An interview with Howardena Pindell + Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and friends +The Humboldt Forum finally opens + Medieval Christian art in Georgia + Plus: Kazakh gold in Cambridge, Dürer’s wanderlust, rocks that look good enough to eat – and are New Towns old hat?
Monocle’s editorial director Tyler Brûlé and panellists Eemeli Isoaho and Chandra Kurt discuss the weekend’s biggest news stories. Plus: we check in with our friends and correspondents in London, Amsterdam and Tokyo.
In a step towards creating intelligent cyborg brains, Cortical Labs in Melbourne have trained lab-grown brain organoids to play a classic 1970s video game. The team explains how the brain cells live in a Matrix-like, simulated world, where all they know is Pong.
And there’s more AI news, as the team digs into DeepMind’s invention of a ‘search engine’ style supercomputer, one much smaller than its competitors. The team discusses sleep, and how manipulating the hypnagogic phase of sleep can lead to bursts of creativity. As the holiday season approaches, Omicron shows no signs of letting up, so the team brings you up to speed on what we know so far. And they bring two bird related stories, one about the superpowers of zebra finches and the other about the link between personality types and feather colours in turkeys. On the pod are Rowan Hooper, Penny Sarchet, Michael Le Page, Clare Wilson and Matt Sparkes. To read about these stories and much more, subscribe at newscientist.com/podcasts.
Georgina Godwin and the weekend’s biggest topics. Vincent McAviney reviews the newspapers, Andrew Mueller explains what we’ve learned this week and Monocle’s editor in chief Andrew Tuck is back with his weekend column.
We preview the long-delayed Hong Kong legislative elections and explore whether Boris Johnson’s mistakes are starting to take an electoral toll. Plus: Mark Rutte’s record-breaking Dutch coalition and an initiative bringing major art works to regional Italian galleries.
Our Conservation Fellow, Kendall Francis takes a closer look at indigo, a blue dye and pigment extracted from the leaves of plants, and how it is used and represented in paintings in our collection.
Kendall’s research reveals histories that are not explicitly portrayed in the paintings and highlights the important contributions from a wider range of people, including the enslaved people who cultivated the crops and extracted the indigo against their will. Supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Monocle’s Emma Nelson and panelists cover the weekend’s most interesting discussion topics, live from London.
Boomers Daily 