‘Molecules of Madness’

Addressing the question of our obvious insanity at a causal level A Kickstarter collaboration with award winning film maker David Malone Davids Trailer on Youtube I wrote an article for Brainwaving just over a year ago, ‘Consciousness and the Direction of Structure’. What appeared to be...

July 4th, 2011 | Big Ideas, Consciousness, Science of the Mind | Read More

How a big US bank laundered billions from Mexico’s murderous drug gangs

As the violence spread, billions of dollars of cartel cash began to seep into the global financial system. But a special investigation by the Observer reveals how the increasingly frantic warnings of one London whistleblower were ignored. A soldier guards marijuana that is being incinerated in Tijuana,...

April 11th, 2011 | Social Insight | Read More

Zeppelin Renaissance

When the Hindenburg blew up in 1937, so did the airship industry. So why is Britain building a fleet of the world’s biggest, for the Americans, in our old Zeppelin sheds? 2015: Regent’s Park International Airport A line of limousines and taxis snakes its way into the Royal Park to deliver...

April 11th, 2011 | Science & Technology | Read More

Time for Change

In 1998 the UN declared: “a drug-free world, we can do it!” In reality, we cannot. The War on Drugs has failed. According to all available indices, it is no longer defendable. Vast expenditure on drug law enforcement has resulted in increasing levels of overall drug-use and lowered drug prices....

April 11th, 2011 | Drug Policy | Read More

Do You Want to Live Forever?

This show is all about the radical ideas of a Cambridge biomedical gerontologist called Aubrey de Grey who believes that, within the next 20-30 years, we could extend life indefinitely by addressing seven major factors in the aging process. He describes his work as Strategies for Engineered Negligible...

March 29th, 2011 | Big Ideas | Read More

Gold Farming: Virtual Slavery?

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly...

March 28th, 2011 | Social Insight | Read More

Time for a New Convention?

War on drugs has failed, say former heads of MI5, CPS and BBC The “war on drugs” has failed and should be abandoned in favour of evidence-based policies that treat addiction as a health problem, according to prominent public figures including former heads of MI5 and the Crown Prosecution...

March 28th, 2011 | Drug Policy | Read More

Hackerville: How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central

Three hours outside Bucharest, Romanian National Road 7 begins a gentle ascent into the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps. Meadowlands give way to crumbling houses with chickens in the front yard, laundry flapping on clotheslines. But you know you’ve arrived in the town of Râmnicu Vâlcea when...

February 14th, 2011 | Social Insight | Read More

The neurons that shaped civilization

Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

February 14th, 2011 | Science of the Mind | Read More

Inside the Battle to Define Mental Illness

Every so often Al Frances says something that seems to surprise even him. Just now, for instance, in the predawn darkness of his comfortable, rambling home in Carmel, California, he has broken off his exercise routine to declare that “there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I...

January 31st, 2011 | Science of the Mind | Read More