Features
From Nietzsche to Nissan
Rapid technological development has made self-driving cars a reality. This advancement raises questions about how these cars should make ethical decisions in place of human drivers. While technology can replace, and will undoubtedly supersede humans in actual driving ability, driving a car involves moral decisions. These choices would have to be programmed—for instance whether to…
Exclusive interview: Dr Rebecca Smethurst explains the evolution of space exploration and future avenues
Astrophysicist Dr Rebecca Smethurst is a research fellow at the University of Oxford, working on the co-evolution of galaxies and supermassive black holes. She is also a science communicator through her YouTube channel Dr Becky and has recently released her book “Space: 10 Things You Should Know”. Here she talks about her work and space…
In conversation with UKAEA
Find out how scientists in the UK Atomic Energy Authority are striving towards a cleaner, more sustainable future by creating a Sun on Earth.
Bird’s-Eye View of Navigation
Every autumn, billions of birds disappear from our fields, trees, and shorelines to make awe-inspiring migratory journeys, reliably returning again the next spring. The bar-tailed godwit, a long-legged wading bird, flies from Alaska to New Zealand over nine straight days without stopping. Short-tailed shearwaters migrate all the way round the Pacific with pinpoint accuracy, returning…
The root of the uncanny: why are things creepy?
What is it that makes things uncanny? And what do people find so creepy about clowns and ghostly children? Linus Milinski examines the roots of creepy.
When experiments fail, can analogies help?
Gaining insight into interiors of black holes, subtleties of the quantum realm, the Big Bang pushes us beyond the reach of experimentation. To get their hands to work, physicists turned to easily manipulable “analogue” systems governed by similar equations. In 2016, a physicist created a sonic black hole by making a fluid to trap sound…
Is international talent the key to the UK’s future success?
Sponsored Earlier this year, International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox and Education Secretary, Damian Hinds announced the Government’s ambition to increase the number of international students choosing to complete higher education in the UK by 30%, to 600,000 per annum by 2030. Oxford Royale Academy (ORA), a leading provider of summer schools at Oxford and Cambridge…
More humans needed for robots to take us over
Regardless of how advanced our AI algorithms are, they have to be trained by humans in order to be smart. For an algorithm to accurately recognize an apple is an apple, it needs to be taught with thousands to millions of pictures of apples. Some algorithms even have to be trained in culturally specific ways….
The future of quantum computing is knotty
We all know how the story goes for quantum computing: A qubit (short for a quantum bit), unlike classical bits, can be at the state of 0 and 1 simultaneously. The superposition of states offers quantum computers the superior computational power over traditional supercomputers. Its unprecedented efficiency for tasks like factoring, database-searching, simulation, or code-breaking…
Reproducibility crisis in science: Taking down the many headed monster
Atreyi Chakrabarty (St. Cross College, DPhil in Interdisciplinary Bioscience) in conversation with Professor Dorothy Bishop (Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford) More and more scientists are starting to doubt the nature of their own playing field. Their colleagues’ studies published in acclaimed journals, but the key findings mysteriously never seem to materialise when others try to…