There are precious few medals awarded these days, unlike in previous centuries where they were routinely doled out for military, political, and financial honours. We still award a few – Olympic medals, the Nobel, the Fields – and one of the most prestigious of all, the Steward medal. The medal is a thin disc of [...]

Every second of every day, we’re confronted with choices that test our apetite for risk. Should you eat that tasty – but fatty – dessert? How much time should you exercise every day? Do you really want to take that spacedive? It might, quite literally, be the trip of a lifetime. Sometimes the calculation is [...]

How far back do you want to go? 150,000 years ago, to lighten an ice age by just a few degrees and help the hominids out? 65 million years ago, nudging an asteroid’s path so doesn’t hit Earth and cause a mass extinction? 1.4 billion years ago, tweaking the composition of the planet’s atmosphere? 3 [...]

Out of the whole panoply of human behaviour, there are few things more quintessentially social than eating together. We celebrate with food, we commiserate with food, we renew old ties and form new ones over breakfast, lunch and dinner. It’s not essential, but having good company while eating is something we can all enjoy – [...]

There’s a moment in The World of Glass when those playing Erica Lin, the CEO of Glass Networks, face perhaps the most important choice they’ll make in the simulation. It comes just after they reach half a billion registered users on their augmented reality system – a system that superimposes new information and interfaces on [...]