Featuring an unforgettable opening motif – ‘dun dun dun duuun’ is just one of the myriad ways it’s been expressed in writing – Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No 5 in C minor, Op 6 (aka ‘Beethoven’s ...

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 ...

Few scientific disagreements lead to public controversy. But there are times when the subject or the participants in a debate so capture the public imagination that otherwise dry, technical matters of ...

To the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, technology was far more than just tools that people develop, but systems through which the world both reveals itself to us and shapes the way we see it. For ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

This video essay from the YouTube channel Kings and Things takes viewers through the once-extraordinary grounds, as well as the fascinating history, of the Villa di Pratolino in Tuscany. Built in the ...

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 ...

Every society depends on violence workers, but what makes young men take a job that risks their lives and harms others?

‘It’s natural,’ says the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘to think that time can be represented by a line.’ We imagine the past stretching in a line behind us, the future stretching in an unseen ...