The best science fiction can predict the science of tomorrow and colour the preoccupations of today. It’s too early to tell whether Nick Payne’s new play, Elegy, will do the former, but it certainly takes a powerful swing at the latter. Read more
British comedian Robert Newman kicks off new act The Brain Show like any self-respecting scientist: with an abstract. He tells the audience about the billions pouring into mapping European and American brains through, respectively, the Human Brain Project and the White House BRAIN (Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies) Initiative. He lays out the shortcomings of these projects’ best-known predecessor, the Human Genome Project, which, he bemoans, never did find half the genes it promised. There was no “gene for getting into debt”; no “low voter turnout” gene. And he explains what the rest of his argument will be: that humans cannot be thought of as machines, and that scientists devalue us all by conceptualising people in this reductive way. Read more
Two linked exhibitions in Berlin – Mirror Images in Art and Medicine and Smoking Mirror – begin where Narcissus left off. The hero of Greek mythology wasted away gazing transfixed at his own beauty reflected on the surface of a dark pool. He left his name both to the narcissus (daffodil) that sprang up on the banks where he died, and to psychology. Read more
“Not quite salve et vale yet,” Oliver Sacks signed off a letter to me at the end of June, expressing the hope that he’d visit London again in the time he had left. The treatment he received earlier in the year had, he said, done “a very good job clearing out the majority of the metastasis in my liver”, and I allowed myself to be optimistic about seeing this remarkable, terminally ill man once more. Read more
As the literati strive to predict the future of the book, one thing is clear in the here and now: the best of popular science writing is still all about clarity, rigour and brio. This year’s six-book shortlist for the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books bristles with that mix. Read more
Moving emotional journeys are the stock-in-trade of animation studio Pixar. In their Toy Story trilogy, released in 1995, 1999 and 2010, little Andy’s toys compete for his affections as his family move, threatening to leave them behind. In the 2009 Up, even the opening sequence — a poignant recap of the elderly protagonist’s life story – had audiences blubbing. Read more
I have two criteria for a game app for my daughter: it must assuage my guilty conscience when I’m not able to play with her, and contain no ads. Ideally I would want her to learn calculus while we wait at the airport security line (or to discover that lingering boredom can lead to creativity and observation). Realistically, I at least want her to learn something useful. Read more
