Daniel Rourke /stream

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Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how…

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Please respect FT.com's ts&cs and copyright policy which allow you to: share links; copy content for personal use; & redistribute limited extracts. Email ftsales.support@ft.com to buy additional rights or use this…

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"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted by…

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Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London this…

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Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of…

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Mr. James Winters at A Replicated Typo pointed me to a short hypothesis paper, Neanderthal-human Hybrids. This paper argues that selective mating of Neandertal males with females of human populations which had…

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In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years ago…

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It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this…

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The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An…

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This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in…

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This view of the future of humankind is grounded in an appreciation of the biologically innate powers bestowed upon us by hundreds of millions of years of evolution. This deep respect…

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According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every possible…

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...this particular baleen whale has apparently been tracked by NOAA since 1992, using a "classified array of hydrophones employed by the Navy to monitor enemy submarines." It sings at 52 Hertz,…

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Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

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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 wake…

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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 inner…

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Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometres below…

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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 of…

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A key feature of complex adaptive systems is their ability to self-organize along a number of different pathways with possible sudden shifts between states: A lake, for example, can exist in…

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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 one…

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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 that…

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Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on how…

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This is my take on the singularity: we're not going to see a hard take-off, or a slow take-off, or any kind of AI-mediated exponential outburst. What we're going to see…

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"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted by…

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Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of…

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The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as gods,…

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In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years ago…

Bookmark

It may be the foundation of modern biology, but fewer than 40 percent of Americans say they believe in the theory of evolution. While frustrated scientists sometimes blame religion for this…

Bookmark

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An…

Bookmark

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Creeper, the world’s first computer virus. From Creeper to Stuxnet, the last four decades saw the number of malware instances boom from 1,300 in…

Bookmark

The views of machinery which we are thus feebly indicating will suggest the solution of one of the greatest and most mysterious questions of the day. We refer to the question:…

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According to this view, ancient viruses, as with the ones today, could only make copies of themselves by succesfully infecting a host. So they become engines of innovation, using every possible…

Bookmark

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

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We human beings persist in thinking of ourselves as a unique species, endowed with special insight into a universe that we can manipulate. In fact, this notion is based on unexamined…

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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 wake…

Bookmark

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 inner…

Bookmark

Lake Vostok, which has been sealed off from the world for 14 million years, is about to be penetrated by a Russian drill bit. The lake, which lies four kilometres below…

Bookmark

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 of…

Bookmark

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 that…

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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 an…