The law around wills should be updated and brought into the “modern world”, the Law Commission for England and Wales has said. The current rules were “unclear” and could be putting people off from making a will, it added. It is considering whether texts, emails and other electronic communications should be recognised as a valid will in … Read more
You hear the exhibition before you see it – the booming voice of Dr Martin Luther King resonating through the Tate Modern galleries. King’s rousing words in Washington in 1963 inspired the black communities of America to protest, march and sing for their rights Now for the first time, the show at the Tate Modern shows how they also … Read more
We have some auction house title shuffling happening on this muggy summer Tuesday. Today, Christie’s announced in a release that the brass have named two new co-chairmen of its impressionist and modern art department: Giovanna Bertazzoni and Adrien Meyer, veterans of the house who have logged time in both New York and London. Bertazzoni, who has … Read more
Dahner’s training clears away the complexity of jujitsu by continually reorganizing and refining only the most efficient moves. Illustration by Jesse Draxler / Photograph by Jeff Chu On a Saturday afternoon in February, John Danaher stood in the middle of Columbia’s Andrew F. Barth Wrestling Room, teaching a seminar on his front-headlock system. Fifty … Read more
No matter how old you are, you might have grown up in a home with a wing chair. This classic chair dates back a lot farther than any of us, according to Bronia Suszczenia, co-founder of the Yorkshire, England-based interior design firm Art from the Start. “The first wing chair appeared in the late 1600s, … Read more
Mahathir Mohamad, the father of modern Malaysia, is backing the man he sacked as his deputy and saw imprisoned on charges of sodomy to be prime minister, in an attempt to unseat the scandal-ridden incumbent. In a remarkable political U-turn ahead of a general election next year, Mahathir now says that his former protege Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s most … Read more
Their structures are still standing more than 1,500 years after the last centurion snuffed it: now the Romans’ secret of durable marine concrete has finally been cracked. The Roman recipe – a mix of volcanic ash, lime (calcium oxide), seawater and lumps of volcanic rock – held together piers, breakwaters and harbours. Moreover, in contrast … Read more
For almost a century, Neandertals were considered the ancestors of modern humans. But in a new plot twist in the unfolding mystery of how Neandertals were related to modern humans, it now seems that members of our lineage were among the ancestors of Neandertals. Researchers sequenced ancient DNA from the mitochondria—tiny energy factories inside cells—from … Read more
Newspaper columns usually talk politics or policy, but not this one. Today I want to discuss an emotion: contempt. “The action of scorning or despising” is the dictionary definition. “The condition of being held worthless.” Contempt is the thread that runs through much of the worst barbarism in today’s Britain. When Grenfell Tower burned down, … Read more
Creativity is one of the great challenges for machine intelligence. There is no shortage of evidence showing how machines can match and even outperform humans in vast areas of endeavor, such as face and object recognition, doodling, image synthesis, language translation, a vast variety of games such as chess and Go, and so on. But when … Read more