Our modern world is getting harder to read, finds Liz Else

There are many ways to choose the books that will shape a year: by the “big” names on whose reputations much still stands, by emerging trends, by beguiling titles or just by gut feeling. This year, Liz Else and Simon Ings based their choices on themes, ranging from human evolution to genetics

Else features a photograph taken from the Grizedale Forest in the UK's Lake District. As a starting point, the artists captured the Forest through a combination of Lidar scanning, 360-degree drone photography and bespoke software.

From the ground, the green and white lights hovering above the city of Nottingham probably looked like a distant storm. But from a Cessna 172 aircraft, the green shape of a man on horseback could clearly be seen galloping across the darkened troposphere. In May 2015, after three years of graft, artist Dave Lynch, scientist Mike Nix and maker Aaron Nielsen pulled off a world first by projecting moving images of the horseman directly onto clouds from an aircraft. Here, Else and Austen see the historic horse ride to a night-sky first

Measuring human worth by possessions or productivity looks barbaric in Jeremy Rifkin's future world

Artist Neil Harbisson has a type of colour blindness that means he can only see shades of gray. Now he wears a device that lets him listen to the the many hues of the world.

The rising affluence of the 1 per cent may not only mean there is less for everyone else. Liz Else investigates what inequality means for your health

How a conservative philosopher plans to use an ancient Greek notion to rescue environmentalism from radical greens and the left

Hakeem Olyseyi is one of only a handful of black astrophysicists, but he has a plan to change that

The quest for immortality is wrong says Mary Midgley

Rather than updating the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual used to classify mental illness, we need a new system that takes brain physiology into account, says the psychiatrist

From establishing sociobiology to his very public rejection of kinship in the evolution of social behaviour, E.O. Wilson loves being in the thick of it

Daniel Kahneman, one of the world's most influential psychologists, talks about the cognitive errors we make every day