It was the beloved science-fiction writer's least favorite of her books. But it remains worth reading. Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time. You're already subscribed to the aa_Rebecca_Onion newsletter.

Pet owners, rescue agencies, and wildlife groups are calling for new safeguards as AI makes it harder to tell whether animals, from polar bears to house cats, are real or fake. AI-generated videos and pictures are destroying one of the largest and most enduring sources of joy and compassion on the internet: animals . Whether the imagery features sailors rescuing a polar bear, baby cows separated from their mothers, or a lost pet that was miraculously found, many people have reached the point where they can't take the creatures on their feeds at face value anymore. The explosion of deepfakes and AI slop over the past few years has led to widespread frustration among viewers, creators, and organizations that support animals, forcing everyone to hunt in the pixels for glitches or other telltale signs of AI. Mibbby Butler was overjoyed one day in April when she received a text message that her lost cat, Brooklyn, had supposedly been found.

Intervention follows days of delays and a near-miss between two planes on the Sydney aiport tarmac. Prue Car has asked Nesa to'urgently' examine AI and move to protect student learning amid growing evidence the technology is affecting student's cognitive development. Prue Car has asked Nesa to'urgently' examine AI and move to protect student learning amid growing evidence the technology is affecting student's cognitive development. Car said she has asked Nesa to "urgently" examine artificial intelligence and move to protect student learning amid growing evidence the technology is affecting student's cognitive development. Half of students' HSC result is based on school-based assessments, some of which is finished outside the classroom. Artificial intelligence has enormous potential to support teaching and learning, but it should never replace the thinking, creativity, and hard work that education is designed to develop.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating the crash. Michael Butler, the driver of a Tesla Model 3 that fatally struck a woman in her Texas home, manually overrode the car's Full Self-Driving (Supervised) system by pressing the accelerator pedal to 100 percent, according to a preliminary investigation from the National Transportation Safety Board. While local authorities initially reported that the Tesla's automated driving assistance system was engaged when Butler crashed into Martha Avila's home in June, the investigation says otherwise. According to the NTSB, the acceleration disabled the FSD system and the vehicle's speed was ultimately greater than 70 mph when the crash occurred. The investigation's preliminary findings match what Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy shared on X in June .

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Musk's company denies that its driving assistance system is to blame. The family of a woman killed after a Tesla, which was operating using an automated driving assistance system according to authorities, crashed into her home is suing both the company and the driver of the vehicle. As reported by, a lawsuit was filed in Harris County District Court by Jennifer and Justin Barbour, the daughter and son-in-law of the 76-year-old victim, Martha Avila. It accuses Tesla of a design defect, and the car's owner, Michael Butler, 44, of negligence. Butler's Tesla Model 3 allegedly collided with Avila's Katy, Texas, home at around 8pm on June 19, at which time she was standing in her front room.

Members of the New Scientist Book Club give their take on Sierra Greer's award-winning science-fiction novel Annie Bot, our read for February - and the needle swings wildly from positive to negative Annie Bot by Sierra Greer was the Book Club's January read The New Scientist Book Club moved on from reading a classic piece science fiction in December - Iain M. Banks's - to an award-winning sci-fi novel in January: Sierra Greer's, which won the Arthur C. Clarke prize in 2025. I must admit, I was nervous to announce this one to my fellow readers. is the story of a sex robot, owned by a controlling and abusive man. It gets very dark in places, it has a number of sex scenes, and I wanted to make sure you all knew what you were getting into before getting started. That cupboard scene, some way into the book, was super disturbing, for example. It turns out my wariness was warranted.

Few fantasies are harder to wipe away than the romance of a clean slate. Every January, when we're twitchy with regret and self-loathing, advertisers blare, "New Year, new you," urging us to jettison our failures and start fresh. In fiction, self-reinvention is a perennial theme, often shadowed by the suspicion that it can't be done. Lately, novelists have put a political spin on the idea, counterposing hopeful acts of individual self-fashioning to the immovable weight of circumstance. Halle Butler's "The New Me" (2019), a millennial office satire, finds its temp heroine, Millie, trying to life-hack her way out of loneliness and professional drift--buy a plant, whiten her teeth, make friends, think positive.

This nimble biography examines the life of the legendary science-fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose works, such as "Parable of the Sower," often articulated unsettling visions of social collapse. Born in California in 1947 to a domestic worker and a veteran, Butler found escape in sci-fi books as a child. As Morris shows, Butler's stories, which reckoned with chattel slavery, climate catastrophe, and fascism, were as deeply attuned to West African culture and myth as they were to the American civil-rights movement. Yet Morris contends that Butler's stories "were not nihilistic predictions but a sort of love offering for readers to receive and be changed by." In this ambitious book, Vellend, a biologist, attempts to establish a "generalized evolutionary theory" to stand alongside physics as a crucial paradigm for understanding "how everything came to be."

When I read a tweet about four noted Silicon Valley executives being inducted into a special detachment of the United States Army Reserve, including Meta CTO Andrew "Boz" Bosworth, I questioned its veracity. It's very hard to discern truth from satire in 2025, in part because of social media sites owned by Bosworth's company. But it indeed was true. Boz is now Lieutenant Colonel Bosworth. The other newly commissioned officers include Kevin Weil, OpenAI's head of product; Bob McGrew, a former OpenAI head of research now advising Mira Murati's company Thinking Machines Lab; and Shyam Sankar, the CTO of Palantir.