Aeon
Human carelessness and climate change are killing millions of animals. Gene editing could save them. Should we use it?
It wasn’t our intention that humanity would become the planet’s greatest evolutionary force; yet the fact that we are confronts us ...
Learning about the brain: It’s less like a machine than a swarm of starlings
When we consider the highways traversing the brain and how signals establish behaviourally relevant relationships across the central nervous system, ...
Viewpoint: Revisiting first UNESCO director Julian Huxley’s embrace of eugenics
Julian Sorell Huxley was born in London in 1887, the eldest son of Julia Arnold, an educator, and Leonard Huxley, ...
Sexual sensation: How the brain manages sensuality
Sexual sensation is absolutely central to both our shared human experience and our individual quirks and kinks. It’s exactly the ...
Viewpoint: AI is paving the path for dehumanizing medicine
AI promises to make healthcare quicker, more precise, and error-free. To the degree that it replaces doctors and nurses, it ...
80 per cent of the world’s population uses some folk medicine. Here’s why magical thinking will never go away
At one point or another, we all knew something about how to heal ourselves using the plants and animals that ...
Do fetuses talk in the womb? How accents form before birth
Some restless infants don’t wait for birth to let out their first cry. They cry in the womb, a rare ...
Is there such a thing as ‘plant behavior’?
We are just beginning to glimpse the extraordinary complexity and subtlety of plants’ relations with their environment, with each other ...
What is intelligence? Categorizing the myriad ways animals and humans ‘reason’
What is intelligence? People treat intelligence as a coherent whole, it remains ill-defined because it’s really a shifting array ...
The butterfly effect: Can a fluttering insect in Canada unleash a hurricane in the Pacific? Understanding chaos and consequences
Chaos is a term scientists coined to describe how small events in complex systems can have vast, unpredictable consequences ...
Viewpoint: ‘It’s like a constant scream inside my head’ — How tinnitus hijacked my brain
Tinnitus is like a constant scream inside my head, depriving me of what I formerly treasured: the moments of serene ...
Viewpoint: Performance-enhancing vices — Does it take a bad person to be a good athlete?
Selfishness channels ambition, envy drives competition, pride aids the win. Does it take a bad person to be a good ...
Are plants conscious? Field of ‘plant neurobiology’ aims to find out
Who has mind, and how do we know? While scientists increasingly agree that many animals are sentient, doubts remain about ...
Viewpoint: How birds help us better understand human infancy
To understand helpless human babies, our big brains and oddly involved dads, look to the evolution of birds not mammals ...
Do dogs ponder the future? Here’s what we can learn from animal dreams
Other animals may not ponder deep, existential questions, but the fact that they dream proves that they possess formidable memories ...
How can we deal with information overload?
Neuroergonomics researchers are looking at what can be done to break through the chaos. They are following what happens in ...
Unlocking the mystery of why we sleep
We spend approximately a third of our life sleeping, yet we don’t know why we need to. And if we ...
How do animals react when danger and death threaten?
Our concept of death is one of those characteristics, like culture, rationality, language or morality, that have traditionally been taken ...
‘It’s all in your head’: Do thinking and feeling really happen in the brain?
Someone’s probably told you before that something you thought, felt or feared was ‘all in your mind’. I’m here to ...
How grief overwhelms and transforms who we are
Grief has such a powerful effect on us, I learned, that it rewires the brain: the limbic system, a primal ...
Insect farming is all the rage. Here’s why it might not be such a good idea
Interest in insect farming is booming. Insects have been heralded as a sustainable alternative to traditional animal agriculture, with a ...
Deep brain stimulation not only treats psychiatric issues, it can boost confidence and openness
[W]hy, exactly, is [deep brain stimulation, or] DBS so transformative – not just eliminating OCD symptoms, but increasing self-confidence and ...
Viewpoint: Psychology is more mythology than hard science
In our secular age, many people no longer turn to sacred books to understand who and what they are. Psychology ...
What was life like for Neanderthal women?
Neanderthal women very likely did hunt some or much of the smaller game we find in sites, such as tortoise, ...
How extensively did the Vikings explore the Americas a millennium ago?
Around the year 1000, Leif Erikson set sail from Greenland and landed first in ‘Stone-slab land’, then ‘Forest land’ and ...
Viewpoint: There are only two sexes. That doesn’t invalidate the biological reality of transgenderism
There’s no need to reject how biologists define the sexes to defend the view that trans women are women. When ...
What caused anatomically modern Homo sapiens to evolve into behaviorally modern people?
At some point, from around 40,000 years ago in Europe, we see evidence of these behaviourally modern humans in a ...
What physicists get wrong about free will
It might seem that everything that’s happening at the higher, ‘emergent’ levels should be uniquely determined by the physics operating ...
