Three pioneers who predicted climate change
The science of climate change has a history that dates back centuries, not decades, and was...
Here be black holes
Like sea monsters on premodern maps, deep-space images are science’s fanciful means to chart the edges...
The necessity of awe
In awe we hold fast to nature’s strangeness and open up to the unknown. No wonder...
Peter and Ben
For decades, Peter lived alone in a Welsh valley – until he found friendship with a...
From vice to crime
European empires were addicted to opium smoking. Then their own agents launched a moral crusade to...
Sunken films
Trawling for memories in the wreckage of the deep sea, recovered early 20th-century films offer haunting...
Laughter is vital
For philosopher Henri Bergson, laughter solves a serious human conundrum: how to keep our minds and...
The paradox of the ravens
Is a red apple proof that all ravens are black? Marc Lange on Carl Gustav Hempel’s...
Unboxing mental health
Our system for diagnosing mental disorders doesn’t work. The transdiagnostic model offers a humane, clinically sound...
The face of the fish
They’re not cuddly, they don’t behave at all like us – yet they are sentient. Why...
Shelter in place
To avoid deportation from the US, Vicky Chavez and her kids moved into a church. They’re...
Ashoka’s moral empire
Being good is hard. How an ancient Indian emperor, horrified by the cruelty of war, created...
How we build perception from the inside out
The cognitive neuroscientist Anil Seth talks to Aeon about consciousness as a prediction, not a perception,...
Stealth infections
From the Black Death to polio, the most dangerous pathogens have moved silently, transmitted by apparently...
False teeth
This playful British short from 1968 combines lab footage, stop-motion animation and humour to show how...
Vienna, city of paradox
How did the city of elegant classicism give birth to an explosive modernism, threatening to destroy...
The hysteria accusation
Women’s pain is often medically overlooked and undertreated. But the answer is not as simple as...
Making music from brainwaves and heartbeats
Welcome inside the lab that’s using biofeedback from heartbeats and brainwaves to create experimental new music...
Does dark matter exist?
Dark matter is the most ubiquitous thing physicists have never found: it’s time to consider alternative...
The fist of modernity
Today’s police state is rooted in Bentham’s utilitarian ideas, and exists to protect capitalism more than...
Peak ellipsis
Does philosophy reside in the unsayable or should it care only for precision? Carnap, Heidegger and...
Illuminating biodiversity of the Ningaloo Canyons
Beautiful and bioluminescent, slimy and spectacular: see creatures never seen before, deep in the sea off...
Private gain, public loss
Putting public services in private hands is bad economics. Worse, it undermines our bonds as a...
Education, unchained
Rousseau’s child-centred ideals are now commonplace but his truly radical vision of educational freedom still eludes...
Barbican, 1969
How the Barbican brought back living into the working heart of LondonBy Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon
Ancient yet cosmopolitan
Art, adornment and sophisticated hunting technologies flourished not only in prehistoric Europe but across the globeBy...
The secret history of the Moon
A massive collision, or something stranger? An epic exploration of lunar origin theoriesBy Aeon VideoWatch at...
The bittersweet madeleine
It is a guilty pleasure and undergirds nationalist bombast, yet nostalgia for the past can help...
The ungoverned globe
The end of the liberal order would unleash chaos; its continuance means unconstrained economic suffering. What...
Lawyer for the strongman
Demagogues do not rise on popular feeling alone but on the constitutional ideas of Weimar and...
Open to the world
A pop-up charity shop in a luxury department store melds art, commerce and justiceBy Aeon VideoWatch...
Beware of lateral thinking
De Bono’s popular theory is textbook pseudoscience: unsound, untested and derivative of real (unacknowledged) researchBy Antonio...
Buffalo Common
Prairies, bison and nuclear warheads – a 2002 postcard from North DakotaBy Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon
From chaos to free will
A crude understanding of physics sees determinism at work in the Universe. Luckily, molecular randomness ensures...
Criminally insane
The insanity defence offends the conscience, has no basis in modern psychiatry, and penalises poor and...
Consciousness regained
After years of deep therapeutic pessimism, emerging therapies offer hope for patients trapped between coma and...
House: after five years of living
The best home is a joyfully inhabited one – doubly so if its residents are design...
Where did the grandeur go?
Superlative things were done in the past century by marshalling thousands of people in the service...
Lyubov: love in Russian
After probing disaster and war, Svetlana Alexievich turns to that other great source of human suffering:...
The medicalised life
Why do so many see vaccines and other medical interventions as tools of social control rather...
In praise of aphorisms
What if we see the history of philosophy not as a grand system of sustained critique...
The fight for ‘Anglo-Saxon’
Racists use it to bolster their ethnohistorical myths, but historians and archaeologists should not abandon the...
The trolley problem problem
Are thoughts experiments experiments at all? Or something else? And do they help us think clearly...
3D-printing coral reefs
Ceramic coral reefs and sawdust houses – the architects 3D-printing the future from scratchBy Aeon VideoWatch...
The good scientist
Science is the one culture that all humans share. What would it mean to create a...
The final nights
What a ‘good death’ can look like, in the quiet company of a compassionate strangerBy Aeon...