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.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

Megan Eaves-Egenes's Nightfaring explores our connection with the night sky Here in the northern hemisphere, January always feels like the longest, drabbest month of the year, so how lucky we are to have a host of new science books to enliven our days. This month, we can explore everything from what the arts bring to our lives to the unsung hero that is friction. Or what we lose when we light up our skies? Daisy Fancourt's Art Cure investigates the impact of the arts, including dancing, on our minds and bodies What if playing the piano, dancing, visiting art galleries or even lying in the mud listening to Wolf Alice at Glastonbury was good for the body, mind and longevity? Or what if it could help us develop brain resilience against dementia? In theory, she's well-placed to make the case as a professor of psychobiology and epidemiology at University College London and director of the WHO's arts and health initiative.

A strange kind of quantumness may be key to quantum computers' success What is it about quantum computers that makes them more powerful than conventional machines? A new experiment shows that the property of "quantum contextuality" may be a key ingredient. Quantum computers are fundamentally different from all other computers because they harness uniquely quantum phenomena absent from conventional electronics. For instance, their building blocks, which are called qubits, are routinely put into superposition states - they seemingly assume two properties at once that are normally mutually exclusive - or they get connected through the inextricable link of quantum entanglement . Quantum computers have finally arrived, but will they ever be useful? Now, researchers at Google Quantum AI have used their Willow quantum computer to carry out several demonstrations showing that the property of quantum contextuality also plays a significant role.

Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton has a new sci-fi novel out this month - and Booker winner George Saunders ventures into speculative fiction with his latest book, Vigil Is it an asteroid or an alien in Van Jensen's Godfall? Welcome to January, a month when many of us are keen to escape from the world into the pages of a book. Thankfully, science fiction is here to help, whether that's with a story set on a generation ship where things aren't as they seem, courtesy of Peter F. Hamilton, or journeying to an alternate version of this world where the Roman Empire is still in charge, in Solitaire Townsend's . Add to the mix a time-loop murder, a UFO romance and some eco-horror, and there's plenty of choice for sci-fi fans this month. A generation ship is in search of a new home in Peter F. Hamilton's latest sci-fi novel Big hitter Peter F. Hamilton sets his latest outing on a generation ship in search of a new world, where people are only allowed to live for 65 years so they don't deplete the ship's resources. When a teenager Hazel's brother has an accident that means he is no longer productive, he is set to be killed off.

Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the future is an inherently difficult task which can be ill-posed in the face of stochasticity. In this paper, we introduce an alternative form of curiosity that rewards novel associations between different senses. Our approach exploits multiple modalities to provide a stronger signal for more efficient exploration. Our method is inspired by the fact that, for humans, both sight and sound play a critical role in exploration.

New Scientist changed the UK's freedom of information laws in 2025 By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account Our successful request for Peter Kyle's ChatGPT logs stunned observers When I fired off an email at the start of 2025, I hadn't intended to set a legal precedent for how the UK government handles its interactions with AI chatbots, but that is exactly what happened. It all began in January when I read an interview with the then-UK tech secretary Peter Kyle in . Trying to suggest he used first-hand the technology his department was set up to regulate, Kyle said that he would often have conversations with ChatGPT. AI may blunt our thinking skills - here's what you can do about it That got me wondering: could I obtain his chat history? Freedom of information (FOI) laws are often deployed to obtain emails and other documents produced by public bodies, but past precedent has suggested that some private data - such as search queries - aren't eligible for release in this way. I was interested to see which way the chatbot conversations would be categorised.

The AI bubble is heading towards a burst but it won't be the end of AI Economists, bankers and even the boss of OpenAI are warning of a rapidly inflating AI bubble. If and when it bursts, what will happen to the technological breakthroughs of the past few years? The hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on AI seem to have inflated a global financial bubble that's now fit to burst, leaving companies and investors at risk of holding vast debt that cannot be serviced by the meagre revenue brought in by current AI services. But what does that mean for the future of the technology underpinning this financial feeding frenzy? In recent weeks, warnings of a potential AI bubble have come from the International Monetary Fund, the Bank of England, the head of the largest US bank, and even OpenAI boss Sam Altman .

Paralysed man can feel objects through another person's hand Keith Thomas, a man in his 40s with no sensation or movement in his hands, is able to feel and move objects by controlling another person's hand via a brain implant. The technique might one day even allow us to experience another person's body over long distances. Keith Thomas (right) was able to control another person's hand A man with paralysis has been able to move and sense another person's hand as if it were his own, thanks to a new kind of "telepathic" brain implant. "We created a mind-body connection between two different individuals," says Chad Bouton at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research in New York state. The approach could be used as a form of rehabilitation after spinal cord injury, allowing people with paralysis to work together, and may one day even allow people to share experiences remotely, says Bouton.

We're finally reading the secrets of Herculaneum's lost library A whole library's worth of papyri owned by Julius Caesar's father-in-law were turned to charcoal by the eruption of Vesuvius. Deep within a particle accelerator, theoretical physicist Giorgio Angelotti is hard at work. He sets a black cylinder on a mount, bolts it down, then runs through some safety checks before retreating from the chamber, known as "the hatch". "You have to be sure there's no one in the hatch before you close the door," he says. That's because he is about to blast the sample with a super-powerful beam of X-rays.