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In this animated self-portrait, the UK artist Emma Allen uses her face as a canvas for a remarkable, millennia-spanning stop-motion. With her features always visible but transformed by the images painted across them, Allen takes us through evolution, from primordial creatures, through large mammals, to humans, before offering a vision of what’s to come – a future in which we transcend the limits of (or perhaps lose touch with) biology. For more from Allen, watch her short video Adam on the experience and neuroscience of depression.
Video by Emma Allen
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Biology
The idea that life on Earth originated elsewhere is not as far out as it seems
6 minutes
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Sports and games
The brutality and beauty of the West African martial art of ‘dambe’
15 minutes
video
Biology
Flicker through the eclectic beauty and biological diversity of 2,400 leaves
3 minutes
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Animals and humans
What happened when one woman raised an abandoned squirrel as her own
8 minutes
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Art
The female Abstract Expressionists of New York shook the world of art
15 minutes
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Metaphysics
Bertrand Russell wanted to kill off causation. Can contemporary philosophy rescue it?
8 minutes
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The future
What’s the healthiest way to handle a creeping feeling that the world is ending?
15 minutes
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Archaeology
From Roman pots to glass eyes, the shore of the river Thames teems with surprises
8 minutes
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Psychiatry and psychotherapy
Pondering the peculiar one-sided intimacy of the client-therapist relationship
3 minutes