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‘Like a film in my mind’: hyperphantasia and the quest to understand vivid imaginations

William Blake’s imagination is thought to have burned with such intensity that, when creating his great artworks, he needed little reference to the physical world.

20/04/2024

‘I Gullah Geechee, too’: the educators keeping a language of enslaved Africans alive

In 2019, Akua Page was invited to a juvenile incarceration facility in Richland county, South Carolina, to give a presentation about the Gullah Geechee language, an English-based creole created by enslaved Africans.

20/04/2024

Scientists’ experiment is ‘beacon of hope’ for coral reefs on brink of global collapse

An underwater experiment to restore coral reefs using a combination of “coral IVF” and recordings of fish noises could offer a “beacon of hope” to scientists who fear the fragile ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.

20/04/2024

‘Every penny has a purpose’: the rise of zero-based budgeting

Each month 20,000 people tune in to watch 27-year-old Beth Fuller work out how to spend her salary. For a year and a half she has, on payday, opened a spreadsheet and written out in granular detail what she will owe in bills, exactly what she…

20/04/2024

Eating light: Finnish startup begins making food ‘from air and solar power’

Nothing appears remarkable about a dish of freshly made ravioli made with solein at first glance. It looks the same as normal pasta. It . But the origins of the proteins which give it its full-bodied flavour are extraordinary: they come from…

19/04/2024

UN livestock emissions report seriously distorted our work, say experts

A flagship UN report on livestock emissions is facing calls for retraction from two key experts it cited who say that the paper “seriously distorted” their work.

19/04/2024

Rescuers deflate football-sized swollen hedgehog

A hedgehog that had swollen to the size of a football – so big that it was spotted in a field by a passenger on a passing bus – has been deflated by rescuers.

19/04/2024

Meet the scientists on a new wildlife frontier: the mysterious sounds of the underground

The sound of an earthworm is a distinctive rasping and scrunching. Ants sound like the soothing patter of rain. A passing, tunnelling vole makes a noise like a squeaky dog’s toy repeatedly being chewed.

19/04/2024

Letting grass grow long boosts butterfly numbers, UK study proves

Good news for lazy gardeners: one labour-saving tweak could almost double the number of butterflies in your garden, according to a new scientific study – let the grass grow long.

19/04/2024

Lost orchards and blossom flourish in placenames across England and Wales

Over the last century orchards and blossom trees have been slipping out of the British landscape at an alarming rate but the “ghosts” of lost flowers are glimpsed in an increasing number of placenames recalling the vanished pinks and whites,…

19/04/2024

Meta steps up AI battle with OpenAI and Google with release of Llama 3

Meta Platforms on Thursday released early versions of its latest large language model, Llama 3, and an image generator that updates pictures in real time while users type prompts, as it races to catch up to generative AI market leader OpenAI.

18/04/2024

Two endangered black-footed ferrets cloned from frozen tissue samples

Two more black-footed ferrets have been successfully cloned in an attempt to save the endangered species, the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced.

18/04/2024