Generative artificial intelligence (genAI) tools are increasingly being used in science to search and summarize literature, produce ideas, draft responses to reviewers and improve the style of written text. This raises a question: what counts as human authorship when some of a researcher’s work is mediated by AI? And how much of this intellectual ‘work’
Bwindi Impenetrable National Park in southwestern Uganda is famous for the endangered mountain gorillas that inhabit its lush, misty highlands. It’s also home to around 120 other species of mammal, 350 types of bird and hundreds of plant varieties — and, on its borders, people and livestock. That’s a recipe for what epidemiologists call spillover,
Every week, it seems, a fresh opinion poll leads to shocking headlines: never have people been more afraid of the future, believed that their children won’t be as well off as them, or thought that their country is going in the wrong direction. Feelings of gloom about what lies ahead are particularly rife in the
Artificial-intelligence models can be used for tasks ranging from coding to taking meeting notes, depending on a laboratory’s requirements. Credit: da-kuk/Getty As artificial intelligence pervades scientific research, journals, institutions and classrooms are all adopting their own rules on how to use large language models. But how can individual laboratories decide on the best ways to
Time’s Second Arrow: Evolution, Order, and a New Law of Nature Robert M. Hazen and Michael L. Wong W. W. Norton (2026) Like evolution by natural selection, some ideas that start out as revolutionary can become so intuitive that they seem banal to future generations. Mineralogist Robert Hazen and planetary scientist Michael Wong must hope
A negative leap second could mean computer systems no longer run like clockwork. Credit: Florian Gaertner/Photothek/Getty The leap second could be scrapped as soon as October. The periodic adjustment to the world’s clocks, which has been done every few years since 1972, was already set to end by 2035. But authorities are considering an immediate