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Female porters, known as 'kayayei', carry bales of second-hand garments on their heads at the Kantamanto textile market in Accra, Ghana, on Thursday, Sept. 15, 2022. The rise of fast fashionand shoppers preference for quantity over qualityhas led to a glut of low-value clothing that inordinately burdens developing countries. Photographer: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Wasteland review: An uncomfortable look at the real cost of waste

28 June 2023

Oliver Franklin-Wallis's book explores the dirty truth about what we trash and ensures we won't be able to look away from the true impact of our endless production of garbage


Frances Haugen

The Power of One review: The woman who blew the whistle on Facebook

26 June 2023

Frances Haugen leaked thousands of pages of Facebook's internal documents. The revelations she uncovered about, among many other things, hate speak and eating disorder content on the social network are unforgettable; sadly, her account of the story is


2NMX51D This satellite image provided by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) shows a tropical storm east of Puerto Rico in the Caribbean, at 7:50am EST, Tuesday, Aug. 10, 2021. The National Hurricane Center issued tropical storm warnings for the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, where forecasters expected the potential cyclone to strengthen Tuesday into the sixth named storm, Fred, of the Atlantic hurricane season. (NOAA/NESDIS/STAR GOES via AP)

The Universe in a Box review: Why all cosmic quests start on laptops

14 June 2023

Grasping anything much about our universe depends on complex computer models that can simulate reality. Andrew Pontzen was sceptical about such simulations but now, as his new book shows, he's an enthusiastic guide


Capital letter test is a foolproof way of sorting AIs from humans

26 May 2023

A trick for asking questions using capital letters seems to baffle artificial intelligences like ChatGPT, while humans can easily give the right answer


ChatGPT seems to be trained on copyrighted books like Harry Potter

5 May 2023

A test to see whether ChatGPT has memorised the contents of copyrighted material suggests it was trained on passages from Harry Potter, Game of Thrones and many other novels


Fluent answers from AI search engines are more likely to be wrong

27 April 2023

AI search engines like Microsoft's Bing Chat often fail to provide citations to back up statements, or cite information incorrectly - and this is more likely when answers sound more convincing


A girl working at a computer

Tools to spot AI essays show bias against non-native English speakers

23 April 2023

Essays in English written by people from China were branded by text-analysis tools as being generated by artificial intelligence 61 per cent of the time


The smart bandage

Electronic wound dressing releases drugs to help injuries heal

24 March 2023

A stretchable sticking plaster detects whether an injury is healing well and uses stimulating electrodes and microinjections of drugs to speed up the process


A scam email on a smartphone

ChatGPT can be made to write scam emails and it slashes their cost

3 March 2023

The impressive capabilities of ChatGPT can be turned to cybercrimes like phishing despite safety precautions taken by OpenAI to prevent misuse, warn researchers


Space X Falcon 9 rocket on launchpad at Cape Canaveral, Florida

SpaceX launch scrapped at last minute leaving NASA astronauts grounded

27 February 2023

Four NASA astronauts were scheduled to set off for the International Space Station this morning on the SpaceX Crew-6 mission but engineers detected a fault on their rocket


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