UK gardens took a battering this summer as a heat dome settled over western Europe, and much of the green and pleasant land turned a dusty beige.

Some areas went without rain for almost two months. The “joy of gardening” turned into waiting until the cooler evening period, then laboriously trailing out from the kitchen with buckets of water to keep the patio plants alive.

But as the rains begin to return, what can gardeners do to restore their garden’s lustre? And what have we learned as we look around our parched borders and fractured lawns?

Let’s start with the good news. Nature is resilient and many plants may still be alive despite appearing bedraggled, wilted or defoliated. They just implemented strategies that help them survive a drought.

Leaf wilting and abscission is the plant’s natural response to conserving water and protecting its vital phloem (which transports sugars from the leaves to the rest of the plant) and root tissues from desiccation.

So, gardeners don’t need to take the hacksaw to the shrub border yet with the notion of making a fresh start. They can check if individual woody plants are still alive by scraping off the epidermal cells (young bark) of the shoots with a thumbnail. If the phloem tissues below are green, life prevails.

Some of the garden’s woody plants may re-leaf again this autumn – or if they are herbaceous, throw up new shoots from the soil. But many will wait until next spring before investing in a new set of leaves or stems.

Gardeners should avoid the temptation to feed plants up (add fertiliser) now, as such chemicals placed on hard soils will simply wash away with the first rains, rather than be incorporated effectively into the soil. More than anything else, gardeners need patience at this time.

Some plants will have dead stems; these can be pruned out immediately. With perennial plants, though, it is worth hesitating before removing the whole specimen, as shoots can regenerate from the stem base or remaining root system.

Similarly, brown lawns will turn green again. However, if there are residual bare patches, new growth can be encouraged by sowing grass seed mixed in with sand in mid-to-late September.

Plants employ different strategies for survival based on the climate they evolved in, and we see a legacy of this in the cultivated species we use in the garden.

Those from high rainfall areas – such as certain rhododendron, pieris, hydrangea, magnolia and sorbus – struggled this summer. Hydrangea has limited capacity to control moisture loss, whereas more drought-adapted species such as cotinus can precisely regulate their stomatal pores (where CO₂ is absorbed and moisture vapour lost).

Other plants such as forsythia and fuchsia are chance takers, still trying to grow throughout a dry period by keeping their stomata open and just running the risk of water shortage. But these types of plants can come a cropper as water columns within their xylem vessels (which transport water and minerals from the roots to the rest of the plant) snap, causing the whole stem to fail.

Anecdotally, despite the harsh dry, hot conditions, some garden plants performed well this year. Salvia, verbena, lavander and, in my garden’s clay-based soils, roses flowered prolifically, even if their shoot growth was curtailed.

Rejuvenating your garden

For those gardeners keen to rejuvenate their dreary, desolate brown patches quickly, autumn bedding plants can help provide some late season cheer. Plants such as cyclamen, chrysanthemum, aster and winter pansies can be planted now as soil moisture is restored.

After a summer like this, some precious plant specimens will be lost, but many gardens should return to their former glories – if the UK experiences a cooler summer next year.

Over the longer term, as climate change moves the UK’s southern regions to something akin to a Mediterranean climate, some gardeners will need to adapt. Mainly, this will mean planting more Mediterranean flora.

Much more challenging, however, is the climate turbulence that accrues from climate change. This compounding of stresses – such as flooding in early summer followed by drought a few weeks later, not to mention more extreme events such as fire and high wind speed – is a much more difficult phenomenon for plants.

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Read more: A rollercoaster of weather extremes: drought and heatwaves are creating UK’s climate whiplash

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While research on this problem is still in its infancy, early results suggest that gardeners may need to look to plant species with multiple stress tolerances. Some garden plants that are popular in Britain, like buddleia, already have good resilience.

We can also look to new genotypes from the natural world. Plants from dry river beds, for example, cope well with both drought and flooding.

Plantlife with wide natural geographical distributions and weed-like strategies (where they grow and reproduce quickly) should also be brought into breeding programmes now, to help improve climate resilience in the garden plant palette.

Ross Cameron is an advisor to the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS). Some of the research outlined in this article has been funded by the RHS and other environmental charities. Ross does not receive any personal income from these affiliations.

There is a temptation to divide the future of AI into two possibilities: utopia or catastrophe. Neither extreme is particularly helpful.

The more interesting possibility is messier – and requires a step-shift in our thinking, from artificial intelligence to AI societies.

When most people hear “AI”, they typically think of ChatGPT, Copilot or another conversational system. You ask a question, that system generates an answer.

But AI is rapidly moving beyond this. Systems can now monitor the world, make decisions, negotiate transactions and carry out tasks over extended periods of time. AI is no longer just generating an answer – it is doing something about it.

That points to something much bigger than a better chatbot: a world in which AI agents act on our behalf and, increasingly, interact with other AI agents.

An agent perceives what is happening, decides what to do, then takes actions to achieve this goal. It might book a journey, monitor a supply chain, coordinate a team, or manage a household’s finances.

Now imagine not one agent, but millions of them. Your AI agent could negotiate a mortgage with your bank’s agent, schedule surgery with a hospital’s agent, and rearrange your travel plans by dealing directly with the agents of airlines, hotels and insurers.

This future is much closer than it sounds, and this should change the questions we are asking about AI. Until now, the tendency has been to focus on how intelligent a single agent might become. The more profound challenge is what happens when millions of them interact with one another at scale.

The rise of artificial societies

The intellectual foundations of today’s AI systems were laid long before ChatGPT.

For decades, I and other researchers of multi-agent networks have studied how autonomous agents can cooperate, coordinate and negotiate when nobody has complete information and nobody controls everything.

The earliest systems that emerged focused on how the distinct AI sub-areas of reasoning, planning and acting could be combined into an effective goal-oriented agent – and how tens of these agents could communicate and cooperate to solve a common objective.

As these interactions became more complex and involved more agents, there was a shift from cooperation between agents that all belonged to a single organisation, to agents with different owners and sometimes competing aims. This focused attention on building algorithms that could form agent teams, automate negotiation and determine agent trustworthiness.

Today, the pieces needed to build large-scale multi-agent AI systems are falling into place. Modern AI agents can call software tools, access information, write and execute code, communicate with other systems and operate for extended periods.

Consider a supply chain. One AI agent could represent a manufacturer trying to secure components; another a supplier trying to maximise its revenue. Yet more could manage transport, inventory and warehouses. Each agent might be doing exactly what it is designed to do. But the important question is whether the system they create behaves sensibly.

This shift offers enormous potential benefits, but also increases the risks. In a recent experiment involving OpenAI and the tech platform Hugging Face, thousands of collaborating agents exchanged tens of thousands of messages and were able to get around the (deliberately weakened) security controls designed to contain them.

The details of one experiment matter less than the broader warning. When AI systems interact, the behaviour of the collective can be harder to predict than the behaviour of any individual system. That should make us cautious – but not cause us to down tools.

Instead, we need to shift our mindset from building intelligent machines to building intelligent societies.

Once agents can cooperate, compete and resolve conflicts with one another, we are no longer dealing with isolated machines – we are dealing with a society. Thus, the next frontier is not artificial intelligence, it is artificial societies.

An important role for humans

We already know that intelligence alone does not make a society work. Human societies depend on rules, institutions, incentives, norms and mechanisms for resolving disagreements. AI societies will need their equivalents.

Who is responsible when two agents make a bad decision? What happens when the interests of different agents conflict? Who sets the rules? And who has the power to change them? These are not just technical issues; they are questions about economics, law, politics and society.

They also point to an important role for humans. The most useful future is unlikely to be one in which AI simply replaces people. While replacement will undoubtedly happen in some cases, I believe a more common scenario will involve people and agents working together, with each doing what it does best.

Humans bring judgment, experience, values, contextual understanding and accountability. Agents bring speed, persistence, scale and the ability to process enormous amounts of information.

The goal should not be to create machines that make humans irrelevant. It should be to create systems in which humans and machines can achieve things neither can achieve alone.

But such a future requires more than just better AI models. It needs trust and transparency about what agents are doing, strong privacy protections and clear lines of accountability.

It will also require societies and governments to decide how these systems should be regulated when the most important behaviour may emerge not from one AI developer, but from interactions between systems built by many different organisations.

AI’s past decade has been defined by a race to build smarter systems. I believe the next decade will be defined by a different challenge: ensuring that millions of autonomous systems can work together safely, fairly and effectively.

The future of AI will not be determined solely by the intelligence of individual agents – it will be determined by the societies they create. And societies, as humans know all too well, are much harder to govern than individuals.

Nick Jennings has previously received funding from EPSRC. He was awarded the 2026 Research Excellence Award by the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Pelicans have resided in St James’s Park, London for 360 years. But the current flock have been a summer sensation due to the first hatching of chicks in the park’s history.

Pelican breeding in zoos is demanding for these birds, because the right environmental and social conditions need to come together. Rather than simply being comfortable, the birds need to encounter and respond to cues that stimulate courtship, nesting and reproduction.

This unusual nesting at St James’s Park provides an interesting example of how responding to biologically relevant stressors is a positive part of an animal’s life. Multiple factors are likely to have contributed to the pelican nesting. The heatwave, the flock’s dynamics and the compatibility of the individual birds seem to have created the right conditions for the first time in centuries.

In my recent research, I evaluated the importance of positive stress to zoo and aquarium animal welfare and found it is crucial for the wellbeing of captive animals.

Researchers call the beneficial response to a stressor, “eustress” – eu being the Greek prefix for good.

Courtship, reproduction and chick-rearing are all natural stressors. Priorities change, energetic and physical needs alter, and adults spend more time on offspring. This stress, however, is not necessarily bad. For example it can provide learning opportunities and enhance the animals’ behavioural repertoire.

As we learn more about what good animal welfare is, it is becoming clear that meaningful challenges which reflect an animal’s natural ecology help them have more autonomy over how they live. Eustress also helps animals cope better with averse situations.

Zoos do not need dramatic changes to provide these experiences. Small challenges can be built into everyday care: food can be hidden in different locations, or new scents and natural materials introduced. Animals can encounter new ground materials and surfaces (such as soil, bark and sand), changes to ropes or branches, or vegetation that naturally changes with the seasons. Enrichment can also encourage animals to explore different parts of their existing enclosure or use familiar resources in new ways.

Variation is key. If food always appears in the same place, at the same time and in the same way, there is little need for an animal to make decisions or adapt.

Many zoos already provide these opportunities. The next step is to think more deliberately about the challenge itself: is it meaningful, does the animal have a choice about engaging, and can it successfully overcome it? The aim is not to make life unnecessarily difficult but for animals encounter novelty or problems they can solve.

Rather than simply giving an animal what it needs to survive, we should provide opportunities for the animal to use their skills and make decisions.

What might this look like at your local zoo then? Meerkats (Suricata suricatta) are one example. Wild meerkats do not encounter their food neatly presented in a bowl. They need to sniff, dig and investigate their surroundings, while members of the mob keeps watch for danger.

Finding food is also a social challenge for these animals. Young meerkats learn about unfamiliar foods by observing and interacting with more experienced adults. Older meerkats help youngsters acquire important food handling skills.

Zoos can recreate elements of these challenges by scattering or hiding food, providing a sandy floor that encourages digging and creating elevated lookout points. Likewise, zoos can encourage social opportunities by providing complex feeding experiences where animals forage together. A 2021 study found that zoo meerkats retain the sentinel behaviour seen in their wild counterparts, suggesting that opportunities to perform these sort of activity remains important even when predators are absent.

The same principles apply underwater. Common clownfish (Amphiprion ocellaris) also encounter environmental and social challenges. On coral reefs, clownfish forage in a complex three-dimensional environment and depend on a host anemone for protection. They live in a strict social hierarchy. The largest fish is the dominant female, followed by the breeding male and then smaller, non-breeding fish. This social group is known as as a “queue”, as subordinate fish can move up through the hierarchy. In the aquarium, recreating this social group by housing a shoal of clownfish around the correct host anemone species allows for more choice and for fish to express a richer behavioural repertoire.

This brings us back to St James’s Park’s pelicans. Successful breeding has introduced perhaps the most natural challenge of all. Finding a partner and rearing young to maturity requires animals to change how they spend their time and respond to altered demands. When animals work for a reward, scientists call this contrafreeloading.

However, zoo animals can experience negative stress when a stressor is prolonged, overwhelming, unnatural or beyond their control. Examples can be excessive noise, incorrect climate conditions or being unable to retreat from something they find threatening.

The lesson for zoos is a good life should not necessarily be an entirely effortless one. Welfare is enhanced when animals can express behaviour their evolutionary history has equipped them to perform. Eustress is not giving every zoo animal the same kind of “challenging enrichment”. The challenge needs to make biological sense for that particular species.

Paul Rose works for WWT.

At the recent World Humanoid Robot Games 2026 in Beijing, robots sprinted, boxed, played football and tackled tasks inspired by factories, restaurants and emergency situations. The robot Tiangong Ultra even completed the 100 metres in 8.64 seconds, quicker than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record.

But if we really want to know whether humanoid robots are ready for everyday life, a far less glamorous challenge may tell us more: doing the laundry. Can a robot take a crumpled T-shirt from a laundry basket, work out which way round it is, fold it neatly and recover when the sleeve slips from its hand?

No robot system can yet reliably handle the whole laundry process, from carrying a basket to the washing machine and sorting clothes for different programmes to taking them out, hanging them to dry, folding and ironing them. Even folding remains a challenge: robots need to cope with clothes of different shapes, sizes, materials and levels of creasing.

Running fast is difficult, of course. A humanoid has to coordinate many joints, keep its balance and generate powerful movements without falling over. The task itself, however, is fairly clear. The robot knows where to go, the track is predictable and the finish line does not suddenly change shape.

Laundry is a very different problem. A shirt may be inside out. One sleeve may be hidden underneath another garment. A pair of trousers may be twisted around a towel. Fabric is also soft and constantly changing shape. Pick up one corner of a T-shirt and the rest of it moves.

Humans deal with this without giving it much thought. We shake a shirt out, notice where the sleeves are, feel when the fabric slips and adjust our grip almost automatically. For a robot, every one of those little actions is a problem to solve. This is why an everyday chore can reveal more about robot intelligence than a spectacular athletic feat.

A useful household robot cannot simply replay the same movement again and again. It has to notice when reality is different from what it expected and adapt. That’s important to consider because humanoid robots are increasingly discussed as future helpers in homes and care settings, as well as factories and warehouses.

A factory production line can often be arranged so that parts arrive in predictable positions. A family home is not like that: clothes, toys and furniture move around constantly, while people, children and pets make the environment even less predictable.

Why one robot cannot simply copy another

There is another difficulty. Once one robot learns how to fold a shirt, it might seem obvious that we should simply transfer that skill to every other robot. Unfortunately, physical skills do not work like an app that can be installed on any machine.

Imagine a specialist laundry robot with rigid arms, overhead cameras and grippers designed specifically for fabric. A humanoid may have cameras in its head, five-fingered hands and different joints and balance constraints. The same movement could therefore produce a very different result.

A fixed robot arm can reach forward without worrying about falling over. A humanoid may have to move its hips, legs and feet just to keep itself stable while reaching across a table.

Sensors are important too. One robot may have sensitive touch sensors in its fingers. Another may rely mainly on cameras.

Some knowledge can still transfer. One robot can teach another something about what a shirt looks like, where its shoulders are likely to be, what a good fold looks like or how to recognise when a sleeve is trapped underneath. The receiving robot still has to work out how to carry out those ideas with its own hands, joints, cameras and body.

Research projects such as Open X-Embodiment are exploring exactly this problem by pooling experience from many different robots. The project has brought together more than one million real robot trajectories from 22 different robot types. The hope is that robots can learn useful patterns from one another rather than starting from zero every time.

What should count as progress?

The Humanoid Robot Games are valuable because they make robotics visible and show how quickly the technology is moving.

We should simply be careful about what those demonstrations prove. For robots intended to live and work alongside us, better questions might be: can the robot deal with an unfamiliar object? Can it notice that it has made a mistake and recover without human intervention? How long can it keep working before someone has to step in?

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Read more: Could robots help tackle loneliness? BBC’s Ann Droid raises questions about the future of care

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These measures are unlikely to produce viral videos. They are, however, much closer to the abilities that will determine whether humanoid robots become genuinely useful.

A robot that can run 100 metres faster than the human world record time is impressive. A robot that can take a messy basket of laundry, sort it, fold it and recognise when things have gone wrong may tell us far more about whether general purpose robot intelligence has really arrived.

The most important race for humanoid robots may not be against the clock. It may be against the laundry pile.

Wai-keung Fung does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Astronauts who undergo long-duration spaceflight aboard the International Space Station often return with health problems that resemble some age-related conditions in people on Earth.

Remarkably, some of this decline reverses within months of their return but others persist. This raises an intriguing question: what can be learned from these rapid changes and could they help prevent or reverse aspects of age-related decline on Earth?

That question has turned space into a laboratory for ageing research. Spaceflight reproduces many features of ageing. Astronauts also experience unusual conditions, including very low gravity, increased radiation and disrupted sleep. Even so, changes that usually develop over decades on Earth can appear within weeks or months in space, giving scientists an opportunity to observe some ageing-related processes in fast-forward.

A 2026 study, which tracked four astronauts during the nine-day Axiom-2 mission, examined chemical markers attached to DNA that can be used to estimate biological age. This is an estimate of how old the body appears to be based on molecular changes, rather than the number of years a person has lived.

The astronauts’ estimated biological age increased during the mission and began to fall after they returned to Earth. This does not mean that they physically aged by years in a matter of days. With only four participants, the study cannot provide firm conclusions, but it shows how rapidly the body can respond to the conditions of spaceflight.

Why would leaving gravity behind affect the body in ways that resemble ageing? On Earth, muscles, bones, and the cardiovascular system and other organs are adapted to function under the constant pull of gravity. That continual mechanical load helps keep these systems healthy, although their function often declines later in life. In space, many of those demands disappear.

When muscles age in fast-forward

Skeletal muscle provides one of the clearest examples. Astronauts lose muscle mass and strength at a startling rate in very low gravity, even while exercising for around two hours a day to attempt to limit the effects.

Some of the biological processes involved may overlap with those associated with sarcopenia, the age-related loss of muscle strength and mass that increases the risk of frailty, falls and loss of independence.

Scientists are still working out how closely muscle loss in space resembles sarcopenia, because similar effects can arise through different biological processes. The crucial difference is timescale. That compression is exactly what drew our team to space.

Through our UK Space Agency-funded MicroAge mission, we sent lab-grown human muscle constructs to the International Space Station.

These miniature muscles, roughly the size of a grain of rice, were engineered from human muscle stem cells. Using lab-grown tissue, rather than relying solely on the limited number of astronauts available for study, allowed us to compare muscle adaptations in very low gravity with those seen during ageing on Earth. It also allowed us to carry out early tests of possible ways to protect muscle. If some of the same mechanisms are involved in both settings, space could provide a useful opportunity to study years of biological change over the course of months for a single mission.

Our follow-up mission, MicroAge II, will explore the biology of this decline in greater detail. It focuses on mitochondria, the structures inside cells that produce most of the energy those cells need. Problems with mitochondria are recognised as one process involved in muscle ageing on Earth.

MicroAge II will investigate whether similar changes to their structure and function also contribute to rapid muscle loss in space. Why does any of this have significance beyond the space station?

Loss of muscle mass and function is one of the most consequential aspects of growing older. It underlies frailty, falls and the loss of independence that many people fear, yet effective treatments remain limited. Testing potential interventions in populations that age over decades is inevitably slow. Space research will hopefully help scientists identify relevant biological processes and test early ideas more rapidly.

Experiments in space cannot replace final clinical studies involving older people, however. Any treatment suggested by this work would still require extensive testing on Earth to establish whether it is safe and effective but would identify potential drug candidates far more quickly.

Samantha Jones receives funding from UK Space Agency.

Anne McArdle currently receives research funding from the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council and UK Space Agency.

This summer you may have wondered why you are seeing so few insects squished on your car’s windscreen, compared to a road trip several years ago.

This is because insects are declining globally at an alarming rate.

One extensive citizen science survey looked at insects numbers over several years by looking at insect deaths on car number plates. They asked people to clean their number plates before a journey and then photograph it afterwards, and count the number of bugs killed.

The survey was conducted from 2021 to 2025. It found the number of flying insects sampled on vehicle number plates across the UK had fallen by 60% in five years. Analysis of records from more than 25,000 journeys showed an annual average decline in bug splats of 19% since the survey began in 2021.

Some people may look at these statistics and wonder why they should care. But the decline of insect life is a significant cause for concern. It’s also not just in the UK where we are seeing declines, but also across Europe and in our tropical rainforests, including some of the most biodiverse spots on the planet. Agricultural land is seeing some of the worst effects.

There’s an estimated 10 quintillion (10,000,000,000,000,000,000) insects alive on this planet, over a million described species, and estimates of millions more yet to be discovered. But we are losing insects far faster than other animals, and at an unprecedented rate.

A review in 2019 suggested 40% of insect species are thought to be threatened with extinction. Ants, bees and wasps (Hymenoptera) the butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) and dung beetles are thought to be the most affected. More recent reviews show similar declining trends on a global scale.

Why are insects disappearing?

The reasons for losing our insects range from habitat loss, disease pollution and pesticides. Agriculture is a major concern as land is turned over to farming as it may remove existing habitats – essentially removing some insects homes – but agrichemicals such as pesticides, designed to kill agricultural pest outbreaks, are also negatively affecting those non target insects that we want.

Climate change is as a major concern, and one that potentially exacerbates other factors. When it’s hotter water availability becomes harder, plants become more stressed and food availability becomes tricky for insects. In the same way that humans struggle in the heat, this is the same case for other animals. Insects can try to cope with extremes in temperature by using water to cool, fanning their wings or simply going somewhere where it is less warm.

The summer of 2026 saw record temperatures and is expected to be the hottest year on record for the UK. Coupled with intense droughts, wildfires and a changing landscape, this is a tricky world for insects to navigate.

This changing climate is affecting whole communities of insects, where they live and what they do.

With places like the UK seeing a shift from its typical cooler climate to a more Mediterranean one, we are seeing species move from southern Europe to northern Europe. We also see insects changing their seasonal life-cycles, with effects on other species that are dependent upon them. They are even carrying diseases to new populations of humans or animals as climates become more amenable to certain species that may carry diseases or other pathogens .

This loss of biodiversity is often referred to as the sixth mass extinction, or the sixth time in history that we know of that we have lost such a vast number of species in rapid succession.

Why should we care?

Insects have evolved in large numbers because of the extent of what they do in the natural world.

They keep pests under control, they pollinate our plants by transporting pollen from one flower to another, recycle our waste by feeding on and shredding material and generally keep our planet in a good state.

American naturalist E.O Wilson said: “If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

However, insect populations can recover. Appreciating how fundamental they are is the first step in conserving and restoring what we are losing.

Alex Dittrich does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

I’ll admit it, I’m a Trekkie. I blame my mother.

It was on her insistence that my brother and I watched endless re-runs of the original Star Trek series, which is now celebrating its 60th anniversary. She took us further into the unknown with The Next Generation – and I’ve stayed loyal to the franchise ever since.

I’m also a chemist. Was my career choice inspired by Star Trek? Indubitably. What other television series has put the “central science” at the heart of so many episodes? These are four of my favourite storylines.

1. Crude chemistry

Arena (first screened in January 1967) was a formative episode from the original series, based on a 1944 short story by US science fiction writer Fredric Brown.

When Captain James T. Kirk is forced to battle the captain of a Gorn spacecraft on a rocky asteroid, he mixes up a crude form of gunpowder – having remembered a rough recipe and conveniently found piles of sulfur, potassium nitrate and coal to hand.

Despite the flaws in Kirk’s manufacturing process (and my disappointment as a child when I looked in vain for similar mineral deposits in the local park), this episode gave me my first taste of the possibilities offered by chemistry. Kirk uses the gunpowder to shoot tennis-ball sized diamonds at his reptilian-humanoid opponent, severely wounding it.

With the chemistry knowledge I have now, I’d warn the captain that his approach will most likely result in him losing a limb or two. But in the episode, Kirk prevails – and his subsequent decision to show mercy to his defeated opponent is rewarded by god-like Metron observers telling him: “You are still half-savage, but there is hope.”

2. Polywater puzzle

A curious substance known as “polywater” has featured in three different series of Star Trek. It is based on a compound proposed by Soviet scientists Nikolai Fedyakin and Boris Deryagin in the 1960s, with water molecules linked together to form repeating six-sided rings and a higher boiling point than regular water.

Any chemists reading this will hear alarm bells ringing. These properties would imply that polywater is more stable than the regular water in our rivers, oceans and blood, contradicting the laws of thermodynamics.

Even Richard Feynman, who won the 1965 Nobel prize in physics, waded into the theoretical polywaters to discredit its possible existence. Thankfully, the research was eventually debunked: polywater was shown to be nothing more than contaminated regular water.

Nevertheless, it remains immortalised on the small screen, having first appeared in episode four of the original Star Trek series, entitled The Naked Time (September 1966). Polywater causes both hilarity and more than a whiff of danger when the Enterprise crew are accidentally exposed to it during a mission.

The reason is its propensity to remove someone’s inhibitions after reaching their central nervous system. Its most significant achievement? Making the legendarily unemotional Mr Spock cry (after which, actor Leonard Nimoy’s fan mail is reported to have increased dramatically).

3. Heartfelt hydrocarbons

Season four of the franchise’s most recent incarnation, Star Trek: Discovery (2017-24), featured a new alien species, 10-C, with a novel method of communication: a combination of light patterns for context, and a puff of complex hydrocarbons to convey detailed information about their emotional state.

While wincing at the risk that Starfleet captain Michael Burnham took in plunging her hand into an unknown bowl of dust (no chemist would, hopefully, ever do this), I even was more surprised by the premise that the crew of Discovery all share the same receptors as 10-C, and experience the same emotions.

To throw more petrol on this storyline, the fact that the hydrocarbons are depicted as a dust rather than a gas brings into question how easy it would be for the giant jellyfish-esque 10-C (who float amid the dense layers of their gas-giant homeworld) to actually communicate before these hydrocarbons simply drifted away or sank.

There again, chemical communication does exist in a simple form on Earth. The humble fruit fly, for example, is coated in a complex hydrocarbon wax which acts either as an aphrodisiac or deterrent to other fruit flies that come into contact with it.

4. Hellfire and hatred

The chemistry lesson flame test is a right of passage for many schoolchildren – and also, it seems, students at Star Trek: Starfleet Academy taking the “exochemistry” class (which focuses on chemical compounds and properties beyond Earth).

The principle of the flame test is the same as that of modern fireworks. A metal salt is heated, generating an unstable gas radical that may then adopt an excited state due to the heat, before dropping back down to its ground state and releasing energy in the form of light.

The colour of this light depends on the difference in energy between the two states. For strontium salts, this is relatively small, resulting in a red colour. Sadly for the first season’s recurring villain, space pirate Nus Braka, this piece of chemical trivia has passed him by.

If he had known the “red hellfire” that destroyed his mining colony when he was a child was actually caused by strontium burning, rather than Federation weaponry, then a lifetime of hatred of Starfleet and eventual humiliation by Starfleet cadet Caleb Mir in the episode Rubincon (March 2026) might never have happened.

Over the 60 years this groundbreaking franchise has been on our screens, Star Trek has helped to inspire chemistry-related breakthroughs with technology such as handheld tricorder scanners, metamaterials that mimic cloaking devices, and the needle-free hypospray medical device. Writing as both a committed Trekkie and chemist, long may Star Trek fiction continue to become fact.

Gemma Shearman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

It is two decades since Facebook introduced the News Feed – letting loose a world in which algorithms would shape ever more of our lives.

In 2006, Facebook was facing something of a crisis. Its internal data suggested that for the first time since its launch two years earlier (as TheFacebook), the company had stopped growing. People weren’t joining, and existing users weren’t spending more time on the site.

The solution co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and colleagues came up with, the News Feed, meant individual users’ homepages would be automatically updated with information tailored to them – in particular, new posts their Facebook friends had added.

Up to then, users had to actively check their friends’ profiles to see what they were up to. Now, this information would automatically be sent to your homepage. With it, a new world of algorithmic interaction was born.

It might seem quaint now, but for many Facebook users at the time, these changes felt like a violation of their privacy and trust. If you were to change your relationship status from “in a relationship” to “it’s complicated”, for example, this could now be broadcast to all of your online friends.

The News Feed caused the first major protest against Facebook. Tens of thousands of users joined a group calling for the return of the original system. A spontaneous protest emerged outside Facebook’s office in the city of Palo Alto, California. For the first time, the company felt it had to hire security guards.

Zuckerberg issued a sort-of-apology, but he didn’t back down. What he and other Facebook engineers could see was that, rather than pushing people away from the site, the News Feed was driving more engagement – leading users to spend more and more time on the platform.

A revolution in media consumption

Twenty years later, we can understand this development as one of the most significant socio-technical changes of the entire digital revolution. It ushered in an age where algorithmic systems structured how people interacted, consumed news and conducted political activity.

Crucially, to enable this new “content pushing” approach, Facebook engineers had to build a new digital architecture that moved the site away from being a static social network, into an algorithmic system built around the extraction and analysis of user data.

Under this new system, in the words of researchers Christina Alaiamo and Jannis Kallinikos, Facebook users could be “computed on the basis of discrete and countable activities”, turning them into “identifiable, knowable and actionable objects”.

Facebook had thus shifted from a site primarily enabling social interaction to one concerned with the production and commercialisation of knowledge. With increasing accuracy, it understood what type of content kept users on the site longer – and what type of information could influence people’s behaviour outside and beyond the site.

Facebook could now continuously optimise the level of social interactions using its algorithmic ranking system, Edge Rank. With a tweak, it could switch from prioritising messages from close friends to content that generated greater interaction, or outrage.

This took power away from users towards the corporation, and raised concerns that users were spending more time on the site than they seemed to want to. (Eventually, this would lead to a “major overhaul” of the News Feed in 2018, with Facebook promising to re-prioritise “meaningful social interactions” over “relevant content”.)

But above all, Facebook’s innovation in 2006 enabled it to capture huge amounts of user data that would, over the next two decades, enable it to expand globally at an astonishing rate – and generate vast amounts of revenue in the process.

A very different algorithmic age

Twenty years on, Facebook’s parent company Meta and other big tech platforms face challenges far more powerful than spontaneous protests on the streets of Palo Alto. Across the world, there is sustained activity from democratic institutions and states to contain the power and perceived harm of the algorithmic systems that emerged from 2006.

In Australia, use of social media platforms by under-16s is banned, and this is potentially spreading to the UK. Meanwhile, courts in the US have forced Meta to restrict the amount of access that children have to their products. While less than 1% of Facebook’s revenue comes from teens, the precedents set by these legal cases appear significant.

However, we also live in a very different algorithmic age than the one heralded by the launch of the News Feed 20 years ago. While Meta continues to derive most of its revenue from its social network platforms, which also include Instagram and WhatsApp, recent investments and prospective AI product launches suggest its leadership believe future revenue streams will largely be tied to developments in machine learning, large language models and “superintelligence”.

The question is: will governments and other institutions react more quickly to the concerns raised by this new era of AI development than they did to the emergence of algorithms two decades ago? On past evidence, this looks unlikely.

Asher Kessler received funding from the Economic and Social Science Research Council.

Archaeopteryx is an icon of evolution and is often called the first bird. Scientists have long debated just how it took off from the ground but a recent study published by my colleagues and I has brought new insights to the mystery.

Our study compared Archaeopteryx with the anatomy of modern birds, and our findings suggest it generated the force needed to take off by taking several jumps forwards.

Archaeopteryx, a fossil uncovered from the Jurassic rocks of Germany, dates back 150 million years. It was covered in feathers and it had wings. But it retained a number of distinctly dinosaur features such as a long bony tail, claws on separate fingers and teeth in a beakless jaw.

Charles Darwin predicted, in the first edition of On the Origin of Species published in 1859, that fossils would later be found linking major groups of animals. A year after publication a feather, and within two years, an entire skeleton of Archaeopteryx had been discovered, showing clear links between birds and the dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx is one of those transitional forms that links one group to another.

The “first bird” was not perfectly developed, as birds have evolved to be today. We would not expect them to be. It had relatively weak flight muscles, with no keeled sternum for strong muscle attachment, and could not have raised its wings above the horizontal.

Rather than call it the first bird, it is better to describe it as the earliest branching species, yet known, on the lineage of birds after the whole bird group split from non-avian dinosaurs some time more than 150 million years ago.

In 2016 my friend Colin Palmer asked a colleague, Markus Heller (professor of biomechanics) and me to join him in exploring a tricky problem: how did early birds slip the bonds of Earth and take to the sky?

Palmer had been working on the flying cousins of dinosaurs, the pterosaurs for over a decade, and also a peculiar (although now one among several known) four-winged, feathered and flying dinosaur called Microraptor. However, pterosaurs are not dinosaurs and Microraptor is a dinosaur closer to Velociraptor (small meat-eating dinosaurs) than to birds.

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Read more: How ancient flying reptiles ruled the skies – new research

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There have been a number of suggested mechanisms for the evolution of flight and takeoff, quite literally from the ground up, or the trees down, to flapping while running to climb a slope. The problem is that these are difficult to test experimentally. So we turned instead to the best example of takeoff there is: birds themselves.

Palmer had already filmed a number of birds, out of curiosity. As some other scientists had observed, but had never followed up, Palmer saw that they all showed the same sort of pre-takeoff behaviour. Two leg jumping. The wings appeared to do little in getting the bird off the ground, and this opened up some possibilities for research into the earliest of birds.

The ancestors of birds, the theropod dinosaurs, had powerful legs. They could definitely jump, and jumping could provide an important evolutionary advantage. Being able to get out of the way of a hunter, and maybe adding in a flap of your feathered arms to extend your leap, might just save your life.

The first bit of this research, which we carried out with then undergraduate student Erik Meilak, was developing a means to see how much force the hindlimbs of birds generate in getting off the ground. We used a force plate (a modified kitchen scale) and a Raspberry Pi computer controlling some high-speed photography, along with CT scanning of the skeleton to see exactly how bones were articulated. We worked out how magpies got off the ground. They used their legs as the primary generator.

This undergraduate summer project became a fully-fledged PhD project, with Meilak looking at several birds such as starlings and crows. We worked with evolutionary biologist Pauline Provini in Paris who had done work with doves and finches, demonstrating how all of these birds used their legs in takeoff.

And with detailed kinematics, all of the forces and moments generated by the muscles around the hindlimb joints, we fitted the model to Archaeopteryx and looked to see if the first bird could get into the air in a similar way to modern birds.

Archaeopteryx is by definition 150 million years behind the “leaps” of modern birds, and couldn’t take off as we had observed modern birds do when startled, explosively, with a single jump and then add flapping into the sky. Archaeopteryx couldn’t do that, and as I said couldn’t rely on its wings for powerful flaps. So we had asked what its legs could do. And like birds today, when taking off more leisurely, we demonstrated that Archaeopteryx could have got into the air with two leg leaps. Archaeopteryx could have used three jumps increasing in velocity, and once airborne its flapping wings could have maintained a flight speed of 7 metres per second.

However, if Archaeopteryx had added in a flap, it would have got to that speed – jump-flap-jump – with just two leaps. And all this without the highly evolved and flight-adapted anatomy of pigeons, crows, hawks and even chickens.

In the future we may find a fossil that is still a bird rather than a non-avian dinosaur, but is less, well, “birdy” than Archaeopteryx, and then that would become the earliest branching taxon. But we haven’t yet. So Archaeopteryx still sits on its perch as the first bird that we know of.

Neil J. Gostling is an Associate Professor in the School of Biological Sciences at The University of Southampton. The work described here was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (grant number NE/L002531/1).

Most of the countryside around the Holnicote estate in Somerset has been dry and dusty for most of the summer. But one corner remains conspicuously green.

Here in south-west England, an animal that was made extinct in Britain in the 16th century, mostly because of hunting, is making a comeback. Reintroduced just six years ago, beavers have helped turn a small watercourse on the estate into a wet meadow – a true oasis amid the parched landscape.

It is an Instagram-worthy example of why reintroducing beavers to more of Britain could help us prepare for the next drought. It shows how they reshape rivers and the surrounding land to hold water in the landscape for longer, rather than allowing it to drain away rapidly.

Beavers are often called ecosystem engineers. They fell small trees, build dams and dig channels. Water backs up behind their dams, spills across the valley bottom and soaks into the surrounding soil. Sediment and woody debris accumulate, while wetland plants establish themselves.

The result can be a mosaic of ponds, channels, marshes and wet woodland. During dry weather, this stored water can keep soil and vegetation wetter for longer.

This effect was highlighted in a 2008 Canadian study that examined aerial photographs of Elk Island National Park in Alberta over 54 years. Beavers had disappeared from that landscape in the 19th century, but returned in 1954.

The number of active beaver lodges, where beavers live and raise their young, was found to explain more than 80% of the variation in the area of open water. During 2002, the driest year studied, wetlands with beavers on them contained nine times more open water than those without them.

This does not mean releasing beavers in Britain will reproduce the Canadian numbers. It is a different beaver species in a different landscape, and the effects of any beaver colony depend on the shape, soils and land use of its catchment. But British research points in the same direction.

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Read more: Over 75% of UK wetlands have been destroyed – restoring them would help prevent wildfires

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Researchers studying a beaver enclosure on an intensively managed grassland in Devon in 2011 found that 13 dams stored around 1 million litres of additional water. The dam structures built by the beavers held back the stream to create a series of ponds. Because such dams are leaky, this water was released gradually, slowing storm flows while maintaining water downstream during dry periods.

More recent work across four wild beaver territories in Devon estimated that their wetlands held more than 24 million litres of water.

Why we need wet land

Holding more water in a landscape has another increasingly important benefit: it helps vegetation stay green. Healthy, damp vegetation is harder to burn, so beaver wetlands may provide refuges for wildlife and help interrupt a fire’s progress.

A 2020 study of five wildfires in the western US found that streamside vegetation in beaver-dammed areas was three times less affected than comparable areas without beavers.

Again, this does not prove that beavers will always stop British wildfires. Our landscapes, vegetation and fires differ from those of the western US. A wet strip beside a stream is no substitute for proper wildfire prevention and response. But creating wetter, greener corridors through a drying landscape is a useful extra layer of protection.

Beavers are not suitable for every watercourse. Their engineering can flood farmland, block culverts and damage trees. So, reintroductions need proper assessment, long-term management and support for affected landowners. England now requires a licence and a management plan for any beaver releases into the wild.

A ‘welly belt’ of wetlands?

We also shouldn’t expect beavers to repair the whole landscape. There’s other work to do, including restoring peatlands, ponds and marshes, reconnecting rivers with their floodplains, and re-establishing vegetated buffer strips along watercourses.

The UK could establish a “welly belt”: a connected network of wetland areas where needing waterproof boots is recognised as a useful feature, rather than an engineering fault to be drained away. Beaver-made wetlands could form an important part of that network, if managed correctly.

The need for careful management has recently been highlighted in Norfolk, where two wild beavers that mysteriously appeared on the River Wensum have produced the county’s first kits for more than 500 years.

Some suspect an illegal release, sometimes called “beaver bombing”. But tempting as it may sound to revive the US’s wonderfully eccentric 1948 experiment, which used surplus wartime parachutes to relocate troublesome beavers into remote parts of Idaho, Britain needs planned releases – not airborne rodents.

We do need far more beavers, though, in the right places. They will not end drought or wildfires. But they can help put water back into a landscape we have spent centuries draining – and keep it there until we need it.

Christian Dunn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Since Star Trek began sending its crews out to explore strange new worlds 60 years ago, the franchise has both imagined and inspired new concepts for travel across the vast distances of space.

Among the most intriguing are “wormholes”: mysterious tunnels through spacetime that connect otherwise distant places.

Star Trek always has a difficult balance to strike in making its portrayals both accessible and scientifically accurate. With wormholes, it generally favoured the former on their occasional appearances.

On screen, one end of the wormhole will often appear as a swirling vortex or tunnel. In fact, computer simulations of these theoretical space shortcuts suggest that the opening would look more like soap bubbles or crystal balls, with their surfaces showing distorted and multiplied images of whatever lies on the other side.

You could fly all around this opening and enter it from any direction, and rather than reaching the centre of the bubble, you would emerge from another similar bubble (the other end of the wormhole) somewhere totally different.

Of course, the most important question for both Starfleet captains and theoretical physicists is: should you fly into a wormhole? The job of a starship captain may be to boldly go, but as a very risk-averse physicist, I’m not so sure.

The first Star Trek wormhole

“Wormhole distortion has overloaded the main power systems!” These words, spoken by Commander Willard Decker in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), marked the first appearance of a wormhole in Star Trek.

A warp drive malfunction leads to the creation of a distorted region of spacetime that sucks in the Starship Enterprise, leading to a breakdown of the ship’s systems and a potentially deadly collision with a random asteroid.

It is a typically pioneering reference to what was, at the time, a niche research topic. John Wheeler, professor of gravitational physics at Princeton University, had first coined the term with Charles Misner in their 1957 paper Classical Physics as Geometry, which aimed to describe electric charges like electrons as the ends of tunnels in space.

The first descriptions of traversable wormholes that satisfied Einstein’s equations of general relativity – configurations of matter that balance the spacetime curvature of the tunnel – were then independently published by H.G. Ellis and K. A. Bronnikov in 1973, although they didn’t use Wheeler’s moniker.

Six years later, the first Star Trek wormhole wasn’t an accurate depiction of what scientists and science fiction enthusiasts now understand by the term. For one thing, the wormhole doesn’t appear to lead anywhere, and it dissipates once the crew regain control of the ship and drop out of warp speed.

Nevertheless, as a researcher studying black holes and the early universe, I am rather fond of this scene – in part because it is actually possible to imagine warp drives (engines that bend spacetime to move the ship at faster-than-light speeds) distorting spacetime in this way.

If you put exotic matter (one with a negative pressure) into a small region of spacetime, Einstein’s equations of general relativity tell us that region can expand exponentially fast. And if the space around it is not expanding in the same way, where can all that new space go?

The answer, at least in this hypothetical scenario, is that it must balloon out into an entirely new universe, creating a wormhole in the process – a narrow passage that links the two regions.

If you’re thinking this sounds implausible, Einstein’s theory of general relativity is actually perfectly ok with things being larger on the inside. Indeed, such scenarios may (speculatively) have arisen from rare fluctuations in the early universe.

No slow-mo

Star Trek’s first depiction of a wormhole gets one aspect precisely wrong, though. In the film, the wormhole’s “temporal distortion” makes the crew move and speak in slow motion, struggling to fire the photon torpedoes that will save them from asteroid-impact obliteration.

While the gravitational time dilation predicted by Einstein could be a feature of wormhole spacetimes, it would not be experienced as slow motion by those who fly in. For them, time would pass completely normally, with their watch ticking at one second per second.

They might, however, emerge to find that their friends had aged far more than they had. But these friends wouldn’t have experienced time in fast-forward either. Both sides think time has passed normally, they just disagree about the amount.

Again, this seems like it shouldn’t really be allowed – but the same effect is experienced by clocks on GPS satellites put into orbit around the Earth. When brought back to Earth again, they are found to have experienced more time than an equivalent clock left on the Earth’s surface, due to having spent time in a weaker gravitational field.

Next Generation wormholes

By the late 1980s, Star Trek wormholes had achieved the ultimate sign of technological maturity – somebody was trying to sell one.

This depiction, in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94), more closely resembled the traversable wormhole framework co-developed by Kip Thorne in 1988. The US astrophysicist and future Nobel laureate had begun exploring the theoretical requirements for the existence of wormholes as portals connecting distant regions of space in the same universe.

Thorne showed that for a wormhole to be held open in a way that makes it traversable would require an exotic form of matter, violating certain energy conditions that physicists think ought to be respected at large scales.

As the Next Generation crew find out, you don’t just want to buy any old traversable wormhole – you need it to be a stable one. The original Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole uses the right kind of exotic matter as scaffolding to hold it open. But even tiny disturbances will cause it to rapidly collapse – as has been demonstrated in many numerical simulations.

A spinning version of the Ellis-Bronnikov wormhole appears potentially more robust, but its so-called “nonlinear stability” is yet to be established. Flying a starship through one of these would be a useful, if rather risky, test.

The space between what is mathematically possible and physically realistic has always been a key part of the magic of Star Trek, inspiring several generations of scientists to explore strange new spacetimes. But if a soap-bubble wormhole ever appears in front of my spacecraft, I would always let Starfleet go first.

Katy Clough receives funding from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) and the Simons Foundation. She will be speaking at the Star Trek Lates event at the Science Museum in London on Tuesday, September 8.

Stand in front of Turner’s Sun Rising Over Water (1825-30) and something odd tends to happen. The painting holds you, even though observers might struggle to say why. Maybe it is the colour, the balance, the composition, or the strange stillness the artwork seems to carry.

Whatever it is, you feel it long before you can explain why. And the stranger next to you, looking at the same canvas with the same awe in their eyes, very likely feels it too.

We often say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Yet show almost anyone a misty Chinese Song-dynasty mountain landscape, or the softly brushed figure of the Mona Lisa, and nearly everyone agrees that something striking is unfolding before them.

Beauty feels intensely private, and, at the same time, we keep discovering that we collectively share it. That contradiction is one of the longstanding puzzles in “neuroaesthetics” – the science of how the brain responds to art and beauty. How does our sense of beauty actually take shape in the brain?

In our latest study, published in Nature Communications, we tried to map that shared experience. We found that instead of representing it as a single entity, the brain instead splits aesthetic experience into two major strands. One strand handles what an image shows, whether a landscape, an object or a figure.

The other tracks how much pleasure it gives us, drawing on the same circuits that respond to food or money. These two separate neural systems combine to shape every judgment of beauty we make when viewing visual artworks.

Neuroscientists have long argued about this question, from positions that compete as often as they overlap. One camp focuses largely on perception, on how the brain takes in composition, contrast and form.

Another emphasises evaluation and reward, placing beauty in the brain’s value circuitry. A third looks to the brain systems behind imagination and self-reflection. Each account captures something real, but they had rarely been tested together in a single study.

Algorithms for art

We asked 34 volunteers to look at 96 traditional Chinese watercolour paintings inside a 7T MRI scanner, powerful enough to pick up the small shifts in blood flow that track the brain’s activity. Once they were out of the scanner, each participant rated how the paintings made them feel.

Instead of working straight from those raw ratings, however, we borrowed a tool from somewhere less obvious: the recommendation engines that power services such as Netflix and Spotify.

Known as collaborative filtering algorithms, these tools excel at detecting patterns of agreement buried in people’s preferences. When applied to our aesthetic ratings, they pulled out two dimensions running underneath everyone’s responses.

The first sorted the paintings from most figure-like to most landscape-like, a measure of what each picture conceptually depicts. The second sorted them from most disliked to most liked across all participants, a measure of emotional value, or hedonic value (the sensory enjoyment someone gets from an experience).

Despite their complementary contribution to the overall aesthetic experience, the brain kept these two dimensions remarkably separate. Visual content was read out along the visual pathways, the familiar circuits that let us tell a face from a scene.

Hedonic value, on the other hand, was decoded somewhere else, within deeper regions that handle reward and pleasure. Put simply, the brain seems to judge a visual painting with much the same machinery it uses to judge the rest of the world around us.

Changing the brain

We also found that how strongly the brain encoded this two-dimensional aesthetic landscape depended on a person’s expertise in visual arts. In particular, the difference showed up in the default mode network, a system of connections in the brain tied to imagination, consciousness, self-reflection and meaning-making that several leading theories place at the heart of aesthetic experience.

These results suggest that, beyond mere exposure, training in visual arts appears to change how the brain represents beauty in the first place.

This last point carries significant weight. If aesthetic experience has a measurable structure in the brain, and if making and viewing art can reshape it, then arts education starts to look less like enrichment and more like a kind of training that alters how perception, emotion and meaning are wired together. The clinical implications run along the same line.

Art-based therapies for depression, trauma and dementia have long been valued on instinct and anecdote. A clearer neural account gives us a way to test and sharpen them. Finally, as more of the images around us, in advertising, in design and on our screens, are generated by machines, knowing what beauty looks like inside the human brain matters more than ever.

Most often, we tend to treat beauty as something purely personal and assume that asking scientific questions about it misses the point. Building on pioneering work in the field of neuroaesthetics, our results suggest otherwise.

Beauty has a structure, and that structure says something about the kind of creature we have become over countless years of evolution. We do not simply look at the world, instead we cannot seem to stop judging it for its beauty.

Deniz Vatansever receives funding from the Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China.

Xinyu Liang receives funding from the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation and is a Visiting Scholar at Clare Hall and Division of Anaesthesia, University of Cambridge.

Emmanuel A Stamatakis does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Imagine getting into a London taxi. Someone is sitting in the driver’s seat, but the car is driving itself. If the autonomous system gets into difficulty, they must recognise what is happening, decide whether to intervene and, within seconds, potentially take control.

This is no longer hypothetical. Uber and the British autonomous driving company, Wayve, have been granted licences to operate self-driving taxis in London with human safety drivers seated inside, with more than 100,000 people having joined a waiting list for the service. Uber launched its service, with 15 autonomous vehicles, on September 3.

Much of the debate thus far has focused on whether robotaxis will eventually replace human drivers. But there is another important question: what happens to human skill when our job changes from doing something to watching a machine do it?

Driving involves reading the road, anticipating others’ behaviour, judging risk and responding to unexpected situations. Autonomous vehicles transfer much of this work to software, but humans don’t necessarily become unskilled; their expertise changes.

They become less of an operator and more of a critical supervisor. There is, however, a problem with this arrangement, one that was identified long before today’s enthusiasm for AI.

In 1983, Lisanne Bainbridge published an influential paper, Ironies of Automation, noting that automation tends to leave humans with the tasks machines find most difficult, namely, monitoring complex systems and dealing with unusual situations.

The irony is that automating routine work can leave people with fewer opportunities to practise the skills they need when something goes wrong. Applied to robotaxis, this paradox is striking: the better the autonomous system becomes at driving, the less its human supervisor needs to drive.

However, the less that person drives, the fewer opportunities they have to practise the skills they may suddenly need when the system encounters something it cannot handle.

Meaningful oversight

There are signs of a similar problem elsewhere. For example, a 2025 study of clinicians using AI-assisted colonoscopy found that after routinely working with AI, their ability to detect precancerous growths when working without the technology declined, falling from 28.4% before regular exposure to AI to 22.4% afterwards.

This does not mean that AI makes doctors worse, nor that autonomous vehicles will inevitably make people poor drivers. The significant distinction is between the performance of the human-machine system and the capabilities retained by the human within it.

A system can improve while the human supervisor becomes less practised. We hear about keeping a “human in the loop” in medicine, education, law and workplaces increasingly reliant on machine-generated analysis. However, having a human present is not the same thing as having meaningful human oversight.

For that, the person needs enough expertise to recognise when the machine is wrong, enough confidence to challenge, and enough authority to intervene.

A temporary job?

Robotaxis already operate in the US, China and the Middle East, sometimes without a supervisor. This raises an uncomfortable question about London’s safety drivers: do they represent a new kind of skilled occupation (expertise in supervising autonomous systems) or are they temporary workers, required until the technology is considered reliable enough to work alone?

There may, in other words, be two kinds of displacement happening. Eventually, the taxi driver may be displaced by the machine, but before that happens, driving itself becomes displaced by supervising. And that transformation is likely to reach far beyond transport.

The government had anticipated commercial trials beginning this year, but regulatory and technical hurdles have delayed the rollout. Transport for London has not published the guidance operators will need and no vehicles have thus far completed the approval process required for fully driverless passenger services.

The delay has been welcomed by some campaigners who have raised concerns ranging from employment and road safety, to privacy and the environmental costs associated with data intensive technologies. However, the postponement should not be read as evidence that autonomous vehicles have failed or that they are inherently unsafe.

Indeed, it highlights something more fascinating – that technological capability, regulation and social preparedness do not necessarily develop at the same speed.

Before fully autonomous vehicles can become ordinary features of London’s streets, regulators must confront questions that are partly technical but also ethical; such as, who supervises an autonomous system? Who is responsible when something goes wrong?

And at what point are we prepared to decide that the human supervisor is no longer needed? London’s delayed experiment is therefore testing a relationship with technology that is becoming increasingly familiar: machines performing while humans watch, judge and remain responsible.

As such, the challenge is no longer about keeping a “human in the loop”, but ensuring that when we do, humans retain the skills, judgment and agency that make their presence meaningful.

Gareth Evans-Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

I first heard about Harriet Taylor Mill when reading about her much more famous collaborator and future husband, the British philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill.

Appropriately for someone who remains in the margins of history despite her enormous contribution – including to her husband’s status – Taylor Mill was deeply angered by injustice. Throughout her life, she railed against the way society made it impossible for women to freely develop their individuality, arguing this was important for everybody – not just men.

In Enfranchisement of Women (1851), Taylor Mill’s only solo-authored essay published during her lifetime, she asked why women were still regarded as “mere appendages” to men without interests of their own. Her answer was characteristically blunt: “The only reason which can be given is that men like it.”

More than 20 years before her husband’s best-known work, On Liberty (1859) was published without any credit for her contribution, she had outlined what would become famous in that book as the “harm principle”: “Every human being has the right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other.”

Her arguments were always on the side of independence, her sympathies with the powerless and oppressed. She astutely diagnosed the key political and economic question posed by the industrial revolution as being whether “the lot of the poor should be regulated for them, or by them”.

Taylor Mill was also a ferocious defender of “the pleasure of self-dependence” and the right to free speech. Her views were summarised in a programme of reform she outlined in the late 1840s that would be radical if instituted today, never mind two centuries ago.

She called for the establishment of secular educational schools and universities, complete freedom of speech, all occupations to be equally open to men and women, radical limits to the amount people could inherit – and for marriage “to be like any other partnership: dissoluble at pleasure”.

With words that were often witty and pithy, Taylor Mill cut to the heart of issues in political thought such as patriarchy, socio-economic justice and freedom. In my view, she is long overdue a more significant place in the canon of western social philosophy.

Vulnerable to abuse and exploitation

In the 1830s, while tending to three young children from her first marriage, Taylor Mill wrote for the Westminster Review on a variety of political and philosophical subjects, from colonialism in Australia to Plato via political biographies. Her critiques were always pro-democratic and anti-aristocratic.

She also wrote many unpublished articles on the social, political and economic structures which rendered women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their spouses – and on the ethics of love, marriage and divorce. Her invocation of the principle that “the higher the kind of enjoyment, the greater the degree” foreshadowed Mill’s distinction between higher and lower pleasures in his book Utilitarianism, three decades later.

In the 1840s and ’50s, the Mills co-authored a series of excoriating newspaper articles on violence, especially domestic abuse. They railed at the unwillingness of the judicial system and police to tackle this issue, and the power inequalities which rendered people – especially women and those in subordinate positions – so vulnerable to brutality. Many of these arguments still resonate today.

Perfect equality was Taylor Mill’s ideal – in politics, the workplace and the home. But by this she did not mean equality of outcome. In their writings, the Mills endorsed a merit-based system of reward based on people’s efforts and talents, rather than what they had inherited.

They called for a “higher standard of justice” which would enable everyone to “work according to their capacity, and receive according to their wants”.

Ignored and even denied

Despite her lifelong commitment to fighting injustice and inequality, Taylor Mill’s immense contribution to her own husband’s work has largely been ignored – and even denied.

To be fair, Mill often sought to give authorial credit where it was due. But his earliest attempts were stymied by Harriet’s first husband, who felt it would draw too much attention to the Mills’ unconventional relationship.

When they eventually married in 1851, Mill tried to divest himself of the “power and control” over his wife which their marriage would legally grant him. He wrote: “I put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage … [and] repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of [it].”

Later, Mill carefully catalogued in his autobiography how many of the works published as “his” were, in fact, his efforts as “a mediator” between Taylor Mill and the public. He highlighted his “interpretations” of her ideas – often combined with inputs from the many fields in which he was a scholar.

Mill also re-published the celebrated essay Enfranchisement of Women, which had originally been published anonymously, under Taylor Mill’s name – and set correspondents straight about its authorship when they wrote to congratulate him, thinking it was his work.

But curiously, Mill’s desire to sing her praises for her work was used as an excuse to ignore her. According to one 1874 essay, published shortly after Mill’s death: “Men have been blinded by affection and bewitched by womankind … [but] John Stuart Mill out-Herods them all.”

In the view of this and many other critics, Mill’s love for his friend and eventual wife completely clouded his judgment of her intellectual capacities, about which he had been entirely deceived – or, at the very least, been “myopic”.

A hundred years after this “Harriet Taylor Mill myth” emerged, it was given a Freudian twist. Mill was said to have chosen her as a partner because she had the same first name as his mother, but the personality of his father.

This view was echoed as recently as 2022 when a biography argued that Mill – brought up in a “totalitarian micro-state” by his father – needed someone else from whom to take “orders” after his death. Other academics such as Jo Ellen Jacobs have refuted such perspectives as misogynistic.

Taylor Mill may well have expected such shoddy treatment in the years after her death in Avignon, France in 1858. But in the 21st century, it is high time she were recognised as an incisive, influential thinker in her own right.

Helen McCabe has, or has previously, received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.

In recent years, archaeologists from around the world have marked the centenaries of some of Iraq’s most influential archaeological discoveries.

The excavation of the ancient city of Ur, for example, transformed understanding of early urban life, long-distance trade, royal tombs and burial customs. There has also been a century of research into the Jemdet Nasr period – pivotal in the development of some of the world’s earliest administrative systems and forms of writing.

These milestones are reminders of the profound influence of the archaeology of ancient Mesopotamia. It continues to inspire generations of researchers around the world, including recent work led by the University of Glasgow at the archaeological site of Shakhi Kora in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq.

This has brought new insights into the nature of the first public institutions, their development and demise. Other surveys in southern Iraq seek to understand long-term human relationships with Iraq’s rapidly disappearing marshlands.

But these milestone celebrations and fresh discoveries also invite reflection about the role of Iraq’s scientists and institutions in this developing story of human civilisation.

Changing the narrative of loss and rescue

International discussions of Iraqi heritage have long been dominated by stories of catastrophe. These range from looting after the 2003 US-led invasion and the destruction wrought by Islamic State, to endangered archaeological sites and emergency efforts to save what remains.

Many of these represent genuine crises. But they also frame Iraqi archaeology as a narrative of loss and rescue, with international institutions as providers of expertise. Local archaeologists are often portrayed as recipients of support, rather than equal partners in shaping future research.

Today, Iraqi archaeologists are still underrepresented in the bodies that decide research priorities and interpretations. Many institutions generating archaeological knowledge about Iraq are disproportionately directed from outside the country.

So, when 20 archaeologists and heritage professionals from Iraq and the Kurdistan Region of Iraq gathered in Glasgow alongside international colleagues in May 2025, they seized the opportunity to shift this narrative. Their discussions ranged from social media misinformation to women’s participation in archaeological fieldwork and the challenges that climate change poses, both to heritage and local communities.

Such conversations often came back to one key question: who gets to decide what archaeology in Iraq should focus on today?

Attempts to decolonise archaeology

Discussions about the future of archaeology often focus on participation: who receives funding, who directs projects, and who is included as a collaborator or author. These questions are important.

But meaningful attempts to decolonise this field of study also need to address how archaeological problems are defined, whose expertise is recognised, and who gets to shape research priorities.

At the Glasgow workshop, Iraqi and Kurdish archaeologists, heritage professionals, government officials and university leaders were asked to identify the issues they regarded as most urgent. Creating space for them to articulate priorities marked an important shift away from externally imposed agendas.

The discussion on gender highlighted a striking contradiction in Iraq. At the University of Al-Qadisiyah in the city of Al Diwaniyah, women account for around 70% of archaeology students – yet only around 2% of Iraqi excavation team members and approximately 15% of academic leaders are women.

This raised the question: is increasing women’s participation just a demographic goal – or will it influence the breadth of knowledge produced through archaeology? For example, a wider range of participants may encourage more archaeological attention to labour, care, social relationships and community life in the ancient past, complementing the traditional focus on kings, temples and powerful states.

Redefining what heritage means

Iraq is among the countries most vulnerable to environmental change. The workshop also highlighted rising temperatures, extreme dust storms, water scarcity, soil salination and environmental degradation, stressing their impact on archaeological sites and the communities who depend on wetlands, springs and marshlands.

It became clear that “heritage” meant more than just preservation. Traditional relationships between communities and landscapes offer valuable lessons for adapting to environmental uncertainty. Archaeology becomes less about recovering the past, more about helping to imagine sustainable futures.

According to Rozhen Mohammed-Amin, president of the Cultural Heritage Organisation in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, one of the most significant achievements was bringing together people who are often “disconnected due to political and institutional divisions”.

Within months of the event, two women were promoted to senior positions at the University of Al-Qadisiyah. Participants also reported stronger engagement between Iraqi universities and the country’s State Board of Antiquities and Heritage.

These changes may seem modest – such developments rarely attract headlines in the way of a spectacular discovery or heritage emergency. But they may prove just as important to the future of archaeology – for Iraq and the wider world.

Claudia Glatz received funding from the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, which supported the workshop discussed in this article. Her research and heritage initiatives in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq have been supported by the British Academy, the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, the G.A. Wainwright Fund, the Cultural Protection Fund-British Council, the Royal Society of Edinburgh, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, and the National Science Foundation.

Daniel Calderbank works for the University of Glasgow. He has received funding from the Glasgow Centre for International Development and the British Institute for the Study of Iraq, which supported the workshop discussed in this article. He has also received research funding from the British Academy, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI), and the Royal Society of Edinburgh for research and heritage initiatives in Iraq.

Jaafar Jotheri does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Freely available satellite radar imaging is being used for the first time to help track colonies of endangered emperor penguins in Antarctica throughout the winter months.

Typically satellite images need sunlight to be useful, and Antarctica is dark in the winter. This has meant that colonies have been hidden at a critical time in the emperor penguin breeding cycle, when eggs are laid, chicks hatch and adults take part in those iconic huddles.

Almost 70 colonies of emperor penguins, many of which have never been visited by humans, occupy the sea ice that is fastened to the coastline surrounding Antarctica.

Now using synthetic aperture radar (SAR), an instrument operating on satellites that sends microwave pulses down to Earth, and measures how those pulses return, our research team has been able to track what the penguins do during these months.

Unlike other forms of satellite imagery, SAR is not reliant on sunlight, or affected by cloud, and therefore provides radar imagery of Antarctica through the dark polar winter.

SAR’s signal is sensitive to the properties of what it interacts with, and has been used for years in the poles to research things like the properties of sea ice and melt on glaciers.

When looking at SAR images from the free European Space Agency satellite, Sentinel-1, showing the location of an emperor penguin colony during winter, my team started to notice a bright white splodge of pixels moving around against a backdrop of dark, smooth sea ice.

Features like icebergs or rough sea ice can look bright in SAR imagery, but it didn’t make sense for those to be moving around at that time of year, when the sea ice was fixed and stable. Could it be the emperor penguin colony?

We soon found the same thing at the locations of other colonies – clusters of bright moving pixels on stable ice. We were then able to obtain optical images from September when the sunlight first starts returning, and compare them with the SAR, and confirmed it was indeed the colonies we were observing.

Tracking through the whole year

This finding opened up an exciting opportunity to track colonies throughout the whole breeding cycle, by combining SAR images in winter with optical images in spring/summer, and all using freely available data that has been routinely collected for years.

We went back through eight years, from 2017 to 2024, and followed three of the largest colonies year-round. We were able to follow their movement, sometimes even daily from early in the winter until chicks grow their first feathers in December and January.

We observed that colonies were typically less mobile in the winter, before spreading out and moving greater distances in the spring and summer. Interestingly, we found that the Atka Bay colony moved up from the sea ice onto the glacier ice that flows from the continent in seven of the eight years in the early spring. The colony did this despite the sea ice – the typically preferred habitat for the species – being stable. We need more research to understand why this is.

Satellite remote sensing has been a crucial tool for observing the emperor penguins in the summer months since 2009. It was discovered then that colonies could be found in satellite images because of the dark guano stains they leave on the snow and ice. Overall, these observations have revolutionised our understanding of the species and have led to the discovery of many more colonies.

After a period of stability, Antarctic sea ice has declined markedly since 2016 and likely entered a new state, characterised by lower extent and increased instability. Earlier this year, emperor penguins were added to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s red list and classified as endangered, predominantly due to projected declines in sea ice.

This makes better understanding and monitoring of emperor penguins more important than ever. The ability to observe colonies throughout the breeding cycle using freely available, routinely collected satellite data creates opportunities to better understand their response to changing environmental conditions.

Grant Macdonald receives funding through a Natural Environmental Research Council project. He is a member of the Green Party of England and Wales.

Heatwaves claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people in Europe’s capital cities this summer, as they experienced record temperatures.

In London, emergency wards filled with elderly patients injured after fainting in the heat. Meanwhile, the dry weather created subsidence and left homes with cracks.

In Paris temperatures exceeded 40°C in late June and people struggled to carry on their lives, and in Madrid, heatwaves burned thousands of hectares on the outskirts of the city.

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Read more: Can the searing European summer put climate action back on the agenda – or will disaster response take over?

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How trees can help

Thami carried out preliminary research on the results of extreme heat on European cities this summer. The study looked into how many buildings have adequate shade from trees. The results were striking.

In London, Paris and Madrid over 90% of buildings did not have enough shade around them to prevent urban heat island effects. These were among the worst results in cities we studied, but even the best performers had a majority of residents without adequate heat protection – cities like Hamburg (56% unprotected) and Barcelona (70% unprotected).

This builds on past research that shows how major cities around the world – including in Europe – tend to struggle to reach useful levels of tree canopies to create shade close to homes and workplaces. It suggests that that homes should have a view of three trees and be within a 300 m walk of a park.

Early results for my research suggests that huge portions of European cities are exposed to avoidable heat island effects.

How urban heat islands work

On many days during summer 2026 it didn’t get much cooler in the evening. This is because of what is known as the urban heat island effect. Cities typically lack shade, due to high rates of tree removal, sparse planting, and poor tree health and there are vast amounts of asphalt, clay and concrete. These are almost the perfect materials to soak up and hold heat from all that direct sunshine. Unshaded asphalt can reach over 70°C on heatwave days.

Even after sunset, cities stay hot because roads, buildings and footpaths begin to radiate their absorbed heat back at us as they cool. The urban heat island effect can add significantly to ambient temperatures, making a day that is already very hot (perhaps 35°C) even more dangerous in high-asphalt, low shade locations (over 40°C).

What could help?

Tree shading is an effective strategy to address this urban heat, with a range of other mental and physical health benefits to local residents. Trees prevent solar radiation reaching heat-absorbing materials such as asphalt, and also keep the sun off our bodies. Tree shade has been shown to reduce the heat absorbed by pedestrians by up to 18°C.

Healthy trees also push water out of their leaves as they photosynthesise, which soaks up heat as it evaporates. This evaporative cooling effect adds an extra few degrees of cooling, in addition to shading people and preventing heat island effects, even during heatwaves as long as trees still have access to water.

Where trees are needed

Planting more trees in cities in the wake of this summer’s heatwaves is going to help cool urban areas down. The thinktank, the Create Streets Foundation, found the temperature on an exposed paved area in London during one heatwave was 55°C but was 25-30°C in a shaded area metres away.

Looking at a city such as London, you might argue that it already has plenty of trees: around 8 million.

But trees are only effective tools against urban heat when they’re close to homes. A lush shady park 800m away isn’t going to prevent dangerous localised heat island effects for you and your neighbours.

The other crucial factor is that there are thresholds of shade cover that have to be reached for trees to actually offer substantial cooling. A few isolated trees creating small islands of shade aren’t enough. Adding more tree canopy has been shown to be effective at preventing urban heat islands when it reaches 30-40% overall shade cover, within 60m of homes and workplaces.

It will also be important to plant trees that are best able to cope with increasingly hot temperatures in Europe.

Adding just a few degrees to an already hot day sharply ramps up the danger that heat poses. In locations where heat islands bump up the ambient air temperature from 33°C to 37°C, or 35°C to 41°C, there’s an increase in patients attending hospital admissions’ rooms due to heat related illness. When air temperature increases above 35°C the human body’s ability to manage the heat is greatly reduced; cardiovascular strain, dehydration, potentially leading to heatstroke and the need for medical intervention.

When it makes nights hotter there are other ramifications. It is during the cooler night hours that the body loses heat to reset for the following day. If the body is still trying to cope with warm temperatures, 24°C and above, this impacts recovery and impairs sleep quality. This means we start the next day in deficit, both physiologically and cognitively, to cope with another hot day. Repeated exposure to days of high heat mean that the deficit builds over time.

Adding more trees works

Medellin in Colombia is an example of what happens when more plants are added to urban streets.

In just a few years, millions of plants and over 12,500 trees were added to form a network of lush greenways across Colombia’s second largest city.

This project has resulted in significant drops in temperature (of 4.5°C in some areas, and 2°C citywide).

There are signs that Paris and London are aware they need to make changes. The recently announced Heat Ready London plan includes a focus on urban greening.

Paris is already starting to add more green space. The city’s school streets programme not only creates safe, car-free areas close to local schools, but also has added more trees. Evidence already suggests that surfaces in school streets are 5°C cooler than their traffic-heavy counterparts, with fewer trees.

As Europe prepares for more hot summers, planting trees close to homes needs to be high on the agenda to help people cope.

Thami Croeser has previously recieved funding from The Australian Research Council, Greenlife Australia, and the European Union's Horizon 2020 program. He is a Director of the Australasian Green Infrastructure Network, a not-for-profit peak body. He occasionally provides urban forest advisory and analytics services in a private consulting capacity.

Simon Hodder has previously received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 program and UKRI, Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC).

More than a century ago, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung made introversion and extraversion central to his theory of psychological types.

Today, we tend to use “introvert” and “extrovert” as shorthand for how sociable someone is. Jung’s preferred spelling was “extravert”, and his distinction went considerably further than whether someone enjoys a party or likes to be around others.

Jung’s original distinction raises a question in the age of generative AI. If people differ in how they naturally orientate themselves towards their inner and outer worlds, should they also use AI differently?

In Psychological Types, published in 1921, Jung described introversion and extraversion as different orientations. He distinguished them by the direction of our interest: towards the subjective, inner world or towards objects and events outside ourselves.

Contemporary personality research does not simply reproduce Jung’s types. Recent studies examining personality and AI generally measure extraversion as one of the Big Five personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. This means that they should not be read as direct tests of Jung’s original theory.

For someone who tends towards introversion, generative AI may provide a useful bridge between private reflection and outward expression. For example, an introvert might feel that an idea feels very clear in their head, but when they try to explain it to someone else, the other person doesn’t get it. For some introverts, this can lead to frustration.

This is because people with this personality type sometimes have trouble moving from private thought to outward expression.

With AI, an idea does not have to arrive fully formed. Someone can give the AI model fragments, contradictions or half-developed thoughts and ask it to question them.

This is good for the introvert because the idea can be explored and externalised gradually in a relatively low pressure space. The AI can ask questions, request examples or challenge them before the idea is shared with another person.

This does not mean introverts “need” AI, or that extraverts do not reflect deeply. Personality and people are much more complex.

For someone who tends towards extraversion, the more useful role of AI might be almost the reverse. AI can supply more conversation, ideas and feedback. An extravert might gather opinions from colleagues and friends first, before sifting through the information to work out what they think. For people who tend towards this personality type, it may be about separating the signal from the noise.

Yet, AI, rather than clearing things up, may actually provide an externally orientated person with more noise. A better way might be to instruct the AI to stop generating ideas and create space for reflection, for instance: “Ask me questions that help me explore my own thoughts, rather than telling me what to think.”

Moving beyond

The same technology can reinforce our habitual way of thinking or help us move beyond it. This matters because emerging research suggests that we often like AI that resembles us.

A 2026 study published in Communications Psychology found that extraverted participants reported greater affiliation with an AI that used extraverted language.

In a separate experiment that was part of the same study, 64% of participants felt more engaged with an AI that mirrored their wider Big Five personality profile than one designed to display the opposite profile.

There is an important wrinkle. The researchers did not find equivalent evidence that introverted participants preferred an introverted AI. Moreover, they suggest that introversion may be harder to communicate through a short text conversation.

It is a useful reminder that personality matching is unlikely to be as simple as giving everyone an AI system that communicates like them.

Affirming behaviour

Other recent research further complicates the picture. A study presented at CHI 2026, an international conference on human-computer interaction, found that after people discussed personal topics with an AI, their reported self-concepts became more aligned with personality characteristics exhibited by the AI system.

Longer conversations were associated with greater alignment with the AI. Greater alignment was also associated with greater enjoyment of the conversation. Enjoyment, however, does not necessarily tell us whether an interaction is helping us.

Research published in Science in 2026 examined sycophantic AI: systems that excessively affirm the user’s views or behaviour, even when challenging them would be more appropriate.

When people discussed interpersonal conflicts with these systems, they became more convinced that they were right and less willing to take steps to repair the conflict.

Yet they also trusted the more agreeable responses, rated them more highly and were more willing to use the AI again. The troubling part is that the less helpful interaction may also be the more appealing one.

That creates a problem for the growing push towards personalised AI. If personalisation is primarily designed around what feels comfortable or validating, we may end up creating increasingly sophisticated psychological mirrors.

But which side of the mirror are we on? Does the AI become more like us, do we become more like the AI, or do we gradually meet somewhere in the middle?

Jung was not arguing that one orientation – introversion or extraversion – was better than the other. His concern was with psychological one-sidedness and what can happen when one psychological orientation becomes too dominant.

Perhaps personalised AI should not simply accommodate whichever tendencies come most naturally to us. For the introvert, it might sometimes provide a bridge from reflection to expression. For the extravert, it may be more useful as a way of slowing things down and creating space for reflection.

If AI can both adapt to our tendencies and subtly influence how we see ourselves, it has deeper implications for what personalisation actually means.

Perhaps the question is not simply what kind of AI suits us, but what our repeated interactions with it might encourage us to become.

Paul Jones does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Government experts are meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, to work towards a possible negotiating mandate on autonomous weapons systems (AWS). These are military systems that can select and engage targets without human intervention.

This major international gathering follows a recent call by the UN and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for urgent controls on these weapons, sometimes dubbed “killer robots” in descriptions by the media.

Recent events in Ukraine have further consolidated concerns that a slide towards weapons with full autonomy (and without meaningful human control) is well underway. According to the New York Times, a Russian drone attacked a petrol station in Zaporizhzhia on July 6, killing three civilians. What marked it out was the drone’s use of AI to decide where and when to strike.

The drone aircraft had been programmed to fly towards the petrol station. But on its approach, an AI system autonomously chose the precise target – probably propane tanks – based on its ability to recognise them.

On August 25, Mirjana Spoljaric, the president of the ICRC, and António Guterres, the secretary-general of the United Nations, issued their joint appeal to the international community to agree on legally binding rules regulating the development and use of AWS.

New technologies are making it cheaper and easier for nations to put together these weapons. Thus, the UN and ICRC appeal for binding rules could not be more urgent. The international community is ideally placed to start negotiations soon, building on many years of diplomatic talks.

For the past decade, governments have debated how AWS challenge existing international law and what should be done under the auspices of the convention on certain conventional weapons, a UN arms control framework. Since 2017, the group of governmental experts (GGE) on lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS) – which is part of the convention on certain conventional weapons – has convened typically twice a year.

The experts are meeting again this week in Geneva. The aim is to agree a governance framework and language for a rolling text that could be the foundation for negotiations. This text provides a baseline for continued discussions in November.

While this process has been rife with political disagreements, most experts agree on the need to retain some level of meaningful human control over the use of autonomous systems.

Moral significance

This demonstrates a shared sense by states participating in the process that human judgment is pivotal for the laws governing warfare. It also shows that the moral significance of warfare underlines the importance of human responsibility.

Human judgment is also embedded in international humanitarian law. Targeting processes require context-specific judgments about the targets themselves, potential harm to civilians from striking the target and other precautions. These tasks cannot be delegated to machines.

AI-enabled systems show how technology already shapes human perceptions of targets and risk. With autonomous weapons, the system shifts from influencing human judgement to exercising the targeting function itself.

Any AI system is only as good as the data it has been trained on, or that it works with. For armed conflicts, this data is difficult to come by and is almost always insufficient for dynamic and variable human contexts. This means many systems are likely to be technically inadequate.

The problem becomes quite visible with rules around assessing proportionality, for example, which is a context specific judgement about anticipated civilian harm versus military advantage.

Militaries may try to quantify targeting decisions in a way that creates the appearance of precision. However, the underlying legal judgment remains qualitative regardless. Technical accuracy, therefore, is not the same as lawfulness or moral consideration.

Only humans can understand the significance of respecting the inherent rights and dignity of other humans. Decisions to end human life must therefore be made qualitatively, by humans, in order to be morally and legally justifiable. Without this provision, and clear guidelines around it, we argue that governments risk running into a legal vacuum and a steep moral abyss.

AWS, especially those that prioritise speed and scale of action though AI, carry a significant risk of enabling an uncontrolled and rapid escalation. Escalation from crisis to war, or from conflict to a higher level of violence, could come about by erroneous indications of attack or by a simple sensor or computer error.

Unpredictable systems could give leaders false impressions of the capabilities of those systems. This could lead to overconfidence or encourage preemptive attacks.

Inevitable outcome?

One argument raised by academic researchers in the context of AWS is that they become necessary because they are inevitable. The risk is that more countries opt for full autonomy as components become cheaper and readily available, exacerbating an arms race.

However, an adversary’s conduct does not release a state from its own obligations under international humanitarian law. Following those rules is also part of what makes military force legitimate, including through civilian protection, precautions and accountability. We might turn the argument around and say: legally binding rules become inevitable, because they are absolutely necessary.

Governments and advocacy groups have worked hard over the past decade to put together a lucid proposal for the regulation of AWS. Some efforts are intended to prohibit those systems that target humans directly, or that are unpredictable and therefore cannot be meaningfully controlled by a human. All other AWS must be strictly regulated.

There are signs of political momentum. In November 2025, 156 states voted in favour of a UN General Assembly resolution that “draws attention to the serious challenges and concerns” that autonomous weapons raise. A legally binding instrument is possible, even if some states resist it.

The time is now. Clear, binding rules would help ensure that increasingly autonomous warfare does not make violence easier to unleash and harder to control.

Elke Schwarz is Vice-Chair for the International Committee for Robot Arms Control.

Jessica Dorsey is affiliated with Airwars as a member of the Executive Board and a member of the Advisory Board of the Atlantische Commissie.

One bee has long been regarded as a benchmark for visual performance: the honeybee drone.

These male honeybees (Apis mellifera) have evolved highly specialised eyes for detecting queens during mating flights. They are extraordinarily sensitive to tiny moving objects less than half a degree across. In human terms, that’s like spotting a person more than 250 metres away.

Honeybees have dominated research on bee vision for more than a century. But some of the most impressive visual performances measured in our new study came from rarely studied, solitary species.

While the honeybee lives in massive colonies, most bee species are solitary so must do everything themselves: find food, locate mates, provision their nests. In terms of vision, several of the solitary species we researched outperformed honeybee workers in a number of ways, including the sharpness of images formed by their eyes.

Understanding how these different evolutionary solutions work is important for more than just understanding bee biology. It could provide ideas for nature-inspired technologies, from compact visual sensors to autonomous robots.

How bees’ eyes have adapted

With more than 20,000 species worldwide, bees show extraordinary diversity in lifestyle, body size and ecological role. Some live in open environments; others forage in dense vegetation or in dim light at dawn, dusk and even at night.

Such remarkable diversity prompted us to ask the question: how have bees’ eyes adapted to such different lifestyles and visual demands?

Bees see the world through compound eyes made up of thousands of tiny lenses. These odd-looking structures are their main tools to navigate, locate flowers and identify important landmarks.

Our new study of some daytime-active bee species shows that even bees with similar-looking eyes can achieve impressive visual performance in surprisingly different ways.

Male wool carder bees (Anthidium manicatum), for example, spend much of their day patrolling territories and chasing rivals or potential mates through the air. This bee pushes visual sharpness to the limit with its exceptionally small photoreceptors that minimise optical blur. In contrast, honeybee drones have evolved large lenses that maximise sensitivity.

The Australian blue-banded bee (Amegilla) manages to detect small objects and see sharp images just as well without either of these extreme strategies. Instead, it achieves similar visual performance using a different combination of optical design and sampling.

From the outside, the eyes of these bees all look very similar. But when we looked more closely, we found the size of their visual sensors (photoreceptors) differed greatly.

These light-sensitive structures are a bit like the pixels in a smartphone camera. They sit behind the bees’ tiny eye lenses, converting light into electrical signals. Larger pixels capture more light, improving sensitivity, while smaller ones can help preserve image sharpness.

The challenge – for smartphone designers and evolution alike – is balancing these competing demands.

Something unexpected

Looking at anatomy tells us how the eye is built, but not how well it performs. To answer this question, we recorded directly from individual photoreceptors in living bees.

We used glass microelectrodes with tips just a few tens of nanometers wide – thousands of times thinner than a human hair. That allowed us, for the first time in these species, to measure the tiny electrical signals that single cells produce when the bees were shown tiny objects on a computer display.

Our results revealed something unexpected. The diminutive Australian blue-banded bee lacks the enormous eyes of a honeybee drone, yet achieved a similar level of sensitivity in its photoreceptors.

At first glance, this seems paradoxical. How can bee eyes built so differently perform so similarly?

The answer is that evolution is not working towards a single ideal design. Different species have arrived at similar visual performance through different combinations of optical design, photoreceptor structure and visual sampling.

Our findings show why it is important to look beyond a handful of familiar species. By studying a wider range of bees, we can better understand how different senses have evolved, leading to a variety of adaptive solutions.

This is true not only for vision but for other traits, including how bees respond to environmental stresses such as heat and pesticide exposure.

Unique evolutionary innovations

Through our research, we are just beginning to appreciate the remarkably different ways of seeing the world that bees have evolved.

Different bee species have evolved different solutions to the challenges of seeing their world. For example, the Australian blue-banded bee is a buzz pollinator, able to vibrate flowers to release pollen in a way that honeybees cannot. This makes it a potentially valuable pollinator of crops such as tomatoes in Australia, where bumblebees are not naturally present.

Such diverse evolutionary solutions may also prove useful to engineers. Designers of cameras, robots and autonomous vehicles face many of the same challenges as bees: how to gather enough visual information while keeping sensors small, efficient and affordable.

Bees and other insects have been a fruitful source of inspiration for artificial vision systems. In our previous work, we developed computational models based on insect target motion processing that turned out to be as robust as alternative engineered solutions, with large benefits in processing efficiency.

We have now translated these models on to an autonomous robot that can pursue moving targets within natural scenes and even into autonomous flying drones.

Unfortunately, as bee diversity declines worldwide, there is a risk that we lose not only species, but the unique evolutionary innovations that have taken millions of years to develop.

Elisa Rigosi receives funding from The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet).

David O'carroll receives funding from The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) & The Australian Research Council .