Check your subscription status, update your details and more. An open-source flight-control system found in consumer drones has been installed in Ukraine's latest cruise missile, showing how cheap technology is making military hardware accessible to all Ukraine has developed a cheap cruise missile guided by an open-source autopilot system typically found in consumer drones. The use of hobby components highlights the shrinking gap between military and consumer electronics, which may make it easier for small countries and non-state actors to develop powerful high-tech weapons. With foreign long-range weapons hard to come by, Ukraine has had to develop its own. Fire Point, a Ukrainian company, showed off its FP-5 Flamingo cruise missile at the Eurosatory defence expo in Paris last month.

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. Can you guess the origin of 7 tiny species on a fictional archipelago? Late last year, between one news event and another (honestly, who can remember?), Feedback was delighted to discover the Journal of Imaginary Research . This is an online magazine publishing "short works of fiction", but only if they take the form of "imaginary research abstracts".

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. The controversial idea that consciousness has a quantum origin is facing a new challenge, after a mathematical analysis appears to show that a long-known law of physics makes it impossible. What physical process makes us conscious, and whether we could observe and analyse it, is one of the great open questions of modern science. In the 1990s, mathematician Roger Penrose and anesthesiologist Stuart Hameroff proposed that classical physics can't explain consciousness alone and so it must arise in the quantum realm. The idea was received with scepticism and remains controversial, but attempts to bring quantumness into explanations of consciousness have persisted since.

Check your subscription status, update your details and more. Powerful artificial intelligence models built by Chinese companies have gone from inducing widespread panic to being met with a shrug of the shoulders - what changed? When Chinese company DeepSeek released its open-source R1 model in January 2025, it made headlines around the world. The large language model (LLM) was reported to rival some of the most powerful AIs from US companies, but it was completely free for anyone to download. A trillion dollars was wiped off the value of US tech companies and US lawmakers immediately proposed banning it on government devices.