Can a Tibetan singer make the leap from the slow pace of life on the Tibetan plateau to the fast rhythms of urban Beijing?

Is consciousness like jazz, something hard to pin down? Or is it more like the biology of dolphins, odd but natural?

René Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, was furiously condemned by his contemporaries. Why did they fear him?

Just as humans can use mobile phones or notebooks for memory storage and recall, slime moulds can use slime. Granted, ...

Architectural copies of lost structures require reckoning with history and heritage. At what cost is the past rebuilt?

Photos and journal entrees chronicle Michael C Rockefeller’s fateful 1961 journey to New Guinea in search of local art ...

Can societies exist without families? Can individuality thrive in them? Margaret Mead on the brave new world of 1959 ...

Aeon is a magazine of ideas and culture. We publish in-depth essays from the world's most incisive and ambitious thinkers, and a mix of original and curated videos — free to all.

What’s so golden about the golden ratio? A myth-busting investigation tells the story of a misunderstood mathematical idea ...

Why do we listen to our favourite music over and over again? Because repeated sounds work magic in our brains ...

As a species, we humans are awfully obsessed with the future. We love to speculate about where our evolution is taking us. We try to imagine what our technology will be like decades or centuries from ...

To approach the space of possible alien languages, we must first consider the building blocks from which a language is constructed – and how these can differ. A language can be thought to contain four ...