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Matthew Sparkes writes about the tension between adults' privacy and children's safety online created by digital ID or age verification. There is a simple solution: require physical devices to be age-rated. Any smartphone or computer sold would have to incorporate a tamper-proof digital age identifier. It is the device that is age-identified, not the owner. …

I agree with Matthew Sparkes, but he is, like many, viewing this as solvable using a "blacklisting" approach. What do we want to ban or restrict access to online? This is like trying to make London safe for a toddler to walk across on their own late at night. It is never going to work; …

The more we learn about the universe, the more we realise how much more there is to discover. This seemed to me to be amply demonstrated by your item "A cosmos made of string". All we need is for the string theorists to come up with a new force they can dub "sealing wax" and …

The question of whether aliens have a grasp of physics is also brought up in Andy Weir's novel Project Hail Mary . Though Rocky's species, the aliens in the story, reach the same conclusion as humans regarding the existential problem they face, they make a fundamental error in their calculations by not knowing about relativity …

Whiteson's opening and closing discussion in his article made me think of physicist Werner Heisenberg's comment that "We have to remember that what we observe is not nature herself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning".

I wonder if what consciousness actually is eludes us because we are trying to make too much of it. Could it be that self-awareness, i.e. consciousness, has the primary function of keeping us motivated, so as to keep us alive? Without sensory input, to which we react, we would starve to death, succumb to danger …

I read Karmela Padavic-Callaghan's article on storing data in glass with interest, but I couldn't help but feel that such research is misdirected. In my long life, I have used many "ultimate" methods of long-term data storage, from wire recorders in the 1940s to floppy discs. Now, it is virtually impossible to recover data from …

Encoding information in glass isn't such a new idea. In the 1998 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "In the Pale Moonlight", glass storage serves as a key plot point. A recording of an AI-generated meeting intended to convince the Romulans of an impending sneak attack by supposed allies is stored on an "optolythic data …

In your report "AI can't stop recommending nuclear strikes", you quote a researcher who says "The nuclear taboo doesn't seem to be as powerful for machines for humans". Surprise, surprise! I also noted with interest the discovery that, in the fog of war, accidents happened in 86 per cent of the conflicts. As 19th-century general …

Your short piece on the apparent willingness of AI models to deploy nuclear weapons without the usual human reservations doesn't indicate whether the AI involved had been made aware of the possibility of nuclear winter. The bombs themselves have been tested and their destructive capabilities are well known. However, the nature of a nuclear winter …