When bored, try the following game – I call it “Purr or Roar?”. Take any feline and guess whether it can purr or roar (it cannot do both because purring and roaring... Read more »
The AI ethicist Eleanor Drage believes that to thrive alongside artificial intelligence, humans need to recognise AI’s “humanity”. She means that while we often speak of AI as though it were some... Read more »
When Craig Venter, one of the mappers of the human genome, set out on a sailboat cruise to map DNA in seawater all across the globe, he found that a teaspoon of seawater... Read more »
A novel featuring a protagonist whose job is taken by AI has won the Climate fiction prize. Hum by Helen Phillips, the American writer’s third novel, is about a woman, May, who... Read more »
According to the evolutionary psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams, almost everyone gets sex wrong. Traditionalists tend to exaggerate the natural differences between men and women. Progressives tend to minimise them, and to assume that... Read more »
An award-winning poet living in Roundhay Park, Leeds, Jason Allen-Paisant spent his early childhood living with his grandmother in Coffee Grove, a hilly rural district of Jamaica which was cut off from... Read more »
Original Sin by Kathryn Paige Harden review – are criminals born or made? | Science and nature books
In 2021, the psychologist and writer Kathryn Paige Harden co-authored a paper outlining her research into the genetic patterns linked to a higher risk of developing substance abuse problems or engaging in... Read more »
The birth of ransomware was a stunt that got out of hand. In 1989, an evolutionary biologist called Joseph L Popp Jr was working part time for the World Health Organisation on... Read more »
‘There is no good way to say this.” This is the phrase used by police when visiting the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li – twice. On the first occasion, officers advise her and... Read more »