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AlphaGenome: On the Promise and Limits of AI in Science
PHILIP BALL | According to the old story, we once thought that all this other DNA was just “junk,” a term coined in this context in the 1970s. It was accumulated over the course of evolution, for example by viruses inserting their genetic material into ours, and it did nothing useful but just cluttered up our genome the way all our old detritus of a lifetime clutters up our attic.
3 days ago


Clues to the Importance of "The Subjective" in Human Healthspan and Longevity
Srini Pillay | From this perspective, fantasy is not a luxury but a stabilizing psychic function. . .
Feb 1


Theory, Metaphor, Narrative: How Science Creates the Stories it Tells
PHILIP BALL | Science is often not a competition between theories but a process of narrative creation in which the paradigm tends to be set by the most persuasive narrative
Dec 8, 2025


The Creativity of Life: A Conversation with Naomi Moris, Director of the Moris Lab at The Francis Crick Institute
Philip Ball in Conversation with Naomi Moris
Nov 23, 2025


The Nihilistic Crisis of the University
SAMUEL LONCAR | Nihilism is killing the university, and not for the first time. The Germany university was the crown jewel of European culture in the 19th-century, the pinnacle and vanguard of scientific progress, and the exemplar of what a wise partnership between state-funding and education could be...
Oct 26, 2025


The Invisible Fugue: The Poetry and Metaphysics of Ellen Hinsey
LUKE FISCHER | Humanity is caught within the tension of light and dark, heaven and earth, the eternal and time, divinity and mortality. In its philosophical and mystical tenor and its meditations on the relation between the timeless and time...
Sep 28, 2025


Reverence and Memory: A Conversation with Amit Majmudar
AMIT MAJMUDAR | What I seek to do is s to build on Steiner's legacy, because the reverence and memory that he showed for the Western tradition is what I hope to show for as many traditions as I can incorporate.
Jun 14, 2025


Some New World of Wonders: Levitation, Rationality, and Naturalism with Carlos Eire and Peter Harrison
Naturalism is not intrinsic to a rational scientific understanding. Now, why we think that, then, is partly because we've constructed false narratives about conflicts between science and religion,
May 4, 2025


Nobel Laureate, Paul Nurse, on the Future of Biology
SIR PAUL NURSE | Life is something that is able to self-assemble into a whole, behaving object. And that's what a cell is, too...
Apr 20, 2025


Perilous Intimacies: Forum Introduction
J. BARTON SCOTT | Perilous Intimacies would seem a major step in the right direction—bringing new and welcome energy to...
Nov 22, 2024


The Devastation of Philosophy: Nazi Jurisprudence, the Shoah, and Fackenheim's Transcendental Wonder of Resistance
James A. Diamond | The philosophical stakes for Fackenheim, a renowned authority on Kant and Hegel, went far beyond the confines of Jews...
Oct 11, 2024


The Two Scientific Revolutions: A Conversation with Vittorio Hösle
VITTORIO HÖSLE | We must try to develop again a worldview in which scientific and ethical thinking. . .
Feb 16, 2024
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