First the rush, then the reality – how a cryptocurrency pyramid scheme spread faster than a virus in a sleepy Georgia town ...

Imagining how aliens might communicate prepares us for first contact and illuminates the nature of our own languages ...

Like today’s large language models, 16th-century humanists had techniques to automate writing – to the detriment of novelty ...

The world’s isms – capitalism, socialism, fascism and so on – explored through the analogy of your mum doing the washing ...

Peel back the visible and invisible layers of brilliance in one artist’s clever self-portraits juxtaposing East and West ...

The science of our age is computational. Without models, simulations, statistical analysis, data storage and so on, our knowledge of the world would grow far more slowly. For decades, our fundamental ...

Inspired by a TikTok trend, a cognitive scientist developed the largest citizen science study in animal communication ...

is an award-winning British science writer based in Cape Town, South Africa. He is the co-author with John Heilbron of Quantum Drama: From the Bohr-Einstein Debate to the Riddle of Entanglement (2024) ...

For all the promise and dangers of AI, computers plainly can’t think. To think is to resist – something no machine does We can split light by a prism, sounds by tones, but surely the world of odour is ...

On 22 January 1817, Henri Beyle’s heart was beating fast. Not because he had braved the robber-infested road from Bologna, but because he was now approaching the city of Florence. Glimpsing ‘like some ...