For centuries, the contents of our minds have remained fundamentally private—thoughts, memories, and mental images locked away until we choose to express them. But what if that barrier could be crossed? Neuroscientist Dr. Tomoyasu Horikawa has developed a technique called "mind captioning" that translates patterns of brain activity into written sentences. The research demonstrates something remarkable: by combining fMRI scanning with artificial intelligence, meaningful aspects of what we see and remember can be decoded directly from the brain, without speech or language production.

Why can an ordinary experience suddenly seem otherworldly? Literary scholar Professor Nicholas Royle explores the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud’s enduring ideas about the uncanny, the rise of the weird, and how the new fantastic might offer a creative way of responding to an increasingly strange world.

What if the violence, conflict, and mental health crises defining our age are not failures of policy or culture, but consequences of biology? What if our brains simply haven't finished evolving?

Peter Kevan has spent fifty years studying pollination. Now, he's worried about something else: whether we can still trust the machinery that produces scientific knowledge. As an author, reviewer and editor-in-chief of Frontiers in Bee Science, he's watched scholarly publishing change from a service to a commercial business, while AI has introduced a new and unsettling problem of some false information slipping into the scientific record. We talked about publishing, AI, research funding, and why public trust in science may become harder to sustain.

I know a couple in their mid-70’s who moved recently into an older adult community. They opted for the independent living portion of the community because that is the way they think of themselves and in part because they wanted to continue to remain physically active. They looked at four or five older adult communities before committing to the one they ultimately choose, determining a livability score for each based on things important to them: sidewalks and roadway crossing, especially to nearby destinations; bicycle network completeness and stress level, access to public transit, permeability of the community to surrounding neighborhoods.

What helps a young person withstand adversity—and could supportive relationships help protect them from suicide? Dr Lynne Fullerton has spent much of her career investigating these questions, from the long-term effects of childhood abuse to the protective role of adults in young people's lives.

How the environments around us influence focus, behaviour and everyday decisions.

Some months ago I directed a short film for Stuart Kauffman on the emergence of complex life. It opens with him standing in a forest, Attenborough-style, gesturing at the green chaos around him — eighty years old and visibly delighted by all of it. That delight is the thing to hold on to in what follows. Kauffman — theoretical biologist, complexity theorist, one of the founding minds of the Santa Fe Institute — has spent half a century at the edge of what equations can describe. We spoke about a theorem that explains three hundred thousand years of human history, why life is not a machine, and the quiet demolition of the dream of a Theory of Everything. The conversation has been edited for length; we've tried to leave the rest of it alone.

Academia is increasingly being flooded with AI-generated research articles. Recently I was confronted with this in a very personal way, when such an “academic” article was posted online claiming to build on some of my own work. At first glance the article looked quite impressive, including many fancy mathematical equations. But a closer inspection quickly raised suspicion.