Science | The Guardian

Psychologists say that singing, dancing and song preferences play a key role in the viability of romantic relationshipsWhat's the one thing your readers should do to help them use music to find and catch the partner of their dreams?" asks Patrick Savage, a senior research fellow in psychology at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Go to karaoke and sing a duet. Go and sing A Whole New World with Brad Kane and Lea Salonga. That's the number one recommendation by science. Well, just by me. I don't have data on this, but from my personal experience, that's the best."Given that he is a musicologist, it is perhaps unsurprising that music is a key part of Savage's relationship with his wife. But his experience with using music as a romantic tool is not unique. Love songs are found across cultures and despite not being a neat category they have historically been most popular - 67% of the top 40 tracks in America between 1960 and 2010 contained love themes. Continue reading...

The global market for menopause products is worth 16.93bn, the majority of that spent on dietary supplements - but is there any evidence they do anything?I had just turned 40 when it started. Suddenly, the ads on my social-media feeds changed. The algorithms decided I was now officially middle-aged and crumbling - by their metrics - and it was time for me to start buying hormone-supporting supplement blends, collagen powder, bum-sculpting leggings and anti- wrinkle creams.In truth, the hormone supplements piqued my interest. I was sleeping badly, more anxious than ever, and low on energy after IVF and two pregnancies. Continue reading...

Writers, therapists and academics give advice on how to make, and strengthen, meaningful bonds with mates and friendsEmma Reed Turrell, psychotherapist, author and host of the podcast Friendship TherapyYou can keep balance in friendship by showing your working out, rather than making assumptions and mind-reading. This might sound like: I'd like to invite you to a party but I'm wondering if it might not be your thing and I want you to know that you can absolutely say no, or just come for an hour." That way you get to express your wish and your friend gets to be honest in their choices, rather than people-please you or dodge the question. Look for the both/and' of a balanced friendship, rather than an either/or' situation, and negotiate how to both get what you need from your communication styles or time together, rather than create a one-way street in which one of you is always keeping the other happy. Not everyone wants a two-way street in friendship and you might find you get push-back if you seek to rebalance an existing relationship but a true friend will welcome your honesty and one that doesn't might not have been a friend at all. Continue reading...

Colour-coded output from smartwatch device would be easy for public to readThey remain some of the most complex diagnostic procedures carried out by doctors. To take an electrocardiogram, or ECG, they first have to attach 10 or more electrodes to a patient's chest, arms and legs to measure the heart's electrical activity. Then, once these signals have been recorded, a cardiologist has to interpret them to determine if a person has a particular heart ailment.It is a life-saving technology - but a complicated, expensive one. However, UK scientists now believe they could soon overcome these limitations by developing devices which will allow patients to take their own detailed ECGs at home and be provided with easily interpreted diagnoses about the state of their hearts. Continue reading...

Technology secretary Peter Kyle has the task of making Britain a leading player in the AI revolution, but says economic growth will not come at the cost of online safetyWith the NHS still struggling, a prisons crisis still teetering and Britain's borrowing costs soaring, there are few easy jobs going in Keir Starmer's cabinet at present.But even in such difficult times, the task of convincing Silicon Valley's finest to help make Britain a leader in the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution - all while one leading tech boss uses the Labour government as a regular punching bag and others ostentatiously move closer to Donald Trump - is among the most challenging. Continue reading...

The makers of a device that delivers small electrical impulses to the brain are hailing the technology as a groundbreaking mental health treatment, but others are scepticalFlow helps the vast majority of people to improve their depression," reads the latest marketing email from Flow Neuroscience, a Swedish-based company that has been making headlines over the past year with what it describes as an innovative brain-stimulation treatment" that patients can use in their own homes.Flow's users receive a headset that delivers small electrical pulses to an area in the front of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is linked to decision making, motivation, planning and working memory, functions that become impaired in depression. Continue reading...

Ever since the first fuzzy images of its surface were captured in 1964, Mars has sparked imaginations worldwide. As Nasa publishes its photographic archives of the red planet, will Elon Musk's wild predictions of a crewed flight in four years come true?Last September, Elon Musk used the social media platform he had bought for 35bn to remind the world that he had bigger things on his mind than the forthcoming US presidential election. The first Starships to Mars will launch in two years when the next Earth-Mars transfer window opens," he posted on X. These will be uncrewed to test the reliability of landing intact on Mars. If those landings go well, then the first crewed flights to Mars will be in four years."Then came a grand restatement of even more impressive intentions. [The] flight rate will grow exponentially from there," he wrote, with the goal of building a self-sustaining city in about 20 years." For those who still doubt whether this plan ought to be quite the priority he evidently thinks, he finished with a familiar insistence: Being multiplanetary will vastly increase the probable lifespan of consciousness, as we will no longer have all our eggs, literally and metabolically, on one planet."Although Mars's volcanoes are no longer active, some of its dune fields are. Wind blowing from the north drives dunes of dark basaltic sand across the floor of a small crater Continue reading...

Here are some of the more curious health hacks circulating on the social media platform - and what the evidence saysThe deluge of improbable health hacks on TikTok can only mean it's the start of a new year. Here we look at some of the more curious tips and the evidence, where there is any, behind them. Continue reading...

John Calhoun designed an apartment complex for mice to examine the effects of overcrowding. It was hailed as a groundbreaking study of social breakdown, but is largely forgotten. So what happened? By Lee Alan Dugatkin Continue reading...

New Glenn launch is delayed until at least 12 January due to conditions in the Atlantic, where booster is slated to landJeff Bezos's Blue Origin announced it would launch its first orbital rocket no earlier than Friday", a pivotal moment in the commercial space race currently dominated by Elon Musk's SpaceX. Then the Amazon founder's rocket company delayed the launch until at least Sunday 12 January due to rough seas.Named New Glenn, the rocket is slated to lift off from the Cape Canaveral space force station in Florida. A statement from the company read: We're shifting our NG-1 launch date to no earlier than January 12 due to a high sea state in the Atlantic, where we hope to land our booster." Continue reading...

If we are to take seriously the risk facing humanity, regulators need the power to recall' deployed models, as well as assess leading, not lagging, indicators of risk, writes Prof John McDermidRe Geoffrey Hinton's concerns about the perils of artificial intelligence (Godfather of AI' shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December), Ibelieve these concerns can best be mitigated through collaborative research on AI safety, with a role for regulators at the table.Currently, frontier AI is tested post-development using red teams" who try their best to elicit anegative outcome. This approach will never be enough; AI needs to be designed for safety and evaluation - something that can be done by drawing on expertise and experience in well-established safety-related industries. Continue reading...

A powerfully inspiring study of optimism that avoids farcical good cheerHumans are unrealistically optimistic about the world and the future; we systematically underestimate our chances of experiencing unpleasant diseases, going through a divorce, or losing a loved one. About the only people who don't see the world through the lens of this optimism bias" are the clinically depressed. Depressive realism - the name given to the relative immunity of the melancholic to this illusion - suggests that we see reality clearly only at the cost of our mental health. This presents psychologists with an interesting dilemma. We are always caught between the delusion of wearing rose-tinted spectacles, and the debilitating affect of taking them off. Should we prioritise accuracy or happiness?Sumit Paul-Choudhury comes down firmly on the side of optimism in this lively exploration of glass-half-full thinking and its relationship with social progress. What initially feels like it might be a self-help book turns into an eye-opening history of the idea of optimism, before exploring its potential to help us address social and ecological challenges. The tension in our relationship to optimism, between its motivating and its delusional possibilities, is present throughout. Continue reading...

The Oxford English Dictionary announced its word of the year at the end of 2024: brain rot. The term relates to the supposedly negative effects of consuming social media content, but it struck a chord more widely with many of us who feel we just don't have the mental capacity we once did. Gloria Mark, a professor of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has been studying our waning attention spans for 20 years. She tells Madeleine Finlay why she believes our powers of concentration are not beyond rescue, and reveals her top tips for finding focusIs modern life ruining our powers of concentration?Support the Guardian: theguardian.com/sciencepod Continue reading...

Low-quality slop' generated by AI is crowding out genuine humans across the internet, but instead of regulating it, platforms such as Facebook are positively encouraging it. Where does this end?How do you do, fellow humans? My name is Arwa and I am a genuine member of the species homo sapiens. We're talking a 100% flesh-and-blood person operating in meatspace over here; I am absolutely not an AI-powered bot. I know, I know. That's exactly what a bot would say, isn't it? I guess you're just going to have to trust me on this.I'm taking great pains to point this out, by the way, because content created by real life human beings is becoming something of a novelty these days. The internet is rapidly being overtaken by AI slop. (It's not clear who coined the phrase but slop" is the advanced iteration of internet spam: low-quality text, videos and images generated by AI.) A recent analysis estimated that more than half of longer English-language posts on LinkedIn are AI-generated. Meanwhile, many news sites have covertly been experimenting with AI-generated content - bylined, in some cases, by AI-generated authors. Continue reading...

Social media is rife with alarming advice and warnings - experts share red flags to avoidWellness advice abounds on social media: warnings about toxic foods", assertions that parasites are driving your sugar cravings, or claims about solving the root cause" of bodily complaints with unproven remedies.Wellness woo" appears in many domains, like nutrition, dermatology, parenting and psychology, says Dr Jonathan Stea, clinical psychologist and author of a new book about mental health misinformation, Mind the Science. Common themes include distrust in mainstream medicine, the flawed belief that natural" is always best, and an overreliance on anecdotal evidence - for instance, I believe smearing beef tallow on my face cured my acne, so it will also cure yours!" Continue reading...

I took all the images with a precisely tuned telescope then joined them up. Use the wrong type of telescope and you'll blind yourself and burn your house down'I bought a telescope on a whim in 2017, thinking back fondly to when my dad used to show me Jupiter and Saturn through his. I thought: Why not revisit some of those memories, now that I can afford to spend a few hundred bucks on essentially a toy?" It was a 10in Dobsonian telescope that I set up in my back yard and pointed towards the brightest things I could see in the sky from the southern horizon - which by sheer luck happened to be Jupiter and Saturn. I was immediately transported back to being a kid, staring at these incredible things. Then I did what any millennial would do: I took out my iPhone and tried to take a photo of what I was seeing through the telescope. It didn't turn out very good but it made me want to share what I was seeing with the world.I started to teach myself about astrophotography and what equipment I'd need. My photos got better and better. Then, during the pandemic, I was laid off from a tech startup and couldn't find a new job. I thought: What if I try selling the pictures I'm taking through the telescope?" Before I knew it, I had people helping me turn my hobby into a business, and I was learning the skills I'd need to get into more elaborate deep space photography, such as capturing the sun. Continue reading...

Research finds hypertrophic cardiomyopathy testing that overlooks sex differences and body size is inadequateDoctors are failing to diagnose women with a potentially deadly heart condition because tests rely on outdated studies from the 1970s and do not account for natural differences in sex and body size.Hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM) is a genetic condition where the muscular wall of the heart becomes thickened, making it harder for the heart to pump blood around the body. It affects one in 500 people, and can cause cardiac arrest and sudden death. Continue reading...

How a team of researchers is reducing skin temperature under clothes and energy bills with some forward fashion thinking

Experts say marsupial mole DNA shows they are closely linked to bandicoots and bilbies and their ancestors probably evolved in rainforests

These tiny organisms matter. They have been used to map dark matter and improve transport networks, and they're living all around usA few years ago, I started looking at the underside of logs and it changed my life. I found a secret carnival of the most bodacious and interesting organisms I had ever seen. Bubbles of candy-pink gloss on stilts (Comatricha nigra), bunches of rainbow iridescence on toffee strings (Badhamia utricularis), bouffants of raspberry parfait (Arcyria denudata) - and those are just a few that have appeared on bits of wood in our urban garden.Slime moulds, or myxomycetes, spend part of their life cycle as what are known as fruiting bodies - which look a bit like tiny mushrooms, hence why they were once classified as fungi (they're actually in the kingdom Protista). Often you will find them, at this stage, in a colony - or, well, I'd suggest galaxy, sweetshop or funfair would be more accurate for a collective noun.Lucy Jones is the author of Matrescence, Losing Eden and The Nature Seed Continue reading...

Largest study into diet and disease suggests extra 300mg of calcium a day is associated with a 17% lower riskHaving a large glass of milk every day may cut the risk of bowel cancer by nearly a fifth, according to the largest study conducted into diet and the disease.Each daily 300mg of calcium, about the amount found in half a pint of milk, was associated with a 17% lower risk of bowel cancer, researchers said, with non-dairy sources of calcium such as fortified soy milk having a similar protective effect. Continue reading...

Medical advances make pills to treat Alzheimer's disease viable, though challenges remain in sharing gains globallyPills that prevent Alzheimer's disease or blunt its effects are on the horizon, as the fight against dementia enters a new era", experts have said.Scientific advances were on the cusp of producing medicines that could be used even in the most remote and under-resourced parts of the world, thereby democratising" care, said Jeff Cummings, professor of brain science and health at the University of Nevada. Continue reading...

Pre-lunch brewers enjoy lower risk of death, analysis finds, but benefit vanishes among all-day drinkersPeople who get their coffee hit in the morning reap benefits that are not seen in those who have shots later in the day, according to the first major study into the health benefits of the drink at different times.Analysis of the coffee consumption of more than 40,000 adults found that morning coffee drinkers were 16% less likely to die of any cause and 31% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease during a 10-year follow-up period than those who went without. Continue reading...

Spot planets, galaxies and constellations in the Australian night sky - and look out for more auroras in 2025 as the sun reaches solar maximumIt's summer in Australia and that means many of us head out of the city and off to a remote camping site, where the night sky shines bright with stars. Australian First Nations astronomers have built knowledge around the stars for about 65,000 years. But what should the beginner look for? This five-step guide will have you navigating the sky in no time - no telescope or star chart needed. Continue reading...

Linguistics professor says London dialect is most likely to be spoken in Essex, but aspects have traversed the globeThe cockney dialect, as associated with the late EastEnders icon Dame Barbara Windsor, may not be as prevalent in today's London, but it remains possibly the most influential English dialect across the world, according to academic research.No longer the preserve of those born within earshot of the Bow Bells in the City of London, today cockney is more likely to be spoken in Essex. Continue reading...

Approach could be used to limit outbreaks of mosquito-borne diseases, such as dengue fever, which results in 390m cases annually worldwide

Famous for her work with Oprah Winfrey, Martha Beck is a bestselling author and self-help superstar. But for 60 years she was anxious and terrified - until she found a simple, uplifting answerAll her life, Martha Beck had been anxious, but a few years ago she began to get really curious about anxiety. And curiosity, she wants us all to know, may just be the path out of paralysing, life-spoiling terror. During the pandemic, Beck - a bestselling author and life coach - started looking deeper into anxiety in order to help her clients. It was something she thought she knew about, having experienced it throughout her life, and over the years she had followed the standard advice: she had practised meditation for 30 years, and been on medication, but now Beck was starting to wonder if inner peace was as far as it went.Instead of trying to control her anxiety, Beck started to befriend it: I started treating myself like a frightened animal and doing for myself what we all instinctively know will calm a frightened animal." Imagine, she says, you found a freezing, dirty puppy on your doorstep, and you decided you wanted to help it. What would you do? Get down on its level, speak to it kindly and softly. Don't try to explain to it what it needs to do next - it's an animal. Allow it to be afraid while regarding it with compassion." When she tried this on herself, Beck says she could dramatically feel this shift in my psychology, my body and my brain". And then, she says with a laugh, I got into creativity and things got really weird." Continue reading...

With half of all languages predicted to die out in decades, activists are turning to online tools to preserve themEvery year, the world loses some of its 7,000 languages. Parents stop speaking them to their children, words are forgotten and communities lose the ability to read their own scripts. The rate of loss is quickening, from one every three months a decade ago to one every 40 days in 2019 - meaning nine languages die a year.The UN's culture agency, Unesco, says predictions that half the world's languages will have died out by the end of the century are optimistic. Continue reading...

Scientists are increasingly finding that behaviours once seen as depraved often have a direct physical cause. To find out more, Ian Sample hears from Guy Leschziner, a consultant neurologist and sleep physician at Guy's and St Thomas' hospital in London. His new book, Seven Deadly Sins: The Biology of Being Human, looks at the neurological basis of behaviours often dismissed as evidence of bad character or lack of willpower Continue reading...

Patient was over age 65 and reported to have underlying medical conditions, state health department saysA patient in Louisiana has become the first human in the US to die of bird flu.The Louisiana department of health reported on Monday afternoon that a patient who had been hospitalized in the state with the first human case of avian influenza has now died. Continue reading...

Widespread use of metal caused estimated 2- to 3-point drop in IQ for nearly 180 years of Pax RomanaApart from sanitation, medicines, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what did the Romans ever do for us? asks an exasperated Reg in Monty Python's Life of Brian.One answer, according to a new study, is widespread cognitive decline across Europe, courtesy of the vast quantities of lead pollution churned out by the booming metals industry that shaped the empire. Continue reading...

The solutions to today's puzzlesEarlier today I set you three puzzles that were interview questions at Paypal, the online payments company ran by a group of billionaire tech bros - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and David Sacks - now better known for their right wing politics. Here they are again with solutions.1. Divide and conquer Continue reading...

Findings suggest Charon collided with dwarf planet and then pair briefly rotated together before separatingIt sounds like one of Kipling's Just So Stories but it is rooted in science: experts say they have a new theory for how Pluto got its largest moon.Pluto - once considered the ninth planet of our solar system, but now classified as a dwarf planet" - has five known moons, of which Charon is the largest with a diameter of about 754 miles, just over half that of Pluto itself. Continue reading...

Sam Altman says tools that carry out jobs autonomously, known as AI agents, could transform business outputVirtual employees could join workforces this year and transform how companies work, according to the chief executive of OpenAI.The first artificial intelligence agents may start working for organisations this year, wrote Sam Altman, as AI firms push for uses that generate returns on substantial investment in the technology. Continue reading...

Do you find yourself replaying an important conversation in your head and thinking - why did I say that?'Journalist and Pulitzer prize-winning author Charles Duhigg found himself at a similar impasse when he had to manage a project and struggled to connect with members of his team. So he learned everything he could about communication.Duhigg tells Reged Ahmad about the simple things anyone can do to improve their communication skills and why being a good listener is key

Mind-manglers from the Musk mafiaUPDATE: Read the solutions hereThe book The Founders by Jimmy Soni tells the story of the Paypal Mafia - the tech bros who founded and ran the online payments company.The most famous of this troupe - Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks - are now as well known for their Trumpist politics as their entrepreneurial ingenuity. Back in the day, however, what really got their blood pumping was mathematical puzzles. Continue reading...

Surging HMPV cases in northern China have prompted some online alarm but experts say the risk of another Covid-like pandemic is lowHuman metapneumovirus (HMPV) is a respiratory disease that causes flu or cold-like symptoms, but can increase risks or lead to more serious complications like bronchitis or pneumonia, particularly among the elderly, young children, and immunocompromised people.The disease is in the same family as respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), and has been around since at least 2001 when it was first identified in the Netherlands. Its outbreaks are concentrated during colder seasons. Continue reading...

The evening star reaches its maximum angular distance east from the sun, meaning it will linger long after sunsetOften referred to as the evening star, Venus is absolutely radiant in the gathering twilight this week. It reaches a configuration known as the greatest eastern elongation on 10 January, when it will be at its maximum angular distance east from the sun, about 47 degrees. This means that it lingers in the sky long after sunset, making it an easy target for stargazers.The chart shows the views looking south-west from London at 18.00GMT on 10 January. Venus will be exceptionally bright and totally unmistakable. It will also be easily visible from the southern hemisphere. Continue reading...

As people have shaped the natural world, so wildlife - from mahoganies to magpies - has had to evolve to surviveFrom the highest mountains to the depths of the ocean, humanity's influence has touched every part of planet Earth. Many plants and animals are evolving in response, adapting to a human-dominated world. One notable example came during the Industrial Revolution, when the peppered moth turned from black and white to entirely black after soot darkened its habitat. The black moths were camouflaged against the soot-covered trees, surviving to pass on their genes to the next generation.As human influence has expanded, so too have the strange adaptations forced on the natural world. We asked researchers around the world for similar changes they have noticed in the 21st century. Continue reading...

By being true to ourselves we can find greater enjoyment and a deeper connectionI have never been afraid of sex. Of course that has hurt me quite badly over all the years I've been having it, but I remain fairly fearless. I am not afraid to talk about it, nor am I afraid to have it. Lots of different kinds of it, with lots of different people.Sometimes I wonder if it's because there's something in there, some sort of pathology that has numbed me to the terrifying realities of (some) of the sex I've had: a childhood trauma or me rebelling against the last vestiges of my now renounced Catholicism. Continue reading...

A dig near Bicester has uncovered spectacular tracks in what was once a Jurassic lagoonThere are many reasons to be excited about the dinosaur footprints whose discovery was announced last week. They will bring new understandings to the Jurassic world of more than 150m years ago. Their recording united quarry workers and more than a hundred scientists, students and other volunteers in a frenzied week of fieldwork. But there was something else in the images of long, winding trails across a stony plain in the Oxfordshire countryside. It looked to me as if great beasts had lumbered by, not in the distant past but just a few days before. I will never be able to rid my mind of the thought that they are alive now, out there somewhere. Who knew the Cotswolds were home to dinosaurs?Smiths Bletchington's limestone quarries have been turning up footprints for decades. The best came in 1997, at what is now a site of special scientific interest, in Ardley quarry: more than 40 sets, with trackways up to 180 metres long. The Ardley finds, made before digital recording, are hard to study today. But when the Oxford University Museum of Natural History heard of a nearby discovery late in 2023, it had high hopes. New technologies - including photogrammetry and drone photography - meant that anything of significance could be captured in detail, shared with scientists around the world and saved for posterity, whatever the fate of the actual prints. Palaeontologists from the museum and the universities of Birmingham and Oxford soon confirmed that Dewars Farm Quarry, a couple of miles from Ardley, was an important site. They mounted a dig last summer. Continue reading...

Can the compound found in plants slow the ageing process and help tackle Alzheimer's? Food writer Giulia Crouch finds out . . .There's a new buzzword in town when it comes to health: polyphenols. While scientists have been investigating the plant compounds for years, the term has now caught the public imagination - and for good reason.A growing body of evidence shows that eating a diet high in these clever natural chemicals offers numerous health benefits, improving everything from heart and metabolic health to lowering the risk of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's. Continue reading...

Second rock from sun visible with naked eye in clear skies in areas with low light pollutionStargazers have been treated to seeing the planet Venus as it made an appearance next to the moon.The second rock from the sun could be seen on Friday night with the naked eye in areas with clear skies and low light pollution. Some were able to take incredible photographs of the morning star, so named because it is often mistaken for a bright star. Continue reading...

Researchers are looking at how to make video meetings feel less tiring, reduce anxiety and tackle Zoom dysmorphia'Whether it's a social catch-up with colleagues, or assembling to set new year objectives, many of us will be reconnecting via Zoom, Teams or Google Meet come Monday morning. Yet while such platforms have revolutionised flexible and remote working in recent years, scientists are increasingly waking up to the negative toll they can take on people's energy levels and self-esteem. So how can we forge a healthier relationship with videoconferencing in 2025?Relatively early during the pandemic, psychologists coined the phrase Zoom fatigue" to describe the physical and psychological exhaustion that can come from spending extended periods on videoconferencing platforms such as Zoom. It was found that people who have more and longer meetings using the technology, or have more negative attitudes towards them, tend to feel more exhausted by them. Continue reading...

Some people long for a storybook house, but I found sanctuary in a home in the woods, where saucepans were said to move by themselves

Commercial animal cloning is banned in the UK, so Gemini Genetics in Shropshire freezes cells bound for the USAt first glance, Gem is simply a very happy spaniel. With a plush toy in her mouth, she is the embodiment of joy. But her straightforward demeanour belies the complexities of her origins. Because Gem is not your typical dog: she is a clone.Ever since Dolly the sheep - the first mammal to be cloned using an adult cell - was revealed to the world in 1996, debate has raged over the potential for the technology and its ethical implications. Continue reading...

Chris Godfrey spent a decade trying to quit smoking, then he tried hypnotherapy and it changed his life. They're probably not thinking about you': Oliver Burkeman on how to liberate yourself and stop people-pleasing. And one night I'm a murderer, the next my husband's having an affair'. Why do we have the dreams that we do? Continue reading...

Rachel Withers says people need to get real about their non-mastery of all they survey, and George Burt discusses slavery, political oppression and AIProf Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of artificial intelligence", states that he struggles to find examples of more intelligent thing[s] being controlled by ... less intelligent thing[s]"; the mother-baby relationship is the only example he can cite (Godfather of AI' shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years, 27 December). Thisseems a strange outbreak of aspect blindness, especially given Hinton's specialism.Many theorists (Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour and others) offer persuasive arguments showing how (to borrow from Freud) man is not master in his own house": human behaviour is continually, at times conspicuously, regulated by non-human drivers, many of them seemingly pretty dumb. Coronaviruses offer a topical example. The present barely regulated rise of AI is unarguably scary, but dealing with it effectively will involve humans getting real about their non-mastery of all they survey and interrogating the ways that stuff (both smart and dumb) controls us, as well as vice-versa. The same goes for climate breakdown and ecological crisis.

Members of the public are helping to sustain digs across the country, even as volunteering declinesThey were moving forward in a line across the 10 sq metre trench, volunteer excavators elbow to elbow with academics, and Joe Fitzpatrick was at the far edge.He was digging around the hearth of a building, about 60cm (2ft) below surface level, when he hit the earth twice with his mattock and out it popped - a rare bronze spear butt, a metal fitting placed over the end of a wooden shaft to counterbalance the spear head. Covered in Pictish inscriptions, it had remained buried for more than one and a half millennia, and was one of the most groundbreaking archaeological discoveries of 2024 in Scotland. Continue reading...

Study finds higher levels of certain proteins in people who reported social isolation or lonelinessLoneliness has long been associated with ill health but researchers say they have fresh insights into the link between the two.While poor health can result in people becoming isolated and lonely, studies have also suggested loneliness can itself lead to poorer health. Continue reading...