“Wearing the unsmart glasses created an entirely un-augmented reality…” Ekaterina Goncharova/Getty Images By the mid-2020s, the world was becoming swamped with “AI slop”. Whether images, video, music, emails, ads, speeches or TV shows, many people’s interactions were with asinine content generated by artificial intelligence. Sometimes the experience was fun and relatively harmless, but often it…
ELAINE KNOX If, like me, you live in the UK, you have probably noticed something: there are more and more sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and similar types of large cars on the streets. These accounted for a huge 63 per cent of new car sales in the UK last year, up from 12 per cent…
Quantum 2.0 visits the edges of our knowledge about the quantum world RICHARD KAIL/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Quantum 2.0Paul Davies, Penguin (UK, out 27th November); University of Chicago Press (US, out February 2026) Physicist Paul Davies’s Quantum 2.0: The past, present and future of quantum physics ends on a beautiful note. “To be aware of the…
Illustration of Faraday’s experiment showing how light becomes polarised by a magnetic field ENRIQUE SAHAGÚN In 1845, physicist Michael Faraday provided the first direct evidence that electromagnetism and light are related. Now, it turns out that this connection is even stronger than Faraday imagined. In his experiment, Faraday shone light through a piece of glass which…
Jacob, outfitted with a tracking collar, lost his left hind leg in a poacher’s snare Alex Braczkowski A lion that lost one leg to a poacher’s snare has defied the expectations of conservation scientists by adopting an inventive new hunting strategy. Jacob, an 11-year-old lion in Queen Elizabeth National Park, Uganda, made headlines last year…
The Roman road network mapped by Itiner-e Itiner-e A comprehensive new map of Roman roads has boosted the known size of the empire’s land transport network by almost 60 per cent – and it is available for anyone to explore online. The project, called Itiner-e, brings together topographic mapping, satellite imagery and centuries of historical…
Coffee plants can be propagated by grafting a shoot onto the rootstock of another plant sirichai_asawalapsakul/Getty Images The ancient trick of grafting one plant onto another could find a very modern use – enabling gene editing of plants that are very difficult or impossible to edit by other means. “It is still at the beginning…
Hackers has gained a cult following in the 30 years since its debut Maximum Film/Alamy Tim BoddyPicture editor, London It is 1995. Geocities, Yahoo! and Netscape are kings of a burgeoning internet. Spending an hour by your screeching dial-up modem on the information superhighway is thrilling. And the film Hackers is released, a psychedelic celebration…
Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images Peekaboo is a delightful game to play with infants. Lacking as they are in object permanence, the act of hiding your face from a baby before revealing it with a flourish is sure to raise a smile, as their little brains try to figure out what on Earth…
An Amur tiger, also known as a Siberian tiger, tests the waters in Russia Tamim Ridlo/Shutterstock Tigers Between EmpiresJonathan C. Slaght, Allen Lane (UK); Farrar, Straus and Giroux (US) The Siberian tiger is an awesome animal, with “cuts of black and washes of orange”, writes conservationist Jonathan Slaght, a roar like “some terrible tide”, at home in the bitter…