Author: Anthony Booker, Reader in Ethnopharmacology, University of Westminster “Double double toil and trouble” is a quote from Shakespeare’s Macbeth that conjures images of evil witches making potions in giant cauldrons. But the truth was that women persecuted as witches were probably legitimate healers of the time. Prior to the 14th century, female healers were […]
If you’ve ever fallen down a Wikipedia rabbit hole—clicking link after link until you’re far from where you started—you’ve explored a network, much like physicists map connections in systems like the internet or ecosystems. Each Wikipedia article is a dot, each hyperlink a line connecting ideas. This vast web, built by millions of contributors, mirrors […]
OpenAI’s recent rollout of its new video generator Sora 2 marks a watershed moment in AI. Its ability to generate minutes of hyper-realistic footage from a few lines of text is astonishing, and has raised immediate concerns about truth in politics and journalism. But Sora 2 is rolling out slowly because of its enormous computational […]
Author: Sergi Basco, Associate Professor of Economics, Universitat de Barcelona On 25 September 2025, it was announced that 9 european banks, including UniCredit, ING and CaixaBank, have launched a consortium to issue a euro stablecoin – a cryptocurrency with a value pegged to the euro. While stablecoins are less volatile than regular cryptocurrencies like bitcoin […]
We saw in our past entry how the moral philosophy theory known as longtermism is rooted in the historical trend towards ‘the expansion of the circle of empathy’, in order to include all future human beings (or ‘persons’, we might say, including non-human, or post-human persons), and also commented on some flaws of the theory […]
Author: Daryl Janzen, Observatory Manager and Instructor, Astronomy, University of Saskatchewan Few ideas in modern science have reshaped our understanding of reality more profoundly than space-time — the interwoven fabric of space and time at the heart of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Space-time is frequently described as the “fabric of reality.” In some accounts […]
One of the most popular versions today of the idea that there can be moral progress—in the sense that our values and moral standards can keep improving—is the claim, much in vogue now, that such progress takes the form of what’s often called the expansion of the circle of empathy. The idea is that, in […]
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably taken a calculus course before. How was it? Chances are you found it frustrating or, at least, complicated. You may remember one of the most feared parts of calculus courses: the computation of derivatives and integrals. For most students, this is the first time they face a mathematical problem […]
Authors: Adam Brumm, Professor of Archaeology, Griffith University; Basran Burhan, PhD Candidate, Archaeology, Griffith University; Gerrit (Gert) van den Bergh, Researcher in Palaeontology, University of Wollongong; Maxime Aubert, Professor of Archaeological Science, Griffith University, and Renaud Joannes-Boyau, Professor in Geochronology and Geochemistry, Southern Cross University Stone tools dating to at least 1.04 million years ago […]
From fabricated research to paid authorships and citations, organized scientific fraud is on the rise. By combining large-scale data analysis of scientific literature with case studies, researchers led a deep investigation into scientific fraud. Although concerns around scientific misconduct typically focus on lone individuals, the Northwestern study instead uncovered sophisticated global networks of individuals and […]