Joseph Emerson of the Department of Applied Math at the University of Waterloo on the documentary The Quantum Tamers which he co-produced at the Perimeter Institute

In July of 1931, author and philosopher Will Durant wrote to a number of notable figures and asked, essentially, "What is the meaning of life?" His letter concluded:

Spare me a moment to tell me what meaning life has for you, what keeps you going, what help—if any—religion gives you, what are the sources…

1 ) Devil’s Cigar

A star-shaped mushroom, called the Devil’s Cigar (Chorioactis geaster) is one of the worlds rarest fungi. This fungi had been detected only in central Texas, two remote locations in Japan, and most recently in the mountains of Nara.

The Devil’s Cigar is a dark brown cigar-shaped capsule that transforms into a tan-coloured star when it splits open to release its spores. It is also one of only a few known…

Heart Stop Beating is the story of Billy Cohn & Bud Frazier, two visionary doctors from the Texas Heart Institute, who in March of 2011 successfully replaced a dying man's heart with a 'continuous flow' device they developed, proving that life was possible without a pulse or a heart beat.



Join the conversation and tweet #heartstopbeating to have your tweet featured on the Focus Forward website. Go to…

Government spooks want cyborg insects to snoop on their enemies. Biologists want to tap into the nervous systems of insects to understand how they fly. A probe that can be implanted into moths to control their flight could help satisfy both parties. One day, it could even help rehabilitate people who have had strokes.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been running a programme to develop machine-insect interfaces for years but…

From autism to basic self-awareness, “the Marco Polo of neuroscience” traces the strange links between neurology and behavior, probing the mystery of human uniqueness.

V.S. Ramachandran: The Tell-Tale Brain from ALOUDla on…

Dr Alice Roberts reveals how your body tells the story of human evolution. The way you look, think and behave is a product of a 6 million year struggle for survival.

We have uncovered the secrets of the atom and traveled to the moon. But how did humans come to be so successful? This series explores the anatomical changes that have…

Danny Hillis, co-chairman of the technology and design firm Applied Minds, characterizes the present day as a "post-Enlightenment" point in time in which people no longer understand the technology that surrounds them. Branding it "the Entanglement Era," Hillis compares humanity's current relationship to the technological environment to its relationship to the natural environment, such as a jungle.

SETTING THE CONTEXT: WHAT'S POSSIBLE, WHAT…

Hi Res

Long Now Research Fellow Stuart Candy brought to our attention this…

"You can't learn the kind of stuff you learn from people from machines"

Renowned computer scientist, pioneer of virtual reality, artist, musician and author, Jaron Lanier presents this talk at the Learning Without Frontiers Conference, London, January 25th 2012. (#lwf12)

In this clip from director Lily Frances Henderson's documentary, Lessons for the Living, a terminally ill woman talks about the dying people she's met with unexpected humor and grace - and is amused over her own, fast approaching, death.



Lessons for the Living reveals a unique subculture of Hospice volunteers as they reflect on their experiences and philosophies of life and death. Among them, a teenager escapes from the drama of…

Professors Iain Stewart and Professor Kathy Sykes take a timely look at global warming ahead of the Copenhagen summit, exploring the world's leading climate scientists' vision of the planet's future.

Scientists predict that if global temperatures continue to rise at their current rate, Earth will be one degree warmer within 10 years, two degrees warmer…

The mysterious and centuries-old Voynich Manuscript was written by an unknown author, illustrated with bizarre, puzzling pictures and composed in a language that even the best cryptographers can’t decode. Now, Naked Science follows new leads in the hunt for the author’s identity.

The Voynich manuscript, described as “the world’s most mysterious manuscript”, is a work which dates to the early 15th century, possibly from northern Italy. It is named after the book…

Adam Rutherford meets a new creature created by American scientists, the spider-goat. It is part goat, part spider, and its milk can be used to create artificial spider's web. It is part of a new field of research, synthetic biology, with a radical aim: to break down nature into spare parts so that we can rebuild it however we please. This technology is already being…

Following his talk at the Learning Without Frontiers conference, we caught up with the prophet of the singularity, Ray Kurzweil, to find how he feels about being right all the time, how humans and technology adapt to each other and how this is feeding into his upcoming book, How The Mind Works and How To…

ABUNDANCE from jason silva on Vimeo.

This video is inspired by the new book ABUNDANCE, written by X-Prize Founder and Singularity University co-founder, Peter Diamandis and writer Steven Kotler. In it, they explain how…

Connectome by Sebastian Seung Book Trailer from cosproductions on Vimeo.

The bold and thrilling quest to finally understand the brain—and along with it our mental afflictions, from depression to autism—by a rising star in…