MachineMachine /stream

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That the reality of machines can outpace the imagination of magic, and in so short a time, does tend to lend weight to the claim that the technological shifts in…

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Neuroscientists have yet to find anything in the brain they are happy calling consciousness, and philosophers are far from agreement over a way of talking about what happens after we…

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We are living in the middle of a revolution in consciousness. Over the past few decades, geneticists, neuroscientists, psychologists, sociologists, economists, and others have made great strides in understanding the…

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Being that this conference is about public interfaces, it would be evidently meaningful to talk about interfaces, machines and humans. But instead of examining the present multifaceted overwhelming and immense…

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Often thought of as a modern disease, cancer has always been with us. Where scientists disagree is on how much it has been amplified by the sweet and bitter fruits…

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Yesterday afternoon, Matthew Fuller gave a brief but fascinating overview of artworks that make a direct address to the perceptual world of non-human animal species. As you will see quite…

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We're hard-wired to turn our lives into stories - how will we cope with the dizzying digital fictions of the future, ask John Bickle and Sean Keating "We are our…

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Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard.…

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It’s true that the code, as it was understood at the height of the genomic era, had some grounding in material reality. Each of the four different letters stands for…

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Just a quick fyi: If you head over to the Harvard University Press web site, you can grab a free copy of Marcus Boon’s new book, In Praise of Copying,…

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Neanderthals really did act like Neanderthals, new research suggests, as our early relatives were found to be more aggressive, competitive and promiscuous than modern man. Scientists examining fossils have discovered…

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Just this year, researchers have estimated that gene flow from Neanderthals to humans occurred between 80,000 and 50,000 years ago (ScienceDaily May, 2010). Researchers have long wondered if Neanderthals were…

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Like a disowned half-brother the Neanderthals keep hammering on our door, forcing us to face inconvenient truths. In the nineteenth century, fossil remains of powerful, thickset, short-necked human-like creatures with…

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A few scientists noticed in the late 1960s that the marine bacteria Vibrio fischeri appeared to coordinate among themselves the production of chemicals that produced bioluminescence, waiting until a certain…

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Trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To tease out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios. The trolley is usually racing towards…

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This year saw the invasion of telepresence robots—electromechanical avatars that allow you to be there without actually being there. Today, half a dozen companies are selling, or will start selling,…

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Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or…

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Men in lab coats race across streets, meet up with kids. Kids into building. Panic in streets. People running from cover. Montage of panic. Panic in streets. Flying saucer blasts…

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Look, I wouldn’t trade the 21st century for any other. We have toilet paper and vitamin-fortified milk and a measles vaccine. We can buy avocados in Fairbanks in January. But…

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We make a mistake when we think of cancer as a noun. It is not something you have, it is something you do. Your body is probably cancering all the…

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Perhaps you have had a nightmare in which you fell through the bottom of your known universe into a vortex of mutated children, talking animals, mental illness, freakish art, and…

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There has been a rash of books on human evolution in recent years, claiming that it was driven by art (Denis Dutton: The Art Instinct), cooking (Richard Wrangham: Catching Fire),…

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Three decades ago, Stephen Hawking famously declared that a "theory of everything" was on the horizon, with a 50 per cent chance of its completion by 2000. Now it is…

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It turns out the Machiguenga — whose number system goes: one, two, three, many — are not alone in their thinking. Most people from non-Western cultures introduced to the Ultimatum…

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THE news of the day often includes an item about some development in artificial intelligence: a machine that smiles, a program that can predict human tastes in mates or music,…

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Imagine being a slave in ancient Rome. Now remember being one. The second task, unlike the first, is crazy. If, as I’m guessing, you never were a slave in ancient…

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According to the late Harvard University biologist Ernst W. Mayr, the greatest evolutionary theorist since Charles Darwin, “species are groups of actually or potentially interbreeding natural populations which are reproductively…

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You may have heard of determinism, the theory that absolutely everything that happens is causally determined to happen exactly as it does by what has already gone before — right…

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In an influential article in the Annual Review of Neuroscience, Joshua Gold of the University of Pennsylvania and Michael Shadlen of the University of Washington sum up experiments aimed at…