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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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Chemistry
Why do the building blocks of life possess a mysterious symmetry?
12 minutes
video
Rituals and celebrations
A whale hunt is an act of prayer for an Inuit community north of the Arctic Circle
8 minutes
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Cosmology
Tiny, entangled universes that form or fizzle out – a theory of the quantum multiverse
11 minutes
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Music
The peculiar beauty of a song caught between composition and improvisation
3 minutes
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Rituals and celebrations
A beginner’s guide to a joyful Persian tradition of spring renewal and rebirth
3 minutes
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Astronomy
The history of astronomy is a history of conjuring intelligent life where it isn’t
34 minutes
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Politics and government
How it looked to Afghan women to see the Taliban return to power
33 minutes
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Love and friendship
Love looks a bit different for a chain-smoking couple in a small apartment
11 minutes
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Metaphysics
Simple entities in universal harmony – Leibniz’s evocative perspective on reality
4 minutes