Using AI to'talk to animals' might make us feel clever - but what, if anything, does it do for them? The motor is off, the turquoise sea is glassy, and Stephanie King and I are motionless, transfixed by the whistles, clicks and squeezy, whirring noises made by the dolphins swimming below us. If anyone could tell me what these big-brained social mammals are saying, it would be her. Based at the University of Bristol, she co-leads Shark Bay Dolphin Research, one of the longest-running wild dolphin research projects in the world. She has spent thousands of hours watching and listening to this population.

The tech world has long been run by iconoclasts whose ideas about right and wrong are self-consciously different from those of most people. In the first installment of this series, I wrote about shame as one way that groups of people can mediate and enforce social norms without explicit state intervention. But there is an emergent Silicon Valley gospel that has challenged both the boundaries and the mechanisms of shame in America. What happens when millions of humans across the globe spend hours a day talking to a robot? Who taught that robot right from wrong?

Follow this section to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Follow this tag to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW?

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Dr. Robert Waldinger didn't believe it at first. The idea that loneliness could break down the body--that the quality of your relationships might help decide whether you get coronary artery disease, arthritis, or Type 2 diabetes--struck the psychiatrist as far-fetched.

Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte Believes Aging May Come Down to a Cell's Identity Crisis Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. For decades, Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte focused on unlocking the secrets of human life at its earliest stages. A pioneer in developmental biology and a long-time professor at the Salk Institute, he used Shinya Yamanaka's game-changing discovery of four genes that can essentially rewind the clock--turning adult cells to a younger state--to better understand how a fertilized egg turns into a human. Izpisua Belmonte's groundbreaking studies include creating the first embryo containing both human and monkey cells in 2021 to better study the steps that occur well before birth.

Disabled and terminally ill campaigners have written to Prime Minister Andy Burnham urging him to reform social and palliative care before assisted dying legislation is introduced in England and Wales. The Assist Us To Live group says people are currently being failed by society and introducing assisted dying in these circumstances will put sick and disabled people's lives at risk. Burnham believes the funding of palliative and social care should be fixed before assisted dying is considered. The government is likely to remain officially neutral, but the PM's remarks suggest he personally will not back the bill proposed by Labour MP Lauren Edwards. Bill supporters argue improving care services and giving terminally ill people autonomy over their final weeks must go hand in hand.

Follow this author to personalize your feed and get instant alerts. Follow Go to your personalized feed WHY FOLLOW? Smart Alerts: Get notified about major news as it happens. Won't somebody think of the middle-aged men? In truth, the friendships and inner lives of men young, old, and in between are chronically ignored by Hollywood, which would rather see even the elderly among them blow up bad guys than admit to having feelings.

Sarah O'Connor's We Are Not Machines explores how we are contorting ourselves to fit AI into our working lives - and what to do about it, finds Tom Knowles Employers wanting staff to be more like machines isn't new, says O'Connor If you are a fan of translated films, you may have noticed the subtitles on streaming platforms have changed in recent years. They aren't wrong exactly, but they can come across as a bit, well, flat. "You get the meaning, but the language? It's not as rich," Petr Čermoch, a translator in the Czech Republic, tells Sarah O'Connor in We Are Not Machines, which explores how artificial intelligence is changing the way we work. That lack of richness is usually because the streaming platform has used AI to translate a script, then had a professional translator like Čermoch finesse it.

This week I've been at SXSW London . There's been music, film, and a lot--and I mean --of talk about AI. I also had the opportunity to sit down with Gloria Mark, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine, who has spent the last 30 years studying how people interact with digital technologies. Early in her career, the biggest concerns were the potential impacts of internet and email use on our brains. We may laugh those concerns off today, but it's true that as the technologies became more ubiquitous and ingrained in our daily lives, our attention spans began to shrink.

There is plenty of intriguing sci-fi on offer this month, whether it's solar-powered cities from Adrian Tchaikovsky or a strange future from M. John Harrison A father mysteriously slips through time in Joseph Eckert's Writing this as the UK swelters under an unprecedented May heatwave, perhaps it's small wonder that so many science-fiction authors are currently imagining miserable versions of an overheated future in which their characters are struggling to survive. I'm intrigued by the sound of sci-fi legend M. John Harrison's upcoming take on a dystopian future, but if post-apocalyptic hellscapes aren't your thing, I'm also happy to report that there are other options for sci-fi fans this month. Next, I'm going to explore Isabel J. Kim's sci-fi spin on immigration,, as soon as I can get my hands on it. I am excited about this book: M. John Harrison is a really classy writer, winner of all sorts of awards, and his latest novel sounds right up my street. It's set in a future years after an obscure "crisis" changed everything, in a world where the seas are full of new creatures.