Science
essay
Medicine
Last hours of an organ donor
In the liminal time when the brain is dead but organs are kept alive, there is an urgent tenderness to medical care
Ronald W Dworkin
essay
Neuroscience
How to make a map of smell
We can split light by a prism, sounds by tones, but surely the world of odour is too complex and personal? Strangely, no
Jason Castro
video
Physics
Is it possible to design a shape to roll along any fixed path?
4 minutes
essay
History of technology
Indexing the information age
Over a weekend in 1995, a small group gathered in Ohio to unleash the power of the internet by making it navigable
Monica Westin
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
Frontier AI ethics
Generative agents will change our society in weird, wonderful and worrying ways. Can philosophy help us get a grip on them?
Seth Lazar
essay
Economics
The cruelty of crypto
Selling itself as the new American dream, crypto exposes the vulnerable to fraud and scams, and loads risk onto the poor
Rachel O’Dwyer
video
Meaning and the good life
Why strive? Stephen Fry reads Nick Cave’s letter on the threat of computed creativity
5 minutes
video
Film and visual culture
An augmented-reality filter reveals the hidden movements all around us
7 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
A scientist’s poor eyesight helped fuel a revolution in computer ‘vision’
9 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Struggling to learn how to do a backflip, Nikita takes on an unusual training regimen
12 minutes
video
Mathematics
How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever
9 minutes
video
Technology and the self
Why we should worry less about ‘sentient’ AIs and more about what we’re teaching them
16 minutes
video
Music
Electronic gloves and even potted plants make music in a playground for sound innovation
6 minutes
essay
History of technology
Ingenious librarians
A group of 1970s campus librarians foresaw our world of distributed knowledge and research, and designed search tools for it
Monica Westin
essay
Beauty and aesthetics
Patterns of the lifeworld
Machine learning theory is shedding new light on how to think about the mysterious and ineffable nature of art
Peli Grietzer
video
Music
As a pianist strikes a chord, visualisations of his notes appear in real time
5 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
What has feelings?
As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals
Kristin Andrews & Jonathan Birch
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination
5 minutes
essay
Evolution
What on earth is a xenobot?
The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks
Philip Ball
video
Art
What does an AI make of what it sees in a contemporary art museum?
15 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
The people of the cloud
Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives
Steven Gonzalez Monserrate
video
Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
6 minutes
video
Computing and artificial intelligence
How machine learning can help historians decode ancient inscriptions
7 minutes
essay
Computing and artificial intelligence
AI’s first philosopher
Alan Turing was a pioneer of machine learning, whose work continues to shape the crucial question: can machines think?
Sebastian Sunday Grève