Repatriation of cultural heritage is being debated at a time of mass migration – is heritage more important to countries that increasingly cannot be defined by their populations?
Hex code from the Blaster worm reveals the potential motivations of the worm’s creator.
Ward Moerman
An architect rides through the streets of Rio amidst a cacophony of drills and jackhammers. He wonders: Is it worth it? What will the legacy of all this construction be?
A dress by designer Iris van Herpen, who, with her runway designs, challenges common fashion norms and beliefs.
Zach Balbino/flickr
Fast fashion is the second most wasteful industry on Earth. But with the creation of dresses that charge cellphones and clothes made from recycled bottles, we could be on the verge of a green fashion revolution.
An astonishing new museum opened near Ramallah, in the West Bank, on June 1.
This clay facial reconstruction of Kennewick Man, carefully sculpted around the morphological features of his skull, suggests how he may have looked alive nearly 9,000 years ago.
Brittney Tatchell, Smithsonian Institution
A 9,000-year-old skeleton became a high-profile and highly contested case for the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. How do we respectfully deal with ancient human remains?
Lorde performs at the Austin City Limits music festival.
Wikimedia Commons/Ralph Aversen
You don’t have to be a physician or anatomist to be curious about how bodies work. Exhibits of dead human specimens have been around for quite a while – capitalizing on our fascination with death.
Koori women Treahna Hamm, Vicki Couzens and Lee Darroch wear ‘Biaganga’, traditional possum coats at the Melbourne Museum’s Aboriginal Cultural Centre in Melbourne.
Julian Smith/AAP
Museums are cracking open the temperature-controlled, dehumidified display cases and inviting people in. Working with Aboriginal communities is reawakening cultural connections and ancient art forms.
Street photographer, c. 1930, part of the NMeM collection.
The decision looks like a reinforcement of the large imbalance in cultural spending between London and the north of England.
The British Museum owns a number of priceless pieces of Aboriginal art, and claim they’re the best possible home for Australian heritage items.
Paul Hudson
The Dja Dja Warrung bark etchings are hugely significant Aboriginal artefacts. They’re back in Australia for only the second time in 160 years. We look at the complex issue of repatriation.
That traditional monolith of culture, the museum, has begun to embrace the digital world. As a series of projects reveal, the possibilities are endless.
John James Audubon’s American Flamingo (1838).
Sotheby's
Many think that the ideal museum should be removed from the vicissitudes of the market. This is an illusion.
Popular in the 18th century were events at which mummies were dissected by doctors and passed around the audience to be touched, smelt and tasted. Mummymania installation view.
Jodie Hutchinson
Egyptian mummies have fascinated Europeans since the 5th century, but a new exhibition considers the more recent role they have played in medicine, art and popular culture – and the ethics of their display in museums.
A selection of spacesuits and the TM Soyuz descent module are among the objects at the Cosmonauts exhibition.
The Science Museum