Life The banality of evil? People aren't so easily led The problem of why ordinary people do appalling things has vexed scholars for centuries, but outmoded ideas won't help counter modern radicalisation Opinion
Space No easy parking spot for first-ever comet landing Eenie, meenie, miney, mo… (Image: ESA/Rosetta/MPS for OSIRIS Team) Landing on a comet will be even harder than we thought. The strange shape of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko does not present as many safe landing sites for the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft as mission planners had hoped. "Its shape is exciting scientifically but it a lot … 51¶¯Âþ
Just obeying orders? Rethinking obedience and atrocity Ordinary people can commit atrocities simply by following orders, iconic 1960s experiments concluded – but this notion of the "banality of evil" is wrong Opinion
Life Ethical trap: robot paralysed by choice of who to save Can a robot learn right from wrong? Attempts to imbue robots, self-driving cars and military machines with a sense of ethics reveal just how hard this is 51¶¯Âþ
Life Portraits of the adorable creatures of the night READY to explore the dark side of life? Nocturnal animals have been around for hundreds of millions of years, and today they make up around half of all mammal species, but because most of us are active during the day we rarely encounter these night dwellers. Artist and photographer Traer Scott has bridged that gap, … Regulars
Space Quasicrystal quest: The unreal rock that nature made It was a mineral so remarkable it shouldn't have existed. What on earth had made it? (Image: Courtesy of Paul Steinhardt) How did a mystery mineral acquire remarkable properties not mimicked in the lab until 30 years ago? Finding out took one cosmologist to the ends of the Earth BY THE time Paul Steinhardt was … Features
Socrates among the psychopaths Aware: the common-sense view of the world is not the only one (Image: John Firth/BIPS/Getty Images) People with serious mental disorders may understand morality after all, reveals a book by an ethics professor who pioneered research in a high-security hospital AS A professor of ethics at King's College, London, Jonathan Glover is accustomed to using … CultureLab
Feedback: Bigger and bigger beasts Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more Bigger and bigger beasts COPE'S rule, named for 19th-century American palaeontologist Edward Drinker Cope, came from his observation that animals in many groups tended to grow larger over time. Thus horses evolved from tiny Eohippus into deer-sized animals before reaching … Regulars