most of those who care for the afflicted and kills most of those who fall ill: at least, that’s the received wisdom.
I fell in love with double-crested cormorants twenty years ago, partly out of gratitude. I had just started watching birds, I was terrible at it, and the big black creatures – two...
I had just seen a man about his headaches and was about to call someone about her backache when the receptionist beckoned me over. ‘Mrs Lagnari is on the phone,’ she mouthed...
‘Their aim is that we accept a capacity of ten thousand separative work units which is equivalent to ten thousand centrifuges of the older type that we already have,’ Ali Khamenei,...
The argument over breast cancer screening has been going on for decades and concerns not just the efficacy of the screening itself but its potential to do harm as well as good.
In 1739, Captain Charles Le Moyne was marching four hundred French and Indian troops down the Ohio River when he came across a sulphurous marsh where, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it,...
My problems began in 1984 when I wrote letters to Francis Pym and Sarah Kennedy about the Falklands War and Sir Robin Day’s part in it. Sarah was presenting a radio programme and I thought she was talking...
The issue is whether the pain inflicted on the few is worth the gain for the many.
My immediate reaction – shit, I’ve had a stroke – was followed immediately by a second: thank God we have health insurance.
It isn’t so much that vegetarians remind us of the slaughterhouse as that they make a mockery of our unthinking preferences.
Before stethoscopes were invented, physicians would listen to their patients’ hearts by laying one ear directly onto the skin of the chest. We’re accustomed to laying our heads...
The Large Hadron Collider at Cern is an extreme machine. As you go round the Science Museum’s new exhibition, Collider (until 5 May), you’re constantly reminded that it’s one...