The English language is full of value judgments. These are taken over by the computer algorithms that use it. What can we do about these unconscious biases?“Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions,” wrote David Hume. Language, our instrument of reason, is saturated with value judgments. So what happens when computers – apparently the embodiment of pure mathematical rationality – start to use human language? They reproduce the traces of our passions, of course.A thorough and elegant experiment reported in the journal Science this week shows this clearly. Researchers analysed a gigantic collection of English texts – more than 840bn instances of 2.3m words – and expressed mathematically how likely different words are to appear in the same contexts. This captures the largely unconscious web of associations around any given word with greater subtlety and fidelity than dictionary definitions can do, since people use words with much greater confidence than they can define them. Continue reading...

Flies are often the first visitors to a murder scene. Studying their grisly dining habits can reveal vital clues to help catch the killerFlies are regarded by most people as a nuisance at best, a harbinger of death at worst. They elicit little more than feelings of disgust and many people are happy to kill them without a second thought. But there is another side to the story. The fly is one of nature’s great marvels and, perhaps, the criminologist’s best friend.In addition to familiar forensic clues such as fingerprints, tell-tale hairs and bloodstains, more and more criminal investigators are relying on the services of the humble fly. Forensic entomology is the technical term for using insects to help us solve crimes. Given the nature of the things flies choose to dine on, they are often the first to be found at the grisliest of crime scenes. There is a predictable succession of flies that arrive at a corpse, with different species of fly specialising in eating different parts of the body at different stages of decomposition. Continue reading...

Saturn’s moon Enceladus has ‘almost all of the ingredients you would need to support life as we know it on earth’, says Nasa project scientist, Linda Spilker, on Thursday. Beneath its frozen surface, Enceladus has a saltwater ocean, and the hydrogen – produced in a reaction between heated water and rocks – indicates that the moon has active energy sources

The International Space Station is scheduled to cease operation in 2024 but Russia seems interested in continuing to utilise this orbiting laboratoryNasa and Russia could soon begin talks to extend the life of the International Space Station in order to test life-support systems for the human exploration of the moon.The International Space Station (ISS) is scheduled to cease operations in 2024. This was the date set by President Obama in 2014, when the future of the station was being discussed. Continue reading...

Space organization finds that hydrogen erupts out of underground ocean on Enceladus, meaning it has the water, chemistry and energy sources life requiresA tiny moon of Saturn has most of the conditions necessary for life, Nasa announced on Thursday, unveiling a discovery from an underground ocean that makes the world a leading candidate for organisms as humans know them.Scientists stressed that the discovery on a moon named Enceladus is not evidence that life has in fact developed on another world, but they have managed to establish the existence of the water, chemistry and energy sources that are necessary for it. Continue reading...

The faithful and the futurologists imagine life without death. But living forever may not be all it’s cracked up to be, and then what?Good Friday seems a suitable day to consider the fact that, in an era in which life expectancy everywhere has almost doubled, humankind is more confused than ever about death. Nearly half of the British population supposes that death is complete annihilation; an almost equal number still believes in some form of life after death, and, for a subject notably lacking in eyewitness data, a surprisingly small proportion, less than 10%, acknowledge they do not know what happens. Meanwhile, in California but also elsewhere, there are enormously rich men who believe that death is a problem with a technological solution which they hope to live to profit from.Ideals of technological immortality come in two sorts. There are those who hope that their bodies will be preserved or at least prolonged almost indefinitely, usually by freezing. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that the present technology allows brains to be frozen and rethawed without being reduced to a unworkable state. To hope that this will be changed by some future breakthroughs is an act of faith at least as remarkable as supposing that Jesus rose from the dead. That belief was at least marked since its earliest appearance by a saving ambiguity about what it might actually mean. Saint Paul, for example, was absolutely certain it had happened but nowhere managed to explain what it materially might have been. Continue reading...

Ducks, red deer, cherry blossoms and leopards in the hill forests of Myanmar are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world Continue reading...

Harvesting syrup from maple trees has been a tradition for centuries, but new techniques are helping sugarers modernize their farms and maximize yieldsThe late March wind tugs at the jackets of Mooretown Elementary students as they clamber after Burr Morse into a wooden sugar shack. Morse, 70, is taking a break from preparing for open house weekend, the annual Vermont maple free-for-all, where 94 farms will open their doors to the public, offering sugar-on-snow, sleigh rides, and maple treats. The sap is temporarily frozen, but sugarers are anticipating potential flow over the weekend, when the temperatures hit a high of 40 degrees.

Team at Israel’s Hebrew University test system that uses lasers and modified bacteria to locate buried devicesA team of researchers at an Israeli university has successfully tested a technology using fluorescent bacteria and lasers that could become a safer system for detecting buried landmines.An estimated 100m landmines are scattered in some 70 countries, a legacy of often long-past conflict, and the devices injure up to 20,000 people a year. Continue reading...

Ian Sample and Nicola Davis delve into the world of reason and ask why do we have it? How does it work? And what insights might our evolutionary past provide?Subscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterLong heralded as one of the last remaining barriers between “man and beast”, our ability to use reason and logic has historically been seen as the most human of behaviours. But as the field of neuroscience and psychology continues to probe our cognitive processes, are the foundations of reasoning now experiencing a shake up? Or, as many argue, are they somehow immune? Continue reading...

The metal’s curious chemistry and propensity to alter enzymes have disfigured royals, killed Romans and gained it notoriety for murdersBullets are dangerous. This may seem like stating the obvious. Of course bullets fired into a body at high velocity are dangerous. But, it turns out that there are other ways that bullets can cause harm, through lead poisoning.

Human army like behaviour of rescuing mates observed in ants raiding termite mounds where pheromone secretion acts as distress callIt sounds like a heroic tale from a classic wartime movie: the rescue of an injured warrior on the battlefield so that they can fight another day. In fact, it is behaviour seen in ants.Researchers have found that a termite-eating species of ant, called Megaponera analis, carries wounded compatriots back from the field. Continue reading...

Life on Earth 600 million years ago comprised enigmatic mattress-like organisms, but some modern ecological rules did applyIn Life, the Universe and Everything, Douglas Adams has left Marvin the Paranoid Android stranded and walking in circles (literally) on Sqornshellous Zeta. This is a swampy planet, where the dominant life form is the mattress. Marvin chats with Zem, a perky and affable pocket-sprung mattress, who encourages him to be ‘more mattressy*’. In an infinite universe, Adams tells us, very few things are manufactured, since everything has evolved somewhere, including mattresses. They are harvested and shipped out to be slept on across the galaxy.Douglas Adams certainly liked to play around with ideas in evolution. The unlikely evolution of the babel fish was the cause of a theological existential crisis, and his bureaucratic and bad-tempered Vogons were effectively disowned by evolution as soon as they left the primordial seas of Vogsphere. What I don’t know is whether Douglas Adams had ever read about the Ediacaran biota: fossils from a time when Earth was, briefly, the planet of the mattresses.

This spiralling, three-dimensional coral maze is bleached for the second year in a row, but it can recover – if we act immediatelyAnd so it begins: the end of days. The Great Barrier Reef is bleaching for the second year in a row and now, according to the results of helicopter surveys released on Monday, it is the middle part (all 300 miles-plus of it) that is suffering the awful reef stress that comes courtesy of a warming ocean.Related: Australia's politicians have betrayed the Great Barrier Reef and only the people can save it | David Ritter Continue reading...

Researchers discover how laces come undone and offer alternative way to tie them that does knot involve your granny

Survival rates improve across the globe, as increase in cases over 20 years attributed largely to better detection and recordingChildhood cancers have risen across the globe by 13% over 20 years, according to data from the World Health Organization’s cancer section.Cancer in children is comparatively rare; when it does occur it is more likely to have been triggered by something in the child’s genetic makeup than by anything to do with lifestyle or the environment. Continue reading...

A laser weapons physicist has come up with a novel treatment for the disease – blowing up the cancer cells in infinitely small explosionsIn a small laboratory, not far from southern California’s Pacific coastline, Dmitri Lapotko is using lasers to conduct on-demand explosions on a scale almost infinitely small. These explosions are carefully designed to obliterate cancer cells at a nanoscale, with a level of efficiency and safety which far outmatches the current treatments of choice. The technology, pioneered by the company Masimo, is about to undergo clinical trials for both the diagnosis and treatment of cancer in the next few years. But the story of how the idea was first conceived originates from one of most defining moments of the 20 century.In the late 1980s, Lapotko was a laser weapons physicist for the Soviet Union, living and working in what is now Belarus. His particular expertise was in using airborn ultrasound to steer the laser beam of a weapon in the upper atmosphere, as the Soviets tried to match the threat of Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed ‘Star Wars.’ Continue reading...

We know that babies don’t just see in black and white. But what colours can they see – and how key is it to their development?

What can we see when we’re born? How does this develop with time? And how can our culture and language affect the way we perceive the world around us?Subscribe & Review on iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud & Acast, and join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterTo celebrate the launch of ‘First Impressions: a virtual experience of the first year of life’ from The Guardian this week, Nicola Davis delves into infant vision and asks: what happens to our vision in the first six months of life? What capabilities are we born with? And what can insights into infant colour vision tell us about human cognition? Continue reading...

Real robots look nowhere close to their fictional avatars, but those on show at the Science Museum ask pertinent questions about who we are and what we’re doing“How can it not know what it is?”For me this question has always been the defining moment of Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic, Blade Runner. Deckard, the policeman anti-hero played by Harrison Ford, has just discovered that Rachel, the self-possessed personal assistant to the founder of the Tyrell Corporation, is in fact one of the company’s advanced replicants: a robot. His question to Dr Eldon Tyrell is loaded with the certainty of bigotry — that repeated “it”. But Deckard’s uncertainty about Rachel, and the essential differences between humans and machines, is just the beginning of a process of disorientation that pursues him all the way to the film’s brutal but surprising climax. Continue reading...

Red list entries swell to 67 species as conservationists call for urgent action to save birds of Britain including warblers, curlews and puffinsMore than a quarter of UK birds, including the puffin, nightingale and curlew, require urgent conservation efforts to ensure their survival, according to a new report on the state of the UK’s birds.Since the last review in 2009, an additional 15 species of bird have been placed on the “red list”, a category that indicates a species is in danger of extinction or that has experienced significant decline in population or habitat in recent years. The total number of species on the red list is now 67 out of a total of 247. Continue reading...

Nivolumab deemed too expensive for the benefits but cancer specialists urge NHS and manufacturers to reach compromiseA gamechanging immunotherapy drug that can extend the life of patients with advanced head and neck cancer has been turned down for use in the NHS because of its high cost.Nivolumab is one of a new class of drug that stimulates the patient’s own immune system to fight the cancer. Immunotherapy drugs have had some spectacular successes in some patients with some cancers. But although nivolumab can give people with advanced head and neck cancers an extra three months of life – when survival expectancy at present is around six months – the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has rejected it. Continue reading...

Aids campaigners say move puts pressure on England to end delays in providing the medication despite two court rulingsPeople at risk of HIV in Scotland are to be given drugs on the NHS that will protect them from infection, it has been announced, in a move that Aids campaigners say will put pressure on the authorities in England to end delays in providing the same medication despite two major court rulings.In a major victory for campaigners, the Scottish Medicines Consortium (SMC) said pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) would be free on the NHS to those who need it because they were at risk – for instance, if they have a partner with HIV. Access to the drugs could begin within weeks. Continue reading...

The “wow” solution to today’s puzzleEarlier today I set you the following puzzle, about the intriguing mathematical cube that is the Menger sponge. (To find out how to construct it, you can read the original post here.)When you slice the Menger sponge in two, what does the hexagonal cross-section look like?

Experts say findings are ‘astounding’ and could help understand the purpose of dreams and predict whether people are dreamingScientists have unpicked the regions of the brain involved in dreaming, in a study with significant implications for our understanding of the purpose of dreams and of consciousness itself. What’s more, changes in brain activity have been found to offer clues as to what the dream is about.Dreaming had long been thought to occur largely during rapid eye-movement (REM) sleep, a period of slumber involving fast brain activity similar to that when awake, but dreams have also been reported to occur during non-REM sleep, leaving scientists scratching their heads as to the hallmark of dreaming. Continue reading...

My father, Gustav Jahoda, who has died aged 96, carried out pioneering research into cross-cultural psychology. He was one of five inaugural professors at Strathclyde University when it opened in 1963 and a founder member of the European Society of Experimental and Social Psychology.It was a move to University College of the Gold Coast (now Ghana University) in 1952 that set my father on the path to becoming “perhaps the first modern cross-cultural psychologist”, as he was described in the Encyclopedia of the History of Psychological Theories. Most earlier research had considered the attitudes of white people to black, but for his book White Man (1961), Gustav researched attitudes of black Africans to white Europeans in pre-independence Ghana. Continue reading...

Royal Lyceum, Edinburgh

Archaeologists and anthropologists don’t just study the dynamics of power and politics. They are actively mired in political systems - a position which they need to embraceThe 82nd annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) just took place last week in Vancouver, British Columbia. It was well attended, and with the political climate being what it is in the United States right now, many of the conversations I had centred around advocacy. Most of the professional archaeologists I know (I dare say all the professional archaeologists I know) are committed to fighting efforts that weaken protections for cultural resources. It is not cynical to say that as a discipline we are committed to the continuing protection for sites that are hundreds or thousands of years old, to ensure that such sites continue to exist for hundreds and thousands years more. There are dissonant voices, however, questioning just how political archaeologists should be, how deeply into the fray we should delve. As scientists should we not be above politics, focusing on our studies of the past?To me, there is no question about our place in the fray. Politics is about the practice of achieving and asserting power. Archaeology and anthropology have long played an important role in both reinforcing and subverting the dominant mythologies upon which such power is built. In many ways modern American Archaeology- focused on the systematic recovery of data to answer research questions about past human behavior- was born out of challenges to nineteenth century justifications for eradicating American Indian populations. As Euro-Americans raced across the north American continent, they found great earthen mounds in the southeast and mid-west that were the remnants of ancient cities like Cahokia. Continue reading...

Chloe Narbonne’s heart failed when she was 11, starting a near-hopeless fight for survival. A year on from groundbreaking surgery, she is alive and this is her story

Daring operation saved Chloe Narbonne after a failed transplant meant the device was the only way to keep her alive

Born with a serious heart condition called dilated cardiomyopathy, Chloe Narbonne had five major operations – and four hearts – by the age of 12. She defied the odds to become the youngest person in Europe to receive an artificial heart thanks to groundbreaking surgery involving 30 NHS staff. Now Chloe, her mother and medical personnel tell her amazing story for the first time Continue reading...

This brainteaser will wring out your brainUPDATE: To see the answer and have your mind blown* click here*hyperbole justified IMHOHi guzzlers.For today’s puzzle, let me introduce you to the Menger sponge, a fascinating object first described by the Austrian mathematician Karl Menger in 1926. We’ll get to the problem as soon as I explain what the object is. Continue reading...

Skeletons: Our Buried Bones exhibition includes woman buried in expensive stone coffin with throat slit 2,000 years agoAn exhibition bringing together stories of deaths over centuries in London and the West Country includes the skeleton of a woman buried in an expensive stone coffin with her throat slit and her head severed almost 2,000 years ago.When the stone sarcophagus, discovered under school playing fields at Mangotsfield on the outskirts of Bristol, was opened it revealed two adult bodies. In 1996 all the focus was on the exceptionally tall man. He would have stood more than 6ft tall, and his feet have had to be turned back slightly to fit into the display case at the M Shed museum in Bristol. Continue reading...

Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin pose a fundamental challenge to the notion of money itselfIt started with the best of intentions: in 2015 a group of programmers inspired by the success of Bitcoin launched a new software platform called Ethereum that allowed users to conduct transactions without a central bank or currency authority using “tokens” called Ether instead of dollars or pounds. Even more exciting, their platform allowed for “smart contracts” so a deal could be made conditional in all sorts of ways, allowing for everything from options contracts tied to future commodity prices to elaborate corporate governance and voting schemes. Having developed this platform and—they thought—worked out the bugs, they decided to create the cleverest smart contract of them all: a “Digital Autonomous Organization” that functions something like a venture capital firm run by algorithm. In 2016 some 11,000 people crowdfunded the DAO with over $150 million in startup funds, many of them developers who had contributed to the core open-source Ethereum codebase.And then, just as the experiment was about to get underway, a hacker exploited a flaw in the code to make off with roughly a third of the kitty. What happened next is a kind of parable for the future of value in the age of algorithms. Continue reading...

The big lie propagated by government and big business is that it is possible to turn things around for the reef without tackling global warming• Great Barrier Reef at ‘terminal stage’: scientists despair at bleaching dataOnce upon a time, in the distant 60s and 70s, the Great Barrier Reef faced imminent destruction. Tenement applications for drilling and mining covered vast swathes of the reef, with both government and industry enthusiastically backing the plans for mass exploitation.In the face of the reef’s impending doom a motley collection of ordinary Australians shared a common determination that something had to be done. But the odds didn’t look good. The poet turned campaigner Judith Wright wrote that “if it had not been for the public backing for protection of the reef that we knew existed, we might have given up hope”. Continue reading...

‘Last year was bad enough, this is a disaster,’ says one expert as Australia Research Council finds fresh damage across 8,000km• ‘Australia’s politicians have betrayed the reef and only the people can save it’Back-to-back severe bleaching events have affected two-thirds of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, new aerial surveys have found.The findings have caused alarm among scientists, who say the proximity of the 2016 and 2017 bleaching events is unprecedented for the reef, and will give damaged coral little chance to recover. Continue reading...

‘The combined impact of this bleaching stretches for 1,500km, leaving only the southern third unscathed,’ says Prof Terry Hughes, director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, who undertook aerial surveys in 2016 and 2017. He has warned Australia faces a closing window to take action on climate change in time to save the reef.

The seven planets in orbit round a red dwarf star 39 light years away will provide valuable data about exoplanets and their atmospheres, but the latest data suggests that they are unlikely to be homelyRed dwarfs are thought to be the most common types of star, but all are dim. Even the red dwarf and the nearest star to the Sun, Proxima Centauri at 4.2 light years, is some 70 times too faint to be naked-eye-visible under the darkest sky. It was reported last summer that Proxima had a planet slightly larger than the Earth which orbited within its habitable zone where liquid water might survive on its surface given an adequate atmosphere.The news of another red dwarf, Trappist-1, broke in February. It boasts seven Earth-class planets, of which three lie in or close to its habitable zone. At 39 light years, it is a thousand times dimmer than Proxima but, whereas Proxima is never visible from Britain, Trappist-1 lies in Aquarius below the Square of Pegasus, albeit swamped by our predawn twilight in the E and near Venus at present. Continue reading...

Biologist and historian best known for Hooper’s Law, used to estimate the age of a hedgerowMax Hooper, who has died aged 82, was a biologist and historian who pioneered the ecological study of hedges. His best remembered discovery was what became known as Hooper’s Hedgerow Hypothesis, or more simply as Hooper’s Law. By examining the composition of a large number of hedges across Britain, he realised that there was a strong connection between age and diversity.As hedges grew older, the number of constituent species increased at a steady rate, a gain of roughly one species every 100 years. Hence you could estimate a hedge’s age simply by counting the number of woody constituents over a 30-metre stretch. Hooper would have been the first to admit that his hypothesis does not run to planted hedges, and seems to work better in the south than the north. Nonetheless it has become an important tool of landscape surveyors and is a classic demonstration of the value of historical investigation in science. It has also influenced the more mixed hedgerow plantings of recent years. Continue reading...

Google’s billion-dollar belief that it can crack the DNA code to immortality reveals a dangerous mindset‘In this world,” wrote Benjamin Franklin, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” This proposition doesn’t cut much ice in Silicon Valley, where they take a poor view of paying taxes. What’s interesting is that they are also coming to the view that perhaps death is optional too, at least for the very rich.You think I jest? Well, meet Bill Maris, the founder and former CEO of Google Ventures, the investment arm of Alphabet, Google’s owners. Three years ago, Maris decided to create a company that will “solve” death. He pitched the idea to Google’s co-founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page and, according to a lovely piece by Tad Friend in the New Yorker, Brin, who has a gene variant that predisposes him to Parkinson’s disease, loved the idea and Page declared that Google should do it. Continue reading...

We might all be sleeping easier following the discovery of the gene and ‘ancient mechanisms’ that aid a good night’s slumberSleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. Thus wrote the English playwright Thomas Dekker in the 16th century, reflecting a view that has persisted through the centuries. Sleep is crucial to our wellbeing. Disturb it and you will find your constitution troubled and twisted out of joint.It is a view supported by science. Experiments in which men and women have endured periods of up to 11 days without shut-eye have shown that if we cannot sleep we develop increasingly severe symptoms: progressive decreases in concentration, perception and other higher mental processes. Intriguingly, these problems vanish once subjects are allowed a couple of nights curled up in their beds in a state of blissful unconsciousness. Continue reading...

Can your sense of humour tell us how clever you are? Read this dark joke to find outDo you have a dark sense of humour? And what does this tell us about your personality? See if you find this funny:A businessman in a suit has just hanged himself from a light-fitting with his tie. His wife and her friend come in and find him. The man’s wife turns to her friend and says: “I can’t believe it. A green tie with a blue suit.” Continue reading...

Most of western Europe and north America also consumes more calories from packaged food than fresh according to analysis of data from 54 countriesThe UK eats almost four times as much packaged food as it does fresh produce, according to new data, with most of western Europe and north America following a similar pattern.The packaged food revolution – which includes ready meals and calorific cakes and biscuits – is held at least partly to blame for the rise in obesity in the US and Europe. Fresh food has played a smaller and smaller part in some families’ lives as the pace of life has speeded up over recent decades, working hours have increased and more women have entered the workplace. Set against this is the rise of ever more tasty instant meals. Continue reading...

Forensic Architecture to present findings after rebuilding German cafe crime scene where man of Turkish origin was shotNearly five years into the trial of a German neo-Nazi gang who went on a killing spree against immigrants, relatives of the victims have become so frustrated with the police’s inability to untangle the case they have turned to a an unlikely profession in search of clues: architects.Forensic Architecture, a London-based organisation started by architect Eyal Weizman have previously investigated war crimes in Syria, Palestine and the former Yugoslavia, using modern technology to search urban areas for evidence. Continue reading...

Is there life on the Earth-like planet GJ 1132b? Well, most probably not, but what it does have is a hot and steamy atmosphere, astronomers have discovered. It’s one of the first times an atmosphere has been spotted around a small, rocky world. Back on our own rocky planet, geologists have revealed how catastrophic flooding separated Britain from Europe 125,000 years ago (I particularly loved the artist’s impression, do check it out!). And although a group of dermatologists released a study this week examining the role of skin conditions in film portrayals of villains, the horror film fanatic in me was far more excited by archaeologists’ revelation that medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising. Running that story a close second for gory thrills was the detailed calorie counts given for human flesh and organs in a paper released this week on prehistoric cannibalism. Stick to the leg of lamb for Easter, honestly. Continue reading...

Erica is 23. She speaks with a synthesised voice and has a lot of freedom – but can’t move her arms yet. Hiroshi Ishiguro is her ‘father’ and the so-called bad boy of Japanese robotics. Together they plan to redefine what it means to be human and reveal that the future is closer than we might think

Julie Freeman is an artist who creates forms, animations, and soundscapes from tracking data. She created a multifaceted installation – A Naked Mole Rat Eutopia – at London’s Somerset House, featuring kinetic sculptures, an animation and a visualisation, all using live data from the naked mole rat communityWhat can we do with data gathered from naked mole rats? Could we gain a new lens on nature, society and ourselves? Continue reading...

The ability of autonomous vehicles to navigate our cities is impressive. But their potential will only be realised when these cars are interdependentThe crash of an Uber Volvo in Tempe, Arizona has dragged a regulatory spotlight back onto self-driving cars. The Uber car, in driverless mode, ended up on its side after being shunted by a Honda that was turning left. Such incidents bring the hype surrounding automotive autonomy bouncing back to earth. But they also remind us of the need for smart regulation.The true believers at Wired magazine used the crash as another illustration of human incompetence and called for for an acceleration of self-driving. As with almost all crashes involving self-driving cars, it appears that the humans were legally at fault. However, casting the blame when computers mix with humans is not easy, and can impede opportunities for social learning. (For Uber, the crash could also have been an opportunity to take responsibility and change its frat boy narrative). Continue reading...

David Tennant gives a brilliant performance as RD Laing, the radical psychiatrist who rewrote the rules on mental health treatmentDavid Tennant is on pugnacious, mercurial and beady-eyed form in this very interesting and absorbing film. It’s one of his best performances. He plays the psychiatrist RD Laing, who became a 60s counterculture hero for challenging what he saw as the profession’s heartless prison-hospital ethos of tranquillisers and electroconvulsive shock treatment. Instead, Laing proposed a holistic treatment without drugs (although medically licensed LSD was acceptable), using group therapy and communal healing. He set up a refuge at Kingsley Hall in east London, that was regarded suspiciously as something like a Bedlam cult.Related: Kingsley Hall: RD Laing's experiment in anti-psychiatry Continue reading...

Andrew Grey, a 26-year-old from Darwin, took part in the Stargazers Live event broadcast on ABCAn Australian mechanic is about to become a published scientific author after he contributed to the discovery of a four-planet solar system during a crowdsourced astronomy event.Andrew Grey, a 26-year-old from Darwin, took part in the Stargazers Live event broadcast over three nights on the ABC this week. Continue reading...