Science
The AI apocalypse is the least of our worries
A host of other catastrophes are far more likely to destroy the planet, including solar storms, super volcanoes, nuclear winter, biowarfare and even asteroid strike
The race against Hitler to build the first nuclear bomb
The bomb was necessary to the Allies, but still horrified those responsible for its development – many of them refugees from Nazism
Should we give weight loss jabs to children?
I have seen the future of food. And some of you won’t like it. On a research trip to the…
How the US military became world experts on the environment
In its bid to become a global superpower, the US vastly increased its number of overseas bases in the 1960s, giving it unparalleled knowledge of Earth’s most extreme habitats
Why going nuclear is humanity’s only hope
Powering a rising world population up to a decent standard of living is something only nuclear reactors can do – and it’s mad to think otherwise, argues Tim Gregory
The downfall of climate change poster boy Michael Mann
Even if you’ve never heard of Michael Mann, you will have felt his baleful influence on your energy bills. He…
Controlling AI is the great challenge of our age
The genie is only half out of the bottle, says Richard Susskind, but we should be in a state of high alert – and anyone who thinks otherwise is ‘plain daft’
A piece of Mars to toy with
Lunar souvenirs are slumping, but Martian rocks are soaring as today’s super-rich fight to get the best fragments from space on their desks
We are all people of faith, whether we realise it or not
Reason, narrowly framed, will never reveal the world to us. A better path involves reason harnessed to our ethical and aesthetic impulses, argues Alister McGrath
Time is running out to tackle the dangers posed by AI
While we can all appreciate the benefits of AI, it is developing faster than anyone imagined, with no consensus on what constitutes acceptable risk
How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…
‘The wickedest man in Europe’ was just an intellectual provocateur
Sir Bernard Mandeville certainly revelled in mischief-making; but his one simple idea – that human beings are animals – seems unremarkable today
Emilie du Châtelet – a lone voice among Enlightenment thinkers
The brilliant physicist’s warning to her contemporaries not to carry respect for great men to the point of idolatry fell on deaf ears
Stuff of legends: the surprising truth about old myths
I visited Mycenae for the first time this autumn. While the ruins of classical Athens can seem almost familiar, the…
Wuhan wager: the $400 ‘bio bet’ that predicted the pandemic
At the end of this month, one of the world’s most renowned scientists will send $400 to a charity to…
The science of voting for Kamala Harris
The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris.…
Life among the world’s biggest risk-takers
The billionaires currently driving technology and the global economy are willing to take bets on very long odds, and treat everything as a market to be played
Will the toughest problem in maths ever be solved?
For many, not just mathematicians, the Riemann hypothesis is the very definition of a supremely difficult problem that might be…
Clear, thorough and gripping: BBC2’s Horizon – The Battle to Beat Malaria
If you transcribed the narrator’s script in almost any episode of Horizon, you’d notice something striking: an awful lot of…
Under pressure: what might life look like on another planet?
Over the past three decades, astronomers have discovered planets orbiting Sun-like stars throughout the universe. This discovery ended 2,500 years…
An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds
Technology unquestionably improves lives, says Ray Kurzwei, and soon we’ll be living to 150. As for 3D-printed guns invisible to scanners – there’ll be a solution to those too
What will we do when all our jobs are done for us?
The philosopher Nick Bostrom speculates imaginatively about the travails of extreme leisure, but we don’t get any guru-like nuggets
Those magnificent men and their stargazing machines
Violet Moller focuses on three 16th-century‘heroes of science’, John Dee, Nicolaus Copernicus and Tycho Brahe, and their great libraries and observatories
The endless fascination of volcanoes
Tamsin Mather is the latest highly articulate volcanologist to combine vivid personal experience with thoughtful scientific explanation
A surprising number of scientists believe in little green men
Eminent astronomers have explained cosmic anomalies as alien megastructures and spaceships, while the source of the celebrated Wow! signal remains anyone’s guess
