You can get experienced meditators to produce, on demand, feelings of timelessness and spacelessness. Tell them ‘Try to be outside time’, and ‘try not to be in the centre of space’, and they will. These sort of sensations tend to happen tog…

Desire for space exploration and fantasies about what life will be like once the human race breaks free from the chains that bind us to this planet have been along for a long time. Some have envisioned a bright future without scarcity as we…

The dictator Joseph Stalin reputedly once said that “The death of one person is a tragedy; the death of one million is a statistic.” Behind this chilling remark lies an important insight into human moral psychology. Our moral intuitions are…

I have long been uncomfortably aware that luck has played a major factor in my success (such as it is). I spent more than three years after my PhD alternating between unemployment and low paying part-time jobs, before I got two lucky breaks…

The disappearance of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 along with its 239 passengers and crew has dominated recent news coverage.  Hope for their survival has dimmed, and my thoughts and prayers are with the relatives of those on board.  This in…

Some context: “Meat Free Mondays” is an international campaign that encourages people not to eat meat on Mondays to improve both their own health and the health of the planet (also, y’know, not killing sentient beings unnecessarily). Sounds…

Speaking in December last year, David Cameron reinforced the current government position that prisoners serving a custodial sentence in the UK should not be given the right to vote, stating that “if parliament decides that prisoners s…

A somewhat surprising announcement by The Sun that from now on every Tuesday Page 3 models will be part of a campaign to raise awareness on breast cancer (“check ’em Tuesday” in the poetic words of The Sun) caught some commentat…

Cory Doctorow has written a thoughtful critique of two science fiction stories and how they might promote short-sightedness and morally bad behaviour. If one thinks science fiction is good for teaching us to think about the future (or liter…

As the Ukrainian crisis continues to unfold, attention has shifted from the deposed president Viktor Yanukovych to the Crimea peninsula.  Crimea has an ethnic Russian majority and as such are much less sympathetic to the pro-Western uprisin…