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16 results
  • Article
  • Article

Fantastic beasts and unnatural history

| Cassidy Phillips

Find out how a 17th-century compendium of the natural world came to present fantastical beasts –like dragons – as real, living creatures.

  • Article
  • Article

Navigating in a connected world

| Alex LeeIan Treherne

Alex Lee ponders the promising ideas, stalled projects and pricey gadgets that aim to help visually impaired people get out and about. But it seems that an actual human could be the essential ingredient.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

The 200-year search for normal people

| Sarah ChaneyMaïa Walcott

Sarah Chaney poses the question we’ve likely all asked at some point in our lives: 'Am I normal?’, and explores whether normality even exists.

  • Article
  • Article

Would you like to buy a dinosaur?

| Ross MacFarlane

Two remarkable letters and a drawing of a plesiosaur by Mary Anning offer a tantalising portal into the exciting world of fossil hunting and discovery of the 1800s.

  • Article
  • Article

The Key to Memory: Follow your nose

Elissavet Ntoulia explores what a pair of pomanders can tell us about how and why we remember.

  • Article
  • Article

A bad atmosphere in the Balkans

| Natasha TripneyDragan Mujan

The citizens of Belgrade, one of the most polluted cities in Europe, are finally pushing back against the polluters, whose activities they’ve been encouraged to accept.

  • Article
  • Article

Sacred cows and nutritional purity in India

| Apoorva SripathiCat O’Neil

Apoorva Sripathi explores the complex reasons behind India’s recent boom in all things dairy – beginning with a 1970s Western food-aid programme.

  • Article
  • Article

Hunting lost plants in botanical collections

| Nataly Allasi CanalesCat O’Neil

A bark specimen at Kew recalls the story of a South American man who harvested the most potent source of the only effective malaria treatment available in the late 1800s. Killed for his work and forgotten by history, Manuel Mamani was a victim of the colonial juggernaut.

  • Article
  • Article

Womb milk and the puzzle of the placenta

| Joanna Wolfarth

A human baby needs milk to survive – and this holds true even before it’s born. Joanna Wolfarth explores “womb milk”, as well as ancient and modern ideas about the placenta.

  • Article
  • Article

Unravelling genetic origins from the potato to cinchona

| Nataly Allasi CanalesCat O’Neil

Starting with the humble potato, Nataly Allasi Canales reveals how researchers unearth the genetic origins of modern plant varieties, and explains why their work is so important for biodiversity.

  • Article
  • Article

Aphasia and drawing elephants

| Thomas Parkinson

When Thomas Parkinson investigated the history of “speech science”, he discovered an unexpected link between empire, elephants and aphasia.

  • Article
  • Article

Acid and the sexual psychonauts

| Alex DymockBen MechenLeah Moyle

How LSD fuelled one woman’s journey of sexual self-discovery in the late 1950s.

  • Article
  • Article

The making of ‘Quacks’

| Helen Babbs

How do you create a medical comedy that’s authentic and laugh-out-loud funny?

  • Article
  • Article

Dying to be in nature

| Matthew PonsfordAndy Merritt

The modern funeral business is one that uses up precious resources and pollutes the planet. But you can make sure it’s only your memory that leaves its mark with these new and natural ways to leave this earth.

  • Book extract
  • Book extract

“It wasn’t an accident that I came to you”

Douglas meets psychoanalyst Susie Orbach for a follow-up session, ahead of delivering a difficult verdict.

  • Long read
  • Long read

The ambivalence of air

| Daisy LafargeCarol Nazatto

Daisy Lafarge investigates the effects of air quality and pressure on body and mind, exploring air as cure, but one with contradictions.