Articles By: Adam Gyngell

The Anti-Psychic’s Challenge

Legendary skeptic James Randi takes a fatal dose of homeopathic sleeping pills onstage, kicking off a searing 18-minute indictment of irrational beliefs. He throws out a challenge to the world’s psychics: Prove what you do is real, and I’ll give you a million dollars. (No takers yet.)

July 20th, 2010 | Extended Mind | Read More

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year’s list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails,...

July 13th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

Why can’t we stop Believing?

Michael Shermer says the human tendency to believe strange things — from alien abductions to dowsing rods — boils down to two of the brain’s most basic, hard-wired survival skills. He explains what they are, and how they get us into trouble. As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine,...

July 6th, 2010 | Science of the Mind | Read More

The most isolated tribe in the world?

In the days after the cataclysmic tsunami of 2004, as the full scale of the destruction and horror wreaked upon the islands of the Indian Ocean became apparent, the fate of the tribal peoples of the Andaman Islands remained a mystery. It seemed inconceivable, above all, that the Sentinelese islanders...

March 22nd, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

The Future of War

Cyber-war – the way of the future? Governments are increasingly preparing themselves for an internet-based attack on their essential service infrastructure, say security experts Jonathan Richards from the Times Online The prospect of inter-governmental cyber-war was something for which...

March 18th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

How do we make Decisions?

Dan Gilbert presents research and data from his exploration of happiness and the way humans make decisions — sharing some surprising tests and experiments that you can also try on yourself.

March 18th, 2010 | Health & Happiness | Read More

The dark side of the internet

In the ‘deep web’, Freenet software allows users complete anonymity as they share viruses, criminal contacts and child pornography Fourteen years ago, a pasty Irish teenager with a flair for inventions arrived at Edinburgh University to study artificial intelligence and computer science....

January 14th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Writing the Unthinkable: Narrative, the Bomb and Nuclear Holocaust

In Russell Hoban’s Riddley Walker, Riddley enters ‘the woom of Cambry’, the epicentre of the nuclear blast that reduced England to a neolithic state over two thousand years earlier. Walking through the crypt of the devastated cathedral, he experiences a numinous revelation of the power that was...

January 3rd, 2010 | Arts | Read More

Mechanisms of Fear: Man and Machine at the dawn of the 20th Century

F. T. Marinetti hailed the twentieth century as the one in which man would finally consummate the “dreamt-of metallization of the human body”.[1] For Marinetti, modernity carried with it the promise of a new, dynamic synthesis of man and machine – a synthesis that Gerald Heard would, in 1939,...

December 16th, 2009 | Social Insight | Read More

An Abdication of Human Response

Adam Gyngell considers Waltz with Bashir and the role technology plays in the abdication of human response in times of war. Ari Folman asks his friend why, twenty years down the line, he is now having this surreal dream from the war in Lebanon. Why can’t he remember the occasion this vision so powerfully...

November 10th, 2009 | Arts | Read More