New Scientist changed the UK's freedom of information laws in 2025 By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account Our successful request for Peter Kyle's ChatGPT logs stunned observers When I fired off an email at the start of 2025, I hadn't intended to set a legal precedent for how the UK government handles its interactions with AI chatbots, but that is exactly what happened. It all began in January when I read an interview with the then-UK tech secretary Peter Kyle in . Trying to suggest he used first-hand the technology his department was set up to regulate, Kyle said that he would often have conversations with ChatGPT. AI may blunt our thinking skills - here's what you can do about it That got me wondering: could I obtain his chat history? Freedom of information (FOI) laws are often deployed to obtain emails and other documents produced by public bodies, but past precedent has suggested that some private data - such as search queries - aren't eligible for release in this way. I was interested to see which way the chatbot conversations would be categorised.

Chinese robotaxis could be set to hit UK roads in 2026 as ride-sharing apps Uber and Lyft announce partnerships with Baidu to trial the tech. The two companies are hoping to obtain approval from regulators to test the autonomous vehicles in London. Baidu's Apollo Go driverless taxi service already operates in dozens of cities, mostly in China, and has accrued millions of rides without a human behind the wheel. Transport secretary Heidi Alexander said the news was another vote of confidence in our plans for self-driving vehicles - but many remain sceptical about their safety. We're planning for self-driving cars to carry passengers for the first time from spring, under our pilot scheme - harnessing this technology safely and responsibly to transform travel, Ms Alexander said in a post on X .

Smartwatches are cool and all, but have you considered wearable neurotech? Ten years ago, a Fitbit was about as sophisticated a wearable as you could get. Then came the sleeker, more unassuming Oura ring . Now there's a new breed of wearables--built for your head. Instead of tracking your step count, heart rate, and skin temperature, these devices are designed to read your brain waves.

Proven methods for teaching the readers who struggle most have been known for decades. Why do we often fail to use them? "There's a window of opportunity to intervene," Mark Seidenberg, a cognitive neuroscientist, said. "You don't want to let that go." In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment. Caroline's academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. "I can't remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless," she told me. She hid her disability by turning pages when her classmates did, and by volunteering to draw illustrations during group story-writing projects. One day, she told her grandmother that she could sound out individual letters but when she got to "the end of a row" she couldn't remember what had come before. A psychologist eventually identified her condition as dyslexia. Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it's more complicated than that.

The world's most powerful people have started to realise that games have immense influence - why else would the White House post an image of Trump as Halo's Master Chief? The world's most powerful people have started to realise that games have immense influence - why else would the White House post an image of Trump as Halo's Master Chief? State of play: who holds the power in the video games industry in 2025? I love playing video games, but what interests me most as a journalist are the ways in which games intersect with real life. One of the joys of spending 20 years on this beat has been meeting hundreds of people whose lives have been meaningfully enhanced by games, and as their cultural influence has grown, these stories have become more and more plentiful. There is another side to this, however.

Over the course of 2025, we had the pleasure of finding out more about a whole range of AI topics from researchers around the world. Here, we highlight some of our favourite interviews from the past 12 months. We caught up with Erica Kimei to find out about her research studying gas emissions from agriculture, specifically ruminant livestock. Erica combines machine learning and remote sensing technology to monitor and forecast such emissions. We spoke to Yuki Mitsufuji, Lead Research Scientist at Sony AI, to find out more about two pieces of research that his team presented at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2024).

US and Ukrainian envoys say productive and constructive talks have taken place in Miami, but there still appears to be no major breakthrough in efforts to end Ukraine's war with Russia. Donald Trump's special envoy, Steve Witkoff, issued a joint statement with the top Ukrainian negotiator, Rustem Umerov, after three days of meetings with European allies. The pair said the meeting focused on aligning positions on a 20-point plan, a multilateral security guarantee framework, a US Security guarantee framework for Ukraine and an economic & prosperity plan. Separate talks have been taking place in Miami between the US and the Russian envoy, Kirill Dmitriev. Our shared priority is to stop the killing, ensure guaranteed security, and create conditions for Ukraine's recovery, stability, and long-term prosperity, Witkoff and Umerov said in a statement.

A widespread power failure plunged San Francisco into darkness on Saturday night, disrupting traffic citywide and forcing numerous self-driving Waymo taxis to stop abruptly in the middle of streets and intersections. As electricity went out across large portions of the city, traffic signals failed, leaving autonomous vehicles unable to operate as normal. Photos and videos shared by users on X showed Waymo robotaxis frozen in place, backing up traffic and creating hazardous conditions for other drivers. Waymo confirmed on Saturday evening that it had shut down its driverless ride-hailing service throughout San Francisco after footage circulated online showing its vehicles blocking roads during the blackout. "We have temporarily suspended our ride-hailing services in the San Francisco Bay Area due to the widespread power outage," Waymo spokesperson Suzanne Philion said in a statement to several news outlets.

The team even extracted DNA from a tiny 100-year-old butterfly leg. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. When you think of butterflies, chances are you imagine unmistakable insects with bright, bold wings. But it turns out that individual butterfly species are sometimes shockingly difficult to tell apart. "Thanks to the genetic revolution and the collaboration of researchers and museums in various countries led by London's Natural History Museum, century-old butterflies are now speaking to us," Christophe Faynel, an entomologist at the Société entomologique Antilles Guyane, said in a statement .

'Extremist movements are using voice-generating bots to recreate the voices and speeches of major figures in their milieu.' 'Extremist movements are using voice-generating bots to recreate the voices and speeches of major figures in their milieu.' Extremists are using AI voice cloning to supercharge propaganda. Experts say it's helping them grow W hile the artificial intelligence boom is upending sections of the music industry, voice generating bots are also becoming a boon to another unlikely corner of the internet: extremist movements that are using them to recreate the voices and speeches of major figures in their milieu, and experts say it is helping them grow. "The adoption of AI-enabled translation by terrorists and extremists marks a significant evolution in digital propaganda strategies," said Lucas Webber, a senior threat intelligence analyst at Tech Against Terrorism and a research fellow at the Soufan Center.