Full of wonders: Takis at Tate Modern reviewed
Steel flowers bend in a ‘breeze’ generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter…
How plastic saved the elephant and tortoise
Plastics — even venerable, historically eloquent plastics — hardly draw the eye. As this show’s insightful accompanying publication (a snip…
The only thing that baffled Einstein was his own popularity
On 6 November 1919, at a joint meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society and the Royal Society, held at London’s…
The powerful magnetism of James Clerk Maxwell
Chances are, you are reading these words in some room or other. Build a wall down the middle of it,…
The Tibetan Passion Book puts the Kama Sutra in the shade
The Tibetan artist and poet Gendun Chopel was born in 1903. He was identified as an incarnate lama, and ordained…
What will it mean for mankind when robots start caring for us?
‘I gotta be me,’ Sammy Davis Jr. croons as the android Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood) steadies her horse, stands…
Help over the hump
Losing our way in life’s trackless forest, whither should we turn for solace and advice? Wisdom used to be the…
The magic of maths
It’s odd, when you think about it, that mathematics ever got going. We have no innate genius for numbers. Drop…
