The Clickbait Candidate
By James Williams (@WilliamsJames_) Note: This is a cross-post with Quillette magazine. While ‘interrobang’ sounds like a technique Donald Trump might add to the Guantanamo Bay playbook, it in fact refers to a punctuation mark: a disused ma…
Read MoreGuest Post: Mind the accountability gap: On the ethics of shared autonomy between humans and intelligent medical devices
Guest Post by Philipp Kellmeyer Imagine you had epilepsy and, despite taking a daily cocktail of several anti-epileptic drugs, still suffered several seizures per week, some minor, some resulting in bruises and other injuries. The source of…
Read MoreConsciousness, memory and value
HBO’s new show Westworld has been getting a lot of attention. As the AV Club pointed out, it was HBO’s highest-rated premiere since ‘the good True Detective’ (i.e., since season one). The first episode involved a robot with human-like intel…
Read MoreThe goodness of being multi-planetary
The Economist has a leader “For life, not for an afterlife“, in which it argues that Elon Musk’s stated motivation to settle Mars – making humanity a multi-planetary species less likely to go extinct – is misgu…
Read MoreGenome editing – the key ethical issues
Written by Dr Christopher Gyngell This article originally appeared on the OMS website The Nuffield Council of Bioethics released a report last Friday outlining the key ethical issues raised by genome editing technologies. Genome editing (GE…
Read MoreGuest Post: Epigenetics: Barriers to the translation of scientific knowledge into public policies
Written by Charles Dupras and Vardit Ravitsky Bioethics Programs, School of Public Health, University of Montreal Environmental epigenetics is a rising field of scientific research that has been receiving much attention. It explores …
Read MoreCross Post: Ig Nobel Prize Winner: Why I Lived Like a Badger, an Otter, a Deer and a Swift
Written by Charles Foster, Research Associate, University of Oxford This article was originally published in The Conversation I have lived as a badger in a hole in a Welsh wood, as an otter in the rivers of Exmoor, an urban fox rummaging th…
Read MoreCross Post: What do sugar and climate change have in common? Misplaced scepticism of the science
Written by Professor Neil Levy, Senior Research Fellow, Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford This article was originally published on The Conversation Erosion of the case against sugar. Shutterstock Why do we think that …
Read MoreAnybody Out There?
By Guy Kahane These days it seems as if every couple of weeks or so we get reports about newly discovered planets that are ever more similar to Earth. The most recent discovery, planet Proxima b, is the closest planet found so far; Scientif…
Read MoreDNA papers, please
Kuwait is planning to build a complete DNA database of not just citizens but all other residents and temporary visitors. The motivation is claimed to be antiterrorism (the universal motivation!) and fighting crime. Many are outraged, from l…
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