A A little over a century ago, men of the ilk of Scott, Shackleton and Mawson battled against Antarctica’s blizzards, cold and deprivation. In the name of Empire and in an age of heroic deeds they created an image of Antarctica that was to last well into the 20th...

A In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray...

A new exhibition celebrates Palladio’s architecture 500 years on A Vicenza is a pleasant, prosperous city in the Veneto, 60km west of Venice. Its grand families settled and farmed the area from the 16th century. But its principal claim to fame is Andrea Palladio, who...

The control of fire was the first and perhaps greatest of humanity’s steps towards a life-enhancing technology. To early man, fire was a divine gift randomly delivered in the form of lightning, forest fire or burning lava. Unable to make flame for themselves, the...

Some songs just won't leave you alone. But this may give us clues about how our brain works A Everyone knows the situation where you can't get a song out of your head. You hear a pop song on the radio - or even just read the song's title and it haunts you for hours,...

What caricatures can teach us about facial recognition A Our brains are incredibly agile machines, and it is hard to think of anything they do more efficiently than recognize faces. Just hours after birth, the eyes of newborns are drawn to facelike patterns. An adult...