How much do you know about friction? Jennifer R. Vail's charming, if sometimes technical, biography of the force showcases its amazing and largely overlooked role in everything from climate change to dark matter, says Karmela Padavic-Callaghan IN 2009, World Aquatics banned a specific type of swimsuit from all international competitions in water sports, ruling that it gave athletes an unfair advantage. The development of this swimsuit included using NASA's testing facilities and sophisticated computer software. Some versions had ultrasonically welded seams instead of traditional stitches. Swimmers who wore the suit broke 23 of the 25 world records set at the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

The head of Google’s DeepMind says artificial intelligence could usher in an era of ‘incredible productivity’ and ‘radical abundance’. But who will it benefit? And why does he wish the tech giants had moved more slowly?

Right now, most big AI labs have a team figuring out ways that rogue AIs might escape supervision, or secretly collude with each other against humans. But there's a more mundane way we could lose control of civilisation: we might simply become obsolete. This wouldn't require any hidden plots – if AI and robotics keep improving, it's what happens by default. Well, AI developers are firmly on track to build better replacements for humans in almost every role we play: not just economically as workers and decision-makers, but culturally as artists and creators, and even socially as friends and romantic companions. What place will humans have when AI can do everything we do, only better?

Our estimates of rural populations have systematically underestimated the actual number of people living in these regions by at least half, researchers have claimed – with potentially huge impacts on global population levels and planning for public services. However, the findings are disputed by demographers, who say any such underestimates are unlikely to alter national or global head counts. Josias Láng-Ritter and his colleagues at Aalto University, Finland, were working to understand the extent to which dam construction projects caused people to be resettled, but while estimating populations, they kept getting vastly different numbers to official statistics. To investigate, they used data on 307 dam projects in 35 countries, including China, Brazil, Australia and Poland, all completed between 1980 and 2010, taking the number of people reported as resettled in each case as the population in that area prior to displacement. They then cross-checked these numbers against five major population datasets that break down areas into a grid of squares and estimate the number of people living in each square to arrive at totals.

Many years ago, when Civilization II was on its way, I'd just started as a writer on the video game magazine Edge. As a fan of the original Civilization, a complex turn-based strategy sim about building vast kingdoms through thousands of years of human history, I was keen to review the sequel and my editor let me. Reader, I became completely addicted. I played the game for two weeks non-stop, leaving many pages of the magazine unwritten. This earned me a very severe written warning.

In 1977, the Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope captured a signal from space so strange that scientists are still baffled by it almost 50 years later. For decades, scientists have struggled to find any natural process capable of producing the 72-second burst which prompted astronomer Jerry Ehman to write'WOW!' on the telescope's readout. Now, new analysis of the so-called WOW! signal has revealed that it might have been caused by a hugely powerful laser slamming into Earth. Experts say this was not the first salvo of an alien invasion, but rather the entirely natural product of a rare alignment between a collapsed star and a cloud of cool hydrogen. Unfortunately for alien-hunters, scientists from the University of Puerto Rico at Arecibo say this new evidence shows that the WOW! signal is not evidence of life beyond Earth.

In his address to the United States Congress on July 24, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu brought up his vision of a "new Gaza" to emerge once his country's brutal aggression against the strip ends. He spoke of a "future of security, prosperity and peace". In May, his office released a detailed outline called Gaza 2035, which featured bold plans for "rebuilding from nothing", "modern designs", "ports, pipelines, and railways". US President Joe Biden has not commented on Netanyahu's vision but he did allude to a "major reconstruction plan for Gaza" in his speech laying out a three-step ceasefire plan on May 31. This was followed by the June 10 UN Security Council resolution supporting his initiative.

Despite what UFO enthusiasts might claim, virtually every scientist agrees that humanity is yet to receive a message let alone a visitor from beyond our planet. But in the vast scale of the universe – containing an estimated 2 trillion galaxies – scientists say there is a '100 per cent chance' that there is life somewhere apart from Earth. This raises a intriguing question: If alien life truly is common in the Universe, why haven't we heard from them? From the'Dark Forest Hypothesis' to the inevitability of nuclear war, the answer to this question may offer a chilling glimpse into the future of our own civilisation. Professor Frederick Walter, a galactic astronomer from Stony Brook University says: 'Life is a biochemical process, it's going to happen, but as you go further down the chain things become more uncertain.'

When the history of our time comes to be written, one thing that will amaze historians is how an entire civilisation managed to impale itself on its worship of optimisation and efficiency. This obsession is what underpinned the hubris of globalisation. Apple's famous slogan "Designed by Apple in California, manufactured in China" became its guiding light. So long as products could be made available to consumers everywhere, it no longer mattered where they were made. We first twigged this when the pandemic struck, and we became suddenly aware of how fragile supply chains built to maximise efficiency could be.

Roman Yampolskiy thinks we live in a simulated universe, but that we could bust out. In the 4th century BC, the Greek philosopher Plato theorised that humans do not perceive the world as it really is. All we can see is shadows on a wall. In 2003, the Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper which formalised an argument to prove Plato was right. The reason for this is that if it is possible, and civilisations can become advanced without self-destructing, then there will be an enormous number of simulations, and it is vanishingly unlikely that any randomly selected civilisation (like us) is a naturally-occurring one.