Culture & Society
Art, media, philosophy and the social effects of technology.
Animals Are Sexual Geniuses: A New Illustrated Book on Nature's Creative Reproduction
A beautifully illustrated new book by artist and environmentalist Perrin Roosevelt Ireland explores the astonishing diversity of animal sexual behavior—from climate-driven mating changes to same-sex pairing and consent—revealing that sexual diversity is biodiversity.
The Penguin Paradox: How Mistakes Shape Language Itself
A Wits University study shows that children's systematic errors and AI's layered architectures share a hidden mechanism: language evolves to become learnable, generation after generation.
Great Apes Don’t Think Like Us — And That’s the Point
How does ape cognition differ from human intelligence? New research challenges the 'distorted mirror' model, showing that great apes have unique mental architectures. Learn why comparing apes to humans requires looking at the questions *they* are built to answer, not just our own metrics.
Intel's Handheld Gaming Ambitions: An Analysis of the New Arc G-Series
A breakdown of Intel's entry into the gaming handheld market with its Arc G3 processors, comparing them against the established AMD Ryzen Z-series.
Mapping the Nerve Cord: How a New Connectome Challenges Theories of Motor Control
Researchers have mapped the full synapse-level central nervous system connectome of an adult fruit fly, challenging long-standing theories of a centralized command hub and demonstrating that motor control is highly distributed.
The Iterative Mirror: How Human Language Development and AI Evolution Converge
New research reveals that the structural evolution of human language, driven by iterated learning, mirrors the emergence of capabilities in deep learning neural networks, highlighting deep architectural principles common to both.
Beyond Serial Generation: How Google’s DiffusionGemma Leverages Parallelism for 4x Faster Token Output
Google DeepMind's newly released DiffusionGemma, an experimental model based on the Gemma 4 architecture, challenges the autoregressive paradigm by generating text in parallel blocks, achieving up to 4x faster throughput on local hardware.
Kai-Fu Lee on the Future of Invisible AI Hardware
Kai-Fu Lee discusses the transition from handheld devices to ambient, invisible AI companions at the 2026 WSJ CEO Council Summit, highlighting a future where AI is always listening but never intrusive.