Category: Technology

The actor Gillian Anderson has just released a book of sexual fantasies. Titled Want, it catalogues a diverse range of fantasies submitted anonymously by women from around the world. It is not the first to do so. In 1973, American author Nancy Friday published My Secret Garden, a volume that provoked fierce debate at the […]

OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT, has launched a new artificial intelligence (AI) system called Strawberry. It is designed not just to provide quick responses to questions, like ChatGPT, but to think or “reason”. This raises several major concerns. If Strawberry really is capable of some form of reasoning, could this AI system cheat and […]

The sight of solar panels installed on rooftops and large energy farms has become commonplace in many regions around the world. Even in grey and rainy UK, solar power is becoming a major player in electricity generation. This surge in solar is fuelled by two key developments. First, scientists, engineers and those in industry are […]

On 24 September 2024, the NA62 collaboration announced the first experimental observation of the ultra-rare decay of the charged kaon into a charged pion and a neutrino-antineutrino pair. The decay had a significance of 5 sigma (the criterion used in particle physics to declare a discovery), measuring the decay rate to a 25% relative precision. […]

The war that began on October 7 has profoundly impacted Israeli society and the economy, highlighting the urgent need for national resilience and self-reliance. This conflict has underscored a critical lesson: Israel must strive for independence in key areas that ensure its stability—security and defense, energy, and agriculture. Realizing that international support may be limited […]

Twenty years ago this October, two physicists at the University of Manchester, Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov, published a groundbreaking paper on the “electric field effect in atomically thin carbon films”. Their work described the extraordinary electronic properties of graphene, a crystalline form of carbon equivalent to a single layer of graphite, just one atom […]

Many large mammals have lost genetic diversity, often thanks to the actions of people shrinking their populations. The implications can be severe because without genetic diversity, a population does not have a “genetic database” to fall back on to adapt to environmental change. The Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus) is no stranger to this reduction in […]

What do immigration, inheritance taxation and cannabis legalisation have in common? Not much, actually. Yet if we know somebody’s stance on one of these issues, we can make a good guess about their view on the others. Politics often seems to work in one dimension: parties and politicians are located on a spectrum stretching from […]

Generative AI Generative AI is a broad label used to describe any AI that can be used to create new content such as text, images, video, audio or code. It is a fast emerging and evolving technology that can present opportunities and bring benefits in the context of research and innovation by: facilitating creativity and […]

This morning, my six-year-old came into our bedroom and started reading a story from a book. She followed each word on the page, slowly forming full sentences. Sometimes she stumbled and asked for help with some “funny words,” but by the end of the book, she had told us a story about a bear in […]