Philippa Kaur

Boredom can be unpleasant, but we can learn from some of the world’s dullest people how to keep ourselves amused, says boredom researcher James Danckert More

Is our love affair with AI really about building a new kind of deity to meet human needs no amount of rationality can fill? Max Barry’s disturbing novel Providence lays out the case, says Sally Adee More

This week, listen as the US debates covid-19, play a struggling survivor of an earthquake-torn city and discover how the planet gains from human progress slowing down More

A prehistoric human species that lived in Europe 1.2 million to 800,000 years ago is emerging as a contender to be our last common ancestor with Neanderthals More

Forget the simple out-of-Africa idea of how humans evolved. A huge array of fossils and genome studies has completely rewritten the story of how we came into being. More

New archaeological finds show that New Guinea developed sophisticated cultural practices around the same time as they were emerging in Europe and Asia More

Pandemics of the past can teach us about the current one, says John Troyer, who studies how we use technology to alter the experience of death More

Always forgetting birthdays? Terrible at staying in touch? New tech promises to turn you into the best buddy ever. We put it to the test More