ToK Essays Nov 2024

The Kakeya conjecture predicts how much room you need to point a line in every direction. In one number system after another — with one important exception — mathematicians have been proving it true.

"Polycrisis" was the big topic in Davos. But people disagree on whether we’re headed toward one — or whether it even means anything.

The Living Planet Index is the biodiversity metric that always claims the headlines. It’s often misinterpreted. How should we understand it?

Scientists at Caltech have developed a super-fast camera that can record footage of the electrical impulses that travel through nerve cells.

In our long history, how likely was it that our ancestors died as children? Historical studies suggest that around one-quarter of infants died in their first year of life and around half of all children died before they reached the end of puberty. It’s only in the very recent past that we’ve seen dramatic improvements.

Familiar categories of mental functions such as perception, memory and attention reflect our experience of ourselves, but they are misleading about how the brain works. More revealing approaches are…

Trek light years into deep space to explore time dilation and the ‘twin paradox’ at the centre of special relativity

In new computer experiments, artificial-intelligence algorithms can tell the future of chaotic systems.

All three statements are true at the same time. But discussions about the state of the world too often focus on only the first one.

Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

An evolutionary approach to consciousness can resolve the ‘hard problem’ – with radical implications for animal sentience

A bizarre and brilliantly effective optical illusion going viral on the internet tricks your brain into seeing a colour image… but if you look closer, you'll notice the photo you're staring at is only black and white.

Math teachers have stymied students for hundreds of years by sticking goats in strangely shaped fields. Learn why one grazing goat problem has stumped mathematicians for more than a century.

An astrophysicist explains what wormholes are and how these theoretical space-time tunnels have popped up in the solutions to a set of decadesold equations.

A mathematical model developed by space medicine experts from The Australian National University (ANU) could be used to predict whether an astronaut can safely travel to Mars and fulfil their mission duties upon stepping foot on the Red Planet.

What does drought mean and what are the implications for water, food, rivers and wildlife?

HS experts are supposed to be trained to communicate difficult knowledge about mental health conditions and yet our expectations sometimes ignore the fact that diagnosing and treating mental illnesses is a messy business and not always easy. New tech allows experts to create visualisations which in turn can be helpful in communicating the complexities of a case and potentia

This is a story about pizza, geometry, and making sure you get what you paid for.