An international team of researchers has created a series of brain charts spanning our entire lifespan – from a 15 week old fetus to 100 year old adult – that show how our brains expand rapidly in early life and slowly shrink as we age.
The handwritten inventories had lain largely untouched for centuries. Sand used to dry the ink still lay between the pages. Written neatly inside were thousands of lists that might hold the key to an enduring puzzle in economics – does education fuel economic growth?
One man’s quest to create a library of everything, 500 years before Google Books was conceived, foreshadowed the challenges of ‘big data’ and our reliance on search algorithms to make sense of it all.
Research by an expert in peacebuilding shows how international ideas, practices and language of conflict resolution are transformed when they meet African “realities and politics on the ground”.
In 2003, researchers embarked on a project to piece together a picture of changes in British working life over the course of 600 years. The emerging results seem to demand a rewrite of the most important chapter in our social and economic history.
The early modern period (1500-1800) saw a surge in the keeping of records. A conference later this week (9-10 April 2014) at the British Academy will look at the origins of the archives that shape our understanding of history. We asked ten of the speakers to tackle some fundamental questions.
