Abigail Marsh has found that many psychopaths don't want to be cruel and uncaring, and argues that they deserve support to help them get there Think of a psychopath and you probably picture someone dangerous, someone whose ruthless self-interest leads to great harm for others and considerable success for themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, while only around 1 per cent of people in the general population have psychopathy, roughly 1 in 5 men in prison show signs of it, and research has also found a link between corporate leadership and psychopathic traits . But just as it is painful to know a psychopath, it isn't necessarily fun to be one either. Abigail Marsh, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Georgetown University in Washington DC, studies those with psychopathic traits who largely lead ordinary lives among us. She has uncovered something surprising: many don't want to be psychopathic at all. Researchers are still honing the precise definition, but psychopathy is characterised by callousness, a lack of empathy, glib social charm and impulsivity.

A trial involving thousands of flights between the US and Europe has found that planes produce fewer contrails if they follow flight paths recommended by an artificial intelligence to reduce their global warming impact. The streaks of condensation triggered by soot particles produced by aircraft engines are thought to cause more warming than the carbon dioxide that planes emit. Research has also shown that some ice-rich regions of the upper atmosphere are more likely to form contrails when a plane passes through them, and that AI can predict where these regions will be using detailed weather forecasts. We're finally solving the puzzle of how clouds will affect our climate There have been small-scale trials showing that planes rerouted through these regions will produce fewer contrails, but the practice has yet to be applied to commercial flights at scale. Now, Dinesh Sanekommu at Google and his colleagues have used an AI contrail-forecasting tool to give routing advice in a randomised control trial of more than 2400 real American Airlines flights.

You can now buy a humanoid robot housekeeper for less than the price of a second-hand car. But before splashing out, there's something you need to know Science fiction is strewn with humanoid robots, from bad-tempered Bender in to cunning Ava in . And it has long seemed like that's the natural home for such robots - on the screen and in books. The idea of a walking, talking, functioning robot with two arms and two legs has appeared to be a distant dream. Last year, machines ran, boxed and even played football at China's World Humanoid Robot Games, albeit sometimes falling over in the process . Meanwhile, companies have been readying their own range of humanoids that promise to do something a bit more useful: help around the house .

AI is nearly exclusively designed by men - here's how to fix it With the Trump administration's attacks on so-called woke AI it is becoming even harder to make the technology we use fairer and more diverse. It's day two of the conference at the Royal Society in London, but I'm finding it increasingly hard to concentrate on the speakers because my AI transcription software - which is supposed to make my life easier - keeps insisting on mistyping someone's name. The irony isn't lost on me: this is the session about artificial intelligence, and specifically about how women are being erased from the latest AI technologies. This is much bigger than the now-familiar idea that AI algorithms carry the biases of the datasets they are trained on, including gender bias. Instead, the focus of the conference session, chaired by computer scientist Wendy Hall, is seeking to address a more fundamental issue: the fact that new AI technologies, which will have a transformative effect on all of society, are being designed almost exclusively by men.

The errors that quantum computers make are holding the technology back. Quantum computers won't be truly useful until they can correct their mistakes Quantum computers are already here, but they make far too many errors. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to the technology really becoming useful, but recent breakthroughs suggest a solution may be on the horizon. Errors creep into traditional computers too, but there are well-established techniques for correcting them. They rely on redundancy, where extra bits are used to detect when 0s incorrectly swap to 1s or vice versa.

We don't know if AI-powered toys are safe, but they're here anyway Toys powered by AI show a worrying lack of emotional understanding. Mya, aged 3, and her mother Vicky playing with an AI toy called Gabbo during an observation at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Education Even the most cutting-edge AI models are prone to presenting fabrication as fact, dispensing dangerous information and failing to grasp social cues. Despite this, toys equipped with AI that can chat with children are a burgeoning industry. Some scientists are warning that the devices could be risky and require strict regulation. In the latest study, researchers even observed a 5-year-old telling such a toy "I love you", to which it replied: "As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed."

Chemistry may not be the'killer app' for quantum computers after all Quantum chemistry calculations that could advance drug development or agriculture have recently emerged as a promising "killer application" of quantum computers, but a new analysis suggests this is unlikely to be the case. Progress in building quantum computers has greatly accelerated in recent years, but it remains an open question what uses are most likely to justify the ongoing investment in this technology. One popular contender is solving problems in quantum chemistry, such as calculating the energy levels of molecules relevant for biomedicine or industry. This requires accounting for the behavior of many quantum particles - electrons in the molecule - simultaneously, so it seems like a good match for computers made from many quantum parts. Quantum computers have finally arrived, but will they ever be useful? However, Xavier Waintal at CEA Grenoble in France and his colleagues have now shown that two leading quantum computing algorithms for this task may actually have, at best, limited use.

Why the world's militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink The reliable internet connections provided by Starlink offer a huge advantage on the battlefield. Starlink's satellite constellation provides a reliable internet connection to almost anywhere on Earth, conferring an advantage on the modern battlefield. But it is also run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, presenting a risk to militaries that could easily find themselves cut off. So, now countries are racing to build their own version. The Starlink network consists of almost 10,000 satellites that offer internet connections across most of the planet via small dishes on the ground.

The speed at which artificial intelligence is gaining in mathematical ability has taken many by surprise. Are the days of handwritten mathematics coming to an end? In March 2025, mathematician Daniel Litt made a bet. Despite the march of progress of artificial intelligence in many fields, he believed his subject was safe, wagering with a colleague that there was only a 25 per cent chance an AI could write a mathematical paper at the level of the best human mathematicians by 2030. Only a year later, he thinks he was wrong.

Chris Maddison was just an intern when he started working on the Go-playing AI that would eventually become AlphaGo. In March 2016, Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence system AlphaGo shocked the world. In a stunning five-match series of Go, the ancient Chinese board game, the AI beat the world's best player, Lee Sedol - a moment that was televised in front of millions and hailed by many as a historic moment in the development of artificial intelligence. Chris Maddison, now a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto, was then a master's student and helped get the project off the ground. Alex Wilkins: How did the idea for AlphaGo first come about?