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The fathers of Islamic science hold lessons for students: breadth over specialisation, and never let constraints get in the way

- by Mariam Sabri

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Can we test for AI consciousness when we don’t understand our own? Getting into John Searle’s ‘Chinese room’ experiment

- by Aeon Video

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Saffron and ostrich liver were prescribed but so were exercise, gardens, animals, socialising, and music

- by Katherine Harvey

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Indigenous knowledge and art overwrite colonial cartography to correct the historical record in Central Australia

- by Aeon Video

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Physicians reject palmistry as nonsense. But reading the creases of our palms for hidden meaning is what doctors have always done

- by Alison Bashford

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Set Margins’, book, ISBN 978-9083449876, English, 192 pages, 2025, The Netherlands

The crisis of information validation began on a global scale with social media and their promise to reduce the various communication levels from different →

CD – Raster

By the early 1980s, many areas of European artistic research were already seeing how the idea of ​​the avant-garde—especially as a historical category—had run its course, becoming a style rather than a driving force for contemporaneity. At →

What sounds might we associate with climate change without supporting visuals? Sound artists have explored the territories of glaciers melting and the cries and calls of endangered species. Johannes Kreidler takes a different approach in his “Jet Whistles / The →

The MIT Press, book, ISBN 978-0262552547, English, 274 pages, 2025, USA

Cory Arcangel is certainly an anomaly in media art. Embodying a pure hacker DIY spirit, he has, in just a few years, become a renowned →

CD – empreintes DIGITALes

The symbolic figure of the garden—a recurring presence in cultural debate between the 20th and 21st centuries, embodied with a surprising capacity to resonate across diverse expressive fields—has not exhausted its evocative power and continues to →

Seventy years after CP Snow warned of estrangement between the sciences and arts, breadth in education should be encouraged

After the playwright Tom Stoppard died last year, one of the most striking tributes to his work came from a clinical scientist. Michael Baum explained in the British Medical Journal how, in the interval of a 1993 performance of Arcadia, he experienced an epiphany. Thomasina Coverly’s attempt to plot the equation for a rose prompted him to realise that chaos theory was the best way to explain breast cancer’s pattern of recurrence. It was, he wrote, “the bond that links the arts and the sciences as one enterprise rather than the contents of two silos”.

Mr Baum was not the first person to celebrate the bridging of this gap. CP Snow famously criticised the incuriosity of “literary intellectuals” about technology in his essay The Two Cultures (later turned into a lecture and a book). Whether or not this was justified at the time, many literary intellectuals besides Stoppard have since taken a close interest in science; Richard Holmes’s latest book, about the influence of evolutionary theory on Tennyson, is just one example. But the split between the humanities and sciences remains pronounced, and will be evident when this year’s A-level results are released on Thursday.

Prof Abbie Garrington reflects on an interview with the physicist Laura Grego about the battle for our skies

Where are the arts and humanities in current debates about space research? The physicist Laura Grego tells us we “have to be aware of what is happening in space”, that we should probe Elon Musk’s potential “appropriation” of space via satellite, and that our spacefaring era raises questions about our stewardship of the Earth for future generations, and the significance of human culture (‘Most people don’t know we’ve set up a doomsday system’: physicist Laura Grego on satellites, nuclear weapons and the battle for our skies, 20 July).

Meanwhile, your interviewer Aida Edemariam notes both the Artemis mission’s potential to inspire, and the relegation of most of us to an audience agog, with no say in civilisational decisions about major space missions.

Literature, the arts and social sciences must not be sacrificed as higher education funding is squeezed

“I ask nothing more from you than to do what you have been doing. Go out into the fray and keep reading,” was Percival Everett’s advice when he addressed graduating students at Wesleyan university in Connecticut last summer. Fitting words from a prize-winning novelist, at a time when gambling has become a more common leisure activity in the US than reading a book. In the UK, too, concerns are growing about the decline of reading, partly due to ubiquitous screen-based entertainment. Last week, parliament’s education committee called for the National Year of Reading to be extended to a decade, to inculcate the habit in children and young people.

All academic disciplines use books to convey information, but for literature and the humanities more widely, they are an indispensable currency. As the 2026 graduation season draws to a close, and robes and mortarboards are put away for another year, there is growing anger that these subjects are under attack from university administrations looking for ways to save money – while ministers look away.

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Exclusive: Prof Evelyn Welch, vice-chancellor of Bristol University, believes her daughter’s success shows value of arts education

One of Britain’s leading university vice-chancellors has described sweeping cuts to arts and humanities across the sector as “absolutely tragic”, citing her famous daughter as an example of the value of a creative arts education.

Prof Evelyn Welch, the vice-chancellor of Bristol University and incoming chair of the Russell Group of research-intensive universities, is the mother of Florence Welch, the singer-songwriter from Florence + the Machine.

Exclusive: Experts fear rise in education ‘cold spots’ and social immobility as 4,000 academic posts lost in one year

Thousands of university job cuts in humanities and social sciences are creating widespread cold spots for languages, classics and theology degrees, the British Academy has warned.

Universities’ finances are so precarious that redundancies are also occurring in business studies, law and English – subjects considered strategically important and traditionally popular courses.