By Kevin Hunt, Director of Doctoral Programmes in Art & Design and Senior Lecturer in Culture & Context, Nottingham Trent University
The AI doomsday news cycle plays on anxieties about the future. The media has tended to prioritise sensational takes on the risk at the expense of more thoughtful opinions by, for example, experts in the ethics of AI.
Alarmist fantasies of superintelligence – where artificial intelligence surpasses that of the most gifted human minds – are criticised for distracting from real concerns and threats. AI is energy hungry, environmentally damaging, and has prompted…
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By Rhi Carter, Lecturer in Occupational Therapy, University of Winchester
Healthcare students need more than knowledge. Learning through play can give them a safe place to make decisions, get things wrong and try again.
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By Sam Naidu, Professor, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University
International human rights judge Navi Pillay was awarded the 2026 Nobel peace prize. She was honoured for her lifelong dedication to international law and global justice.
To understand more about Pillay and her work, we spoke with Sam Naidu, a feminist and literary scholar with a focus on crime and justice, and the author of a biography…
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By Amnesty International
Responding to the declaration of a state of emergency in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as well as the imposition of governor rule and the deployment of armed forces in the province, Babu Ram Pant, Amnesty International’s Deputy Director for South Asia, said: “Reports of arbitrary detentions of key leaders – including the provincial chief minister – and […] The post Pakistan: Declaration of emergency must not be pretext to crackdown on human rights appeared first on Amnesty International. ]]>
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By Drew Caveney-Holler, PhD Candidate in International Relations, Durham University
In his speech at the UN General Assembly in September, Andy Burnham announced that his security chiefs would begin work on a new National Centre for Information Defence.
The UK prime minister said the centre was necessary because of Russian attempts to “spread lies and disinformation”. He added: “Faced with this information…
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By Reid Kress Weisbord, Distinguished Professor of Law, Rutgers University - Newark
Naomi Cahn, Professor of Law, University of Virginia
Dolly Parton’s nephew Bryan Seaver announced the legendary singer’s death on Aug. 25, 2026, in a prerecorded video. Seaver, the son of one of Parton’s 11 siblings, had been her head of security for many years.
But Seaver is currently embroiled in a messy dispute with She’s Alive LLC, the company Parton established to manage her business…
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By Amiran Baduashvili, Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz
Labeling medical test results as ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’ helps clinicians make quick judgments when diagnosing patients. But this binary approach to interpreting tests can lead to fatal errors.
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By Ornob Alam, Postdoctoral Associate in Evolutionary Biology, New York University
New genomic tools let scientists dig into the family trees of crops like rice, corn and adzuki beans to learn more about how they transitioned from wild plants to domesticated crops.
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By Saar Shahar, PhD Candidate in English, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Joshua Reynolds’ 1776 ‘Portrait of Omai’ portrays a commoner from Tahiti as a nobleman, reflecting European fantasies and assumptions about Pacific cultures.
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By Daniella McCahey, Assistant Professor of History, Texas Tech University
Jean de Pomereu, Research Affiliate, Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge
When Belgian American particle physicist Francis Halzen was awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in physics “for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin,” it was a reminder that for more than a century, scientists have treated Antarctica’s environments as windows…
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