Daniel Rourke /stream

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The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this, Pääbo…

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Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact,…

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When Philip K. Dick died in 1982 of a series of strokes brought on by years of overwork and amphetamine abuse, he was seen within the science fiction genre as a…

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This is the raw text output of a chat session with a bot I modified to act as an interlocutor. I use our conversation, which revolves around the history of spam,…

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The new political ecology is thus emerging from a call for greater humility toward the world and all the life forms it may hold, both literally and figuratively. Rather than contrasting…

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Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde…

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A peculiar experiment inspired by the Enlightenment sheds light on the age-old question of what makes us human.

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Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The…

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Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction…

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It’s time. The winged chariot at my back, and all that. Taking a seat on one of the comfortable couches at the National Gallery in Ottawa, I mentally strap myself in.…

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It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an…

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Biology determines our behaviour more than it suits many to acknowledge. But people—and politics and morality—cannot be described just by neural impulses

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Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government.…

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The Internet may well have its downsides, but it also has the potential to make us collectively smarter, according to open-science advocate Michael Nielsen. In Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of…

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Lars von Trier’s latest has been overshadowed by the director’s ill-judged comments at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. This is a pity because, as Film Quarterly Writer-at-Large NINA POWER and editor…

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The history of science can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and…

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This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world…

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"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions…

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For years, excitement about quantum computing has been growing among scientists and tech visionaries. Quantum computers, if they succeed, promise to make a whole new range of problems accessible to computers,…

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Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life (embryonically)…

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I must belong to the only generation of writers who've written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the…

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Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains…

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Why, though, to begin with, did stigmata materialize in 13th-century Italy? Part of the answer seems to lie in the theological trends of the time. The Catholic Church of St. Francis’s…

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As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and his…

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The question of what defines the human has, of course, been kicking around since Socrates, and probably a lot longer. If it has yet to be satisfactorily resolved, then this, Pääbo…

Bookmark

Atheism is just one-third of this exotic ideological cocktail. Secularism, the political wing of the movement, is another third. Neo-atheists often assume that the two are the same thing; in fact,…

Bookmark

Officially, the Swiss Academy of Sciences meeting in Bern on 20 January was an overview of large-scale computer modelling in neuroscience. Unofficially, it was neuroscientists' first real chance to get answers…

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This is the raw text output of a chat session with a bot I modified to act as an interlocutor. I use our conversation, which revolves around the history of spam,…

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Since the early 1990s Adam Curtis has made a number of serial documentaries and films for the BBC using a playful mix of journalistic reportage and a wide range of avant-garde…

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Image spam is one of the many dark matters of the digital world; spam tries to avoid detection by filters by presenting its message as an image file. An inordinate amount…

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Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The…

Bookmark

Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction…

Bookmark

It’s time. The winged chariot at my back, and all that. Taking a seat on one of the comfortable couches at the National Gallery in Ottawa, I mentally strap myself in.…

Bookmark

It turns out that Kant didn't think that an author could mount a strong legal case against piracy based on property rights in words. After all, even after pirates copied an…

Bookmark

With children so easy to embrace robotics, it’s clear that there’s a ton of potential for integrating intelligent technologies into learning environments. Besides, the idea of “exploring and creating” sounds a…

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Isak Gerson is spiritual leader of the world's newest religion, Kopimism, devoted to file-sharing. On 5 January the Church of Kopimism was formally recognised as a religion by the Swedish government.…

Bookmark

Lars von Trier’s latest has been overshadowed by the director’s ill-judged comments at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. This is a pity because, as Film Quarterly Writer-at-Large NINA POWER and editor…

Bookmark

To me it tastes like a desire to locate man’s place in a world that he perceives primarily with the aid of machines. The art of the Greeks has been used…

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This mental approach to causality is often effective, which is why it’s so deeply embedded in the brain. However, those same shortcuts get us into serious trouble in the modern world…

Bookmark

"I began to realize that the ‘control’ animals used for research studies throughout the world are couch potatoes," he tells me. It's been shown that mice living under standard laboratory conditions…

Bookmark

For years, excitement about quantum computing has been growing among scientists and tech visionaries. Quantum computers, if they succeed, promise to make a whole new range of problems accessible to computers,…

Bookmark

Basically, three things can happen to any given neuron in the central nervous system. It's a really complex proccess! A) some neurons are born very early in the caterpillar's life (embryonically)…

Bookmark

Games don’t do storytelling well because they can’t deliver the four key components of story. There is no hero. Time is in the control of the player, not the creator. There…

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Do we have free will? It is an age-old question which has attracted the attention of philosophers, theologians, lawyers and political theorists. Now it is attracting the attention of neuroscience, explains…

Bookmark

As scientists began to build a database of human DNA in the 1990s, it became possible to test these ideas with genes. In his talk, Paabo described how he and his…

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Objects 101 by Roger Sandall What interests me here however is something else—the profoundly paradoxical position of MacGregor himself. When resisting Greek calls for the return of the Elgin Marbles, he…