Articles By: Joe Murray

Was the poisoning of a French town in 1951 an LSD trial?

On August 16th 1951 a number of people in the quiet southern French town of Pont St.Esprit began to fall ill. Stomach pains were soon followed by violent and often terrifying hallucinations. Local hospitals were soon overwhelmed and more than thirty people were taken to asylums in nearby towns. It was...

August 25th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Genetically Modified Animals

UNLESS you live in Europe, your last meal probably contained genetically modified ingredients – 80 per cent of soya grown worldwide is now genetically engineered, for instance. Yet while modified plants are rapidly taking over the planet’s farms, the same cannot be said for GM animals. There’s...

July 28th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Putting the Pope on Trial

International law presents a radical challenge to the powerful: they could be judged by the same standards as the rest of us. By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 13th April 2010 Confession and repentence are not among the Christian virtues practised by the Pope. He has apologised for the rape...

April 14th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Entangled

Time is not what it seems… When a drug overdose causes Leoni, a troubled teen from twenty-first-century Los Angeles, to have a near-death experience, her soul is lifted from the modern world and flung into a parallel time 24,000 years in the past. There her fate becomes entangled with that of Ria,...

April 8th, 2010 | Arts | Read More

A Swansea Love Story

In the last 4 years, the small South Wales city of Swansea experienced a rise in heroine addiction of 180%. VBS befriends a gang of young addicts caught up in South Wales’ largely ignored heroin epidemic. Our intimate look into their lives shows the unbreakable cycles of economic depression, family...

March 8th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Neanderthals bid for Human Status

NEANDERTHALS as innovators? That the concept seems amusing goes to show how our sister species has become the butt of our jokes. Yet in the Middle Palaeolithic, some 300,000 years ago, innovation is what the Neanderthals were up to. From NewScientist, by Rowan Hooper This period is usually regarded...

February 25th, 2010 | Evolution | Read More

BREAKPOINT: terrorists vs. transhumanists

Former counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke’s BREAKPOINT novel, set in the year 2012, is based on emerging technologies. “Globegrid,” a high-speed global network, links supercomputers worldwide. Combined with advanced AI software, it promises to reverse-engineer the brain, revolutionize...

February 17th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

The Shaman’s Renaissance

A new religion is spreading to Britain – its central sacrament the consumption of a hallucinogenic Class A drug. Here’s a report from the faith’s heartland in the rainforests of the Amazon I am deep in the Amazon rainforest, anxiously losing my mind as the world begins to disintegrate....

February 1st, 2010 | Spirituality | Read More

Google to end censorship in China over cyber attacks

Google, the world’s leading search engine, has thrown down the gauntlet to China by saying it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese service. The internet giant said the decision followed a cyber attack it believes was aimed at gathering information on Chinese human rights...

January 18th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

Russia and US in secret talks to fight net crime

Forget missiles, nukes and biological weapons. Many of tomorrow’s battles will be fought in the fog of cyberspace, and as Daniel Nasaw’s article from guardian.co.uk shows, the US and Russia are currently holding secret talks to lay down the ground rules for the conflicts of the future. American...

December 14th, 2009 | Creativity, Science & Technology | Read More