The tricky ethics of Google's Project Nightingale

Dec 04, 2019 12:18 pm UTC| Insights & Views Technology

The nations second-largest health system, Ascension, has agreed to allow the software behemoth Google access to tens of millions of patient records. The partnership, called Project Nightingale, aims to improve how...

AI Revolution Series

The hidden costs of social media use in elections: A Ghana case study

Dec 04, 2019 12:17 pm UTC| Insights & Views Politics

Social media is becoming increasingly central to election campaigns around the world. In the process, it is transforming politics in a number of ways. Unsurprisingly, journalists and analysts have focused on the more...

A quantum computing future is unlikely, due to random hardware errors

Dec 04, 2019 12:16 pm UTC| Insights & Views Technology

Artists rendition of the Google processor. Forest Stearns, Google AI Quantum Artist in Residence, CC BY-ND Google announced this fall to much fanfare that it had demonstrated quantum supremacy that is, it performed a...

Alcohol deaths in the UK – second highest since records began

Dec 04, 2019 12:15 pm UTC| Insights & Views Health

Its easy to forget how toxic alcohol is, although this collective lapse of memory is not accidental as the alcohol industry does all it can to curate a positive image of drink. In the UK, the industry depends on heavy...

London Bridge attack: why longer sentences for terrorist offences are not the answer

Dec 04, 2019 12:15 pm UTC| Insights & Views Law

Following the recent attack in London, where two Cambridge University graduates were stabbed to death and at least three other people were seriously wounded by convicted terrorist Usman Khan, many questions are now being...

Human genetic enhancement might soon be possible – but where do we draw the line?

Dec 04, 2019 12:12 pm UTC| Insights & Views Science

The first genetically edited children were born in China in late 2018. Twins Lulu and Nana had a particular gene known as CCR5 modified during embryonic development. The aim was to make them (and their descendants)...

Climate Change Series

Did people or climate kill off the megafauna? Actually, it was both

Dec 04, 2019 12:12 pm UTC| Insights & Views Nature

Earth is now firmly in the grips of its sixth mass extinction event, and its mainly our fault. But the modern era is definitely not the first time humans have been implicated in the extinction of a wide range of...