They're inside millions of homes and are useful for setting a timer or answering a query. But smart speakers like Amazon Echo and Google Nest may be unsafe for famous people because they can'give away how you live', an academic has warned. Sadie Creese, professor of cybersecurity at Oxford University, says the popular tech devices can make certain notable figures especially'targetable' to hackers. That's because they're fitted with microphones and even cameras that record and save data to the cloud. These recordings can potentially be accessed by cybercriminals remotely, which could could harm the victim's organisation or their family, she said.

Belgian physicist and musician Prof Bob Coecke, 55, wants to teach quantum physics to a mass audience. The paradox-filled theory that describes the microscopic realm has become a staple of science fiction, from Marvel's Ant-Man to the multiple Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once. It's famously bizarre and, in the UK, the subject is mostly reserved for undergraduates specialising in physics because it requires grappling with complicated maths. But Coecke, a former Oxford professor, has devised a maths-free framework using diagrams for total beginners, outlined in Quantum in Pictures, his book with Dr Stefano Gogioso that was published earlier this year. Over the summer, they ran an education experiment, teaching the pictorial method to UK schoolchildren – who then beat the average exam scores of Oxford University's postgraduate physics students.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a widely used term that conjures notions of fantasy, the future, or even threat. This is not surprising considering the multitude of movies which dramatise the role of artificial intelligence and what it may become. In reality, artificial intelligence is a branch of computer science which aims to "understand and build intelligent entities by automating human intellectual tasks". These processes have contributed to numerous technological advances across various industries, for example. It is now quite common to see articles about the latest AI development -- check out these robots which flip burgers!

If you leave your iPad untouched for a few days, you probably do not need to worry about much more than a flat battery and a backlog of emails. But with artificial intelligence, computers could soon have their own set of'rights' that could let them sue you for neglect, according to a leading scientist. Professor Marcus du Sautoy, a mathematician at Oxford University, has suggested that as AI leads to our devices developing their own consciousness, they may need their own laws to protect them. Advances in artificial intelligence could lead to computers and smartphones developing consciousness and they may need to be given'human' rights. He claims that if technology is conscious, it could also then be deemed as being alive, and so could win the right to be governed by laws on human rights.

Prof du Sautoy added: "In babies there is something called the mirror self-recognition test, a moment where a child recognises the image in the mirror is themselves and has a sense of self. "I think there is something in the brain development which might be like a boiling point. It may be a threshold moment. "Philosophers will say that doesn't guarantee that that thing is really feeling anything and really has a sense of self. It might be just saying all the things that make us think it's alive. But then even in humans we can't know that what a person is saying is real. "Consciousness is like a box that we all have and inside this box we all have something called a beetle.