Science

Last hours of an organ donor

In the liminal time when the brain is dead but organs are kept alive, there is an urgent tenderness to medical care

Ronald W Dworkin

Is it possible to design a shape to roll along any fixed path?

4 minutes

Frontier AI ethics

Generative agents will change our society in weird, wonderful and worrying ways. Can philosophy help us get a grip on them?

Seth Lazar

A scientist’s poor eyesight helped fuel a revolution in computer ‘vision’

9 minutes

Struggling to learn how to do a backflip, Nikita takes on an unusual training regimen

12 minutes

How a curious question about colouring maps changed mathematics forever

9 minutes

What has feelings?

As the power of AI grows, we need to have evidence of its sentience. That is why we must return to the minds of animals

Kristin Andrews & Jonathan Birch

Teaching an AI to beat video games still takes human imagination

5 minutes

What on earth is a xenobot?

The more we understand how cells produce shape and form, the more inadequate the idea of a genomic blueprint looks

Philip Ball

The people of the cloud

Hot, strenuous and unsung. There is nothing soft and fluffy about the caretaking work that enables our digital lives

Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

How machine learning can help historians decode ancient inscriptions

7 minutes

AI’s first philosopher

Alan Turing was a pioneer of machine learning, whose work continues to shape the crucial question: can machines think?

Sebastian Sunday Grève