Professional medium Patricia Putt was last week subjected to a rigorous scientific test of her powers as the first stage of her bid to claim a $1m prize from the James Randi Educational Foundation

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People’s mindsets are neither fixed by evolution nor infinitely malleable by culture. Dan Jones looks for the similarities that underlie the diversity of human nature.

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Do fleeting changes of facial expression show whether someone is telling lies? Psychologist Paul Ekman believes he has the answer, he tells Jon Henley.

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FOR several years, President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has been trying to negotiate and reconcile with supposedly moderate elements of the Taliban… We know that there is not, and will never be, any “moderate Taliban.”

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For if we ever begin to suppress our search to understand nature, to quench our own intellectual excitement in a misguided effort to present a united front where it does not and should not exist, then we are truly lost.
  –Stephen Jay Gould

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Two months after the local atheist organization here put up a billboard saying “Don’t Believe in God? You Are Not Alone,” the group’s 13 board members met in Laura and Alex Kasman’s living room to grapple with the fallout.

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A referendum in Germany has failed to give children a choice between classes in secular ethics or religion.

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Atheists are targeting schools in a campaign designed to challenge Christian societies, collective worship and religious education.

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Voters in Berlin are preparing to go to the polls to decide whether children should have a choice between classes in secular ethics or religion.

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The latest NEWSWEEK Poll finds shifting American attitudes about religion and faith. Still, the U.S. remains a deeply religious land.

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Why freedom of speech must include the right to “defame” religions

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Chicks can add and subtract small numbers shortly after hatching and without receiving any formal mathematical training

Evolution is a scientific fact – except, perhaps, in Texas, where the school board is trying to cast doubt on it

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An atheist is trying to get himself “de-baptised” from the Church of England because he believes he was accepted into the religion without his consent.

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The giant meat-eating reptile, known as a pliosaur, had a bite four times as powerful as T. rex. The second creature, on the other hand, may be the least scary dinosaur ever discovered

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A new film attempts to demonstrate that the divide between religion and science is not as great as has been portrayed.

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New England surpasses West Coast as least religious region in America, study finds

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Christopher Potter’s history of the cosmos has been hailed as a popular science masterpiece. But as he tells Stuart Jeffries, it took a complete breakdown to spur him to write it.

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The way we think may be shaped by the culture in which we grow up, but the similarities between groups are far greater than the differences, says Ed Yong.

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Once we had evolved the necessary brain architecture, we could “do” religion, brain scans indicate.

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