ToK Essays Nov 2024

For over a decade, the Gender Affirmative Model has been the standard of care for gender dysphoric youth across the West. Yet, despite its widespread and long-standing use, good evidence to support it remains elusive.  Maybe that’s because there isn’t any. A new paper reports on result

By using machine learning and state-of-the-art supernova nucleosynthesis, a team of researchers have found the majority of observed second-generation stars in the universe were enriched by multiple supernovae. Their findings are reported in The Astrophysical Journal.

It’s boom times for doom times. But the apocalyptic mindset that has gripped so many of us not only understates how far we’ve come, but how much further we can still go.

On nights and weekends, Justin Gilmer attacked an old question in pure math using the tools of information theory.

The disappearance of Nicola Bulley saw armchair detectives flood the internet with uninformed and harmful speculation

The science-fiction writer imagined artificial intelligence—and what it might want—long before this uncanny reality ever became our own.

Scholars say the likelihood of George North’s unpublished manuscript A Brief Discourse of Rebellion sharing words and features with the Bard’s plays by chance is ‘less than one in a billion’

An endoscope was used to film inside the 9m-long space, whose purpose is still unknown.

Why would it be so bad if our species came to an end? It is a question that reveals our latent values and hidden fears

An otherworldly experience at the intersection of art and science – staged on a single square inch in a Petri dish

This courageous account puts the indigenous Americans who came to Europe, most as slaves, at the centre of the story

The transition to a world where what’s real is indistinguishable from what’s not could impact levels of social trust.

We still have so much to learn about the human brain, yet scientists are already able to tap into certain parts of it.

A comprehensive mathematical framework treats wrinkling patterns as elegant solutions to geometric problems.

The space rock has about a 1 in 560 chance of hitting this planet, the agency says.

Awakening experiences are spiritual states often believed to unlock life’s mysteries – but sacred knowledge comes at a cost

Research into a vase in Colchester reportedly provides the "only evidence" of such fights staged in Britain.

A political and policy issues blog.

From the archives in 2006, Mark Newbrook ponders the complexities of extraterrestrial languages

Huge systems appear to be far larger than was presumed possible so early after big bang, say scientists

Astrology and astronomy were once practiced side by side by scientists like Galileo and Kepler. And they’re more similar than you might think.

Given what we know about the inner worlds of nonhuman animals, how can scientists experiment on them for our potential good?