International standards ban publication of research that involves any biological material from executed prisoners, that lacks human research ethics committee approval and that lacks consent of donors.
'Portrait of Francis Bacon', Paul van Somer I (1617)
Bacon helped usher in the scientific revolution. If we’re serious about combatting global warming, we should follow his example.
Soprano Jane Sheldon in La Passion de Simone. Kaija Saariaho’s work had its Australian premiere at the 2019 Sydney Festival, performed by the Sydney Chamber Opera.
Victor Frankowski
The Australian premiere of La Passion de Simone uses multiple voices to tell a story about philosopher Simone Weil. But the work lacks the emotional drama of its subject’s life.
Our birth is one of the all-important bookends of our lives and affects so much of what comes later – so why don’t we think about it more?
When it comes to urban planning, the question is not so much how to physically plan our cities differently. Rather, the question is how to convince both the public and our politicians to implement change.
Patrick Tomasso /Unsplash
City planners and politicians have pitched carbon emission reduction as an individual choice but this leads to green gentrification and fails to make broad changes. We need a new guiding philosophy.
What do the Carlos Ghosn scandal, the rising power of algorithms and the “gilets jaunes” have in common? The need to extend the spatial and temporal definitions of responsibility.
A resonance theory of consciousness suggests that the way all matter vibrates, and the tendency for those vibrations to sync up, might be a way to answer the so-called ‘hard problem’ of consciousness.
A display of acrobatics by German internees at the prisoner of war camp at Newbury Racecourse in Berkshire in October 1914.
Imperial War Museum/Wikimedia
Seth Lazar, Australian National University and Colin Klein, Australian National University
A new study provides fascinating data on how people prioritise who to save in hypothetical driverless car crashes. But it takes more than just numbers to really create ethical machines.
Some careful reasoning shows that comparing abortion with contract murder equates two acts that are far from obviously morally equivalent.
Indonesian activists hold candles during a candlelight protest against death penalty executions, outside the presidential palace in Jakarta in 2016.
Mast Irham/EPA