Category: Technology

At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, robots sprinted, boxed, played football and tackled tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. The robot Tiangong Ultra even completed the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record. But if we really want to know whether humanoid robots are […]

Wachiwit/Shutterstock It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed – letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives. In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had […]

Wachiwit/Shutterstock It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed – letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives. In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had […]

Over the past 50,000 years, many of the world’s large mammals have gone extinct. Until recent decades, all we knew about them came from fossils. Now, analysis of ancient DNA is adding to the picture. Ancient DNA is damaged and degraded genetic material often obtained from fossils thousands of years old. It’s giving scientists insights […]

Stand in front of Turner’s Sun Rising Over Water (1825-30) and something odd tends to happen. The painting holds you, even though observers might struggle to say why. Maybe it is the colour, the balance, the composition, or the strange stillness the artwork seems to carry. Whatever it is, you feel it long before you […]

Stand in front of Turner’s Sun Rising Over Water (1825-30) and something odd tends to happen. The painting holds you, even though observers might struggle to say why. Maybe it is the colour, the balance, the composition, or the strange stillness the artwork seems to carry. Whatever it is, you feel it long before you […]

A safety driver may become less of an operator and more of a critical supervisor. Scharfsinn / Shutterstock Imagine getting into a London taxi. Someone is sitting in the driver’s seat, but the car is driving itself. If the autonomous system gets into difficulty, they must recognise what is happening, decide whether to intervene and, […]

Illustration of early mammals and dinosaurs. Generated by ChatGPT. About 200 million years ago, furry little egg-laying creatures evolved the ability to feed their offspring with a secretion from some special glands: milk. Their evolutionary journey continued and by about 160 million years ago, the first mammals with a real placenta had come into being. […]

The early bronze age (21st century BC) Ziggurat of Ur in southern Iraq. Abbas Al Yasiri/Shutterstock In recent years, archaeologists from around the world have marked the centenaries of some of Iraq’s most influential archaeological discoveries. The excavation of the ancient city of Ur, for example, transformed understanding of early urban life, long-distance trade, royal […]

When asked why Jean-Olivier Irisson, a scientist at Sorbonne Université in Paris, decided to dedicate his life to studying microscopic creatures in the sea, his answer was simple: “They are beautiful.” Beauty may not be the first thing that comes to mind when we think of plankton – organisms that drift in water and come […]