What happens when there are two competing definitions of death, confounding our understanding of the end of life? On 9 December 2013, Jahi McMath, a 13-year-old African-American girl living in Oakland, California, entered the hospital for a tonsillectomy, still one of the most common surgical procedures performed on children and often recommended for sleep apnoea, a condition she had been living with.

Amazon’s first employee, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife, and one of the world’s richest women is rewriting the philanthropy playbook

Researchers are exploring ways to use people’s voices to diagnose coronavirus infections, dementia, depression and much more.

The long read: How one magic word became a way of justifying Silicon Valley’s unconstrained power

When you read and listen to discussions about J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, you will often hear someone say something along the lines of this: When you’re fifteen you think Holden’s a genius; when you’re twenty-five you realize he’s just a brat. Before I’d even read the book, I remember seeing it referenced in an episode of Family Guy, where one character berates another character by saying:

“Is Donald Trump really a billionaire?” everyone seemed to be asking Sunday night, after the New York Times dropped a bombshell report about the president’s taxes, which detailed big losses in some years and limited income in others. The answer: Yes, he is indeed.

The Michael Moore-produced ‘Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders and family foundations skewered in the film.

Philosophy can help us live more meaningful lives and build better societies. We just need a framework of philosophy that fits our modern-day problems.

In 1963, a saucer-shaped, yellow submarine returned from the depths of the Red Sea and docked to an underwater research center, 26 miles off the coast of Port Sudan and 33 feet below the surface. Aboard it was legendary explorer and oceanographer Jacques Cousteau, who captured the imagination of millions with his Oscar-winning documentary World Without Sun.

Never in our lives have we experienced such a global phenomenon. For the first time in the history of the world, all of humanity, informed by the unprecedented reach of digital technology, has come together, focused on the same existential threat, consumed by the same fears and uncertainties, eagerly anticipating the same, as yet unrealized, promises of medical science.

Later this year, the Trump administration is expected to fulfill a decadeslong Republican dream. The Department of the Interior will likely sell the first leases for oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, opening up to development the last remaining stretch of protected land along the North Slope.

Britain achieved an unlikely status as a power provider last year. Its annual consumption of coal plunged to the lowest level in 250 years. According to figures released last week, a mere 8 million tonnes were incinerated in UK factories and power plants. That is roughly the same amount that was burned nationally in 1769, when James Watt was patenting his modified steam engine.

The remarkable inside story of one journalist’s quest to uncover the true costs of industrial farming to the environment, people & animals

You say you want to be a crime writer? Ever thought of studying physics? I’m serious. While many automatically think of an English degree as the gateway to literary success, it’s also true that science-savvy novelists have excelled in every genre. Think of Primo Levi and E.L. Koingsburg, both chemists, Vladimir Nabokov, who was an entomologist and lepidopterist, mathematician Lewis Carroll, and contemporary authors Lisa Genova, a neuroscientist, or physicist Alan Lightman.

Glen Assoun was innocent of murder, but he was having a hard time proving it. With his long, dark hair and big, bushy beard, he paced in front of the jury in a Nova Scotia courtroom in August 1999, trying to convince them he didn’t rape the woman he was cross-examining. If he could show he was innocent of that crime, perhaps he could convince the jury he also hadn't murdered his wife.

A median of 45% across 34 surveyed countries say it is necessary to believe in God to be moral and have good values. However, public opinion on this question, as well as the role of God, prayer and religion varies by country, region and economic development.

We cannot much longer ignore the discomforting truth that the economies we’ve inherited from the twentieth century are poorly designed for the production of human beings. As digital technologies weave economic logic deeper into the temporal fabric of everyday life, we’re debasing economic society’s most complex, valuable, and neglected production: human consciousness.

America today faces a terrifying danger: political correctness. It is an existential threat not just to the United States, but all of human civilization. By this, obviously, I mean right-wing political correctness. Maybe you’re surprised to hear this. In the U.S. media, there’s no shortage of lamentations about political correctness and how it chills debate — but they’re almost always about the threat of left-wing PC.

Absence of human contact is associated with declines in cognitive function. But as the COVID-19 pandemic brings concerns about the potential harms of isolation to the fore, researchers are still hunting for concrete evidence of a causal role as well as possible mechanisms.

As Germany emerged from its coronavirus lockdown in May, police commandos pulled up outside a rural property owned by a sergeant major in the special forces, the country’s most highly trained and secretive military unit. They brought a digger. The sergeant major’s nickname was Little Sheep. He was suspected of being a neo-Nazi. Buried in the garden, the police found two kilograms of PETN plastic explosives, a detonator, a fuse, an AK-47, a silencer, two knives, a crossbow and thousands of rounds of ammunition, much of it believed to have been stolen from the German military.