The most sophisticated robots are often the ones that do more with less.

Robotics usually answers each new problem with another motor or sensor. This makes the case for the opposite: a small craft whose wings first slow its fall from the sky and then become its sails on the water.

ALBATROSS: A Bioinspired, Aerially Deployable, Autonomous Sailing Sensor Platform

One method to right the wrongs was to guide children in camera use to inspire them to shoot back.

In 1970s south London, a children's rights workshop handed kids cameras built from wellies, prams and chocolate tins. The aim was to let them shoot back at the images that defined them, and to show that independence learned in a makeshift darkroom could carry into social and political life.

Snap Happy! How Children Became Photographers

Priya’s experience reveals one of the costs the diversity contract imposes on residents of color.

A woman started seeing therapists — not over a crisis, but because she needed somewhere she was permitted to talk about race at all. She came to each interview with a list on her phone of incidents she had never been able to name out loud. Her case is unusually intense, which is exactly what makes an entire community's unspoken rules visible.

Diversityland: Hiding Racial Inequality in an American Suburb

Cannibalism in Neolithic Iberia occurred at different times and reflected different human behaviours.

The team expected a single regional episode of cannibalism. Then the radiocarbon dates arrived, and the question shifted from what one cause could explain it to why it happened again and again, and in such different forms.

Multiphase human cannibalism in Neolithic southern Iberia: Chronological and taphonomic evidence from Malalmuerzo, Carigüela, and Majolicas Caves

The bottom line is this: AI safety absolutely requires constitutional democracy.

A perfectly safe AI in the hands of an authoritarian state is not safe at all. The case for treating legal and constitutional repair, from emergency powers to surveillance law, as AI safety work.

AI and Political Freedom: The Risk to Democracy and How to Respond

I didn’t write this about the world, I wrote it about myself.

Depression-era slogans that haunted a meatpacking neighborhood, and years of outreach work on cold northern streets, taught one lesson above all: empathy. Today it is treated as weakness.

Rooming House

The evidence was overwhelming; an upward lightning discharge from the top of the storm had hit the ER-2.

Months after a campaign hunting gamma-ray flashes, a researcher spotted pulses too fast to come from inside a cloud. A camera that usually showed only black at night turned out to hold the first record of such a strike.

Detection and Analysis of an Upward Jet-Like Electrical Discharge Intercepting a High-Altitude Research Aircraft

Human amoebas good and bad are part and parcel of life and death.

A mycologist's late-career detour, begun out of curiosity about whether single cells can be said to learn. It leads to vampire amoebas that turn red draining algae, amoebas that hunt worms in packs, and the rare brain-eating species that may be spreading as the climate warms. It also leads inward, to the hundreds of billions of amoeboid white blood cells crawling through all of us — and to the cancer cells that move the same way.

A Is for Amoeba: The Story of Life in a Single Cell