Such public 'monsters' serve a similar role to gothic monsters, images that embody the cultural or psychological characteristics that we as a society find difficult to acknowledge. By excising them, through fantasies of execution or simply professional exclusion, we rid ourselves of the undesirable attributes they are perceived to carry.
A new species of ‘super-armoured’ worm, a bizarre, spike-covered creature which ate by filtering nutrients out of seawater with its feather-like front legs,
PhD student Lucie Daniel-Watanabe has teamed up with award winning gaming company Ninja Theory to see whether gaming might help improve people’s mental health.
Natalie Lawrence (Department of History and Philosophy of Science) discusses the history of monsters, and what they say about the people who invent them.
In the Permian period, for example (roughly 298 to 252 million years ago), we have evidence of animals such as Gorgonopsids - large, carnivorous, four-legged monsters with long, sabre-like fangs, strong rear legs, and a vaulted palate that allowed them to breathe when they grabbed their prey. The biggest was roughly the size of a large bear.
The early universe managed to produce some absolute monsters, even in relatively tiny galaxies.” According to standard models, black holes form from the collapsed remnants of dead stars and accrete matter up to a predicted limit, known as the Eddington limit, where the pressure of radiation on matter overcomes the gravitational pull of the ...
The Enawenê-nawê people of the Amazon rainforest make beautifully engineered fishing dams. Living alongside this indigenous community, Dr Chloe Nahum-Claudel observed how the act of trapping fish shapes their minds, bodies and relationships. The proximity of life and death brings human vulnerability sharply into focus.
Narratives built around dreams and nightmares are woven into the early cultures of the British Isles with blood-curdling descriptions of scary beasts – fire-breathing dragons, many-humped sea-monsters, composite creatures mutating before our eyes – whose forms decorate many of the precious manuscripts that survive to bring us gripping tales ...
