Slate has relationships with various online retailers. If you buy something through our links, Slate may earn an affiliate commission. We update links when possible, but note that deals can expire and all prices are subject to change. All prices were up to date at the time of publication. Chelsea Conaboy's new book, Mother Brain: How Neuroscience Is Rewriting the Story of Parenthood, is an ambitious look at new science investigating how caregiving changes everyone who does it. Conaboy draws on research from neuroscience and psychology to make sense of the challenging transitions of early parenthood.

The robotics business has skilled numerous modifications not too long ago. What is going to drive the business modifications for the subsequent few years? Listed here are our 5 predictions for robotics in the remainder of the 12 months… earlier than we go to Automatica 2022. Nicely… the brand new decade of 2020 is lastly underway. Now that the delay attributable to Covid-19 is over, we will see that the robotics and automation business has skilled main modifications through the pandemic.

Ada Palmer is a professor of European history at the University of Chicago. Her four-volume science fiction series, Terra Ignota, was inspired by 18th-century philosophers such as Voltaire and Diderot. "I wanted to write a story that Voltaire might have written if Voltaire had been able to read the last 70 years' worth of science fiction and have all of those tools at his disposal," Palmer says in Episode 495 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Palmer says that Voltaire could actually be considered the first science fiction writer, thanks to a piece he wrote in 1752. "Voltaire has a short story called'Micromégas,' in which an alien from Saturn and an alien from a star near Sirius come to Earth, and they are enormous, and they explore the Earth and have trouble finding life-forms because to them a whale is the size of a flea," she says.

Researchers have mapped the web of connections underpinning coronavirus conspiracy theories, opening a new way of understanding and challenging them. Using Danish witchcraft folklore as a model, the researchers from UCLA and Berkeley analysed thousands of social media posts with an artificial intelligence tool and extracted the key people, things and relationships. The tool enabled them to piece together the underlying stories in coronavirus conspiracy theories from fragments in online posts. One discovery from the research identifies Bill Gates as the reason why conspiracy theorists connect 5G with the virus. With Gates' background in computer technology and vaccination programmes, he served as a shortcut for these storytellers to link the two.

Facebook groups are ripe targets for bad actors, for people who want to spread misleading, wrong or dangerous information. And in a recent opinion column in WIRED magazine, she and a co-author write that the company's so-called pivot to privacy, Facebook's promise to protect sensitive user information, did little to combat the spread of misinformation. Instead, Facebook encouraged users to join its groups, which are private pages for users with similar interests. We want to note here that Facebook is among NPR's recent financial supporters. Nina Jankowicz is here with us now.

Are you just a computer made of meat? Are all your thoughts, feelings and experiences nothing more than circuits made from neurons in your head? If you're like a lot of people, your answer to this question will be a definitive "No!" From science to philosophy, there are lots of good reasons to hold that human beings are more than just computing machines. Unfortunately, many of the technologists bringing versions of artificial intelligence to the market are already sure they know that we are. Suddenly we might be leaving our grandmas and maybe even our kids with emotional robots because, oh well, everybody's doing it. For them people are, indeed, just biological computers.

The Chinese Room, the developers behind award-winners like Everybody's Gone to the Rapture and Dear Esther, has revealed that it's "going dark" for the months ahead. The company isn't shutting entirely, but it quietly laid off its team after finishing its new title So Let Us Melt and won't be a "fully active" firm "for the time being." As co-founder Dan Pinchbeck explains, it's really a combination of factors that prompted the decision. Pinchbeck makes no bones about Chinese Room's bottom line: there were "financial pressures" that included keeping the full team running. Add Pinchbeck's own health concerns and the usual stress of wrapping development on a game (many studios are all too familiar with crunch time), and it was clear that it was time to have a "good think about the future." Right now, just three people are working on upcoming titles like The 13th Interior and Little Orpheus.

Nasa has announced that it has found evidence of flowing water on Mars. Scientists have long speculated that Recurring Slope Lineae -- or dark patches -- on Mars were made up of briny water but the new findings prove that those patches are caused by liquid water, which it has established by finding hydrated salts. Several hundred camped outside the London store in Covent Garden. The 6s will have new features like a vastly improved camera and a pressure-sensitive "3D Touch" display