Science & Technology

Four years ago, I started a class at Temple University titled, “Social Perspectives of Digital Pornography: The Other Sex Ed,” centered on porn literacy, or what young people learn – or don’t learn – from digital porn. I wanted to create a space to examine these issues, not from the assumption that pornography is entirely...

Legend had it that ravens followed wolves to fresh kills. A tracking study reveals a much more interesting scavenging strategy. Do ravens follow wolves to feed on their kills? For decades, biologists assumed they did. Ravens are often seen flying with wolves, following their tracks, or gathering quickly at fresh carcasses A twist in the tale: New...

Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing our society and economy. A new study shows that the majority of people believe that artificial intelligence is displacing more human labour than it is creating new opportunities. Scientists at the University of Vienna and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU) demonstrated a causal link: the stronger this perception, the more dissatisfied people...

oliday rituals and gatherings offer something precious: the promise of connecting to something greater than ourselves, whether friends, family, or the divine. But in the not-too-distant future, artificial intelligence—having already disrupted industries, relationships, and our understanding of reality—seems poised to reach even further into these sacred spaces. People are increasingly using AI to replace talking with other...

As a teenager in the 1980s, I was shown a BBC drama in school called Threads that depicted the impact of a nuclear strike on a city in northern England. Threads is a brutal vision of a terrifying reality that I imagine haunted many people in the years before the end of the cold war....

Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall. Goodall’s life journey stretches from marveling at the somewhat unremarkable creatures – though she would...

You might imagine nuclear power plants as behemoth facilities spanning hundreds of acres. Nuclear microreactors, by contrast, could sit on land the size of a football field and power a whole town. However, after decades of fraught relationships between the nuclear industry and communities in many parts of the U.S., building these tiny reactors requires...

Even if you don’t recall many facts from high school biology, you likely remember the cells required for making babies: egg and sperm. Maybe you can picture a swarm of sperm cells battling each other in a race to be the first to penetrate the egg. For decades, scientific literature described human conception this way,...