Category: Technology

Your location isn’t just a pin on a map—it can expose some of the most intimate details about your life. The value of this information to advertisers and others has turned the location data business into a multi-billion dollar industry. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we’re covering a new EFF report on how ad libraries encourage apps to […]

Take a walk in London’s Trafalgar Square this summer and wilting under the heat will be all sorts of body sizes, some tall, some short: a real mix of sizes. Picking just two from the crowd to represent the whole human species would be a tall order. But that is exactly what we do when […]

Tsetse flies transmit some of Africa’s most persistent parasitic diseases. They have affected human health, livestock production and rural development for generations, across a region spanning millions of square kilometres in 37 sub-Saharan countries. Human African trypanosomiasis, or sleeping sickness, is caused by two species of single-celled parasites. Others infect wild and domestic animals, causing […]

Water is an amazing substance. The human body is made up of more than 50% water. Approximately 70% of the earth’s surface is covered by water. We drink it, bathe in it, cook with it, clean with it. It is also used to cool data centres, which is an increasing draw on what is a […]

A federal appeals court just made it harder for online services, big and small, to get lawsuits over user speech dismissed early. In California v. Meta, a Ninth Circuit three-judge panel held that the lower court’s denial of Section 230 immunity to Meta is not immediately appealable. The misguided ruling has the potential to have […]

Audio und werbung In the global race to build bigger and better quantum computers, researchers have taken a step forward. A new machine called Helios is a radically different system compared to other quantum computers. Quantum computers harness the power of quantum mechanics, the laws that govern how physics operates at atomic and sub-atomic scales. […]

amarw92/Shutterstock When people think about climate change and animals, they might picture melting sea ice, drought-stricken landscapes or species struggling in the wild. Far less attention is given to the animals living in our care. Yet as heatwaves become more frequent, intense and unpredictable, zoos may be facing one of the biggest animal welfare challenges […]

The Cosmoramic Room in P.T. Barnum’s American Museum, New York. Illustration from the museum’s official guidebook. If you’re thinking about moving house or just feeling nosy about your neighbours, your first port of call may be an online property marketing site: Rightmove and Zoopla in the UK, Zillow in the US or Magic Bricks in […]

The intersex symbol nito/Shutterstock I teach a university course called Hormones and Behaviour. What surprises students is that biological sex is not produced by a single switch. What surprises me is that many students have never been taught this before. It is basic biology, but it helps explain life. Sex emerges through a sequence of […]

A 2025 study by South Korean researchers caught the attention of the astronomy community when it suggested that the evidence behind dark energy could be wrong. Dark energy makes up about 70% of the universe but nobody knows what it is. This makes it a frequent target for scepticism. Scientists had long known that the […]