We speak to Prof Hannah Fry about the human impacts of artificial intelligence, from AI therapists to lovers, agents and tutors

Put the weight on to get that extra weight off

It turns out being bird-brained could actually be the ultimate goal for your cognitive health

ADHD diagnosis has risen in recent years, particularly among adults. But we need to improve how we view and treat it.

Stephen Hawking spent much of his life pulling at a thread, one that had been swallowed by a black hole. He was interested in what happened to material once it passed a black hole’s event horizon – the point of no return, where gravity crushes anything that crosses it into an infinitesimally small point in space. Other theories hypothesise that if you fell in, your atoms would become part of this cosmic monster and reside there until the end of time. Hawking’s maths suggested something else, however. According to his calculations, black holes don’t last until the end of time. In fact, quantum mechanics suggests that a black hole would, over time, fizz away. Its particles would evaporate over aeons until a final, massive burst of energy. Why does this matter? Well, until this point, the prevailing idea in physics was that nothing is ever really destroyed. If we could somehow fish your atoms out of a black hole, and invent a machine that knew where to put them (like your pattern caught in a transporter buffer), we could, in theory, rebuild you. The death of a black hole, and the ultimate end of everything within it, seemed to violate this rule. Hawking had spotted a crack in our model of the Universe. The resolution to this problem that he settled on, after many intellectual battles with other theoretical physicists, was the ‘holographic principle’ (an idea first proposed by physicists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind). It’s a headscratcher of an idea that suggests the Universe is actually a projection. In this issue, Thomas Hertog, one of Hawking’s closest science collaborators, takes a closer look at this idea. He thinks that we’re close to a discovery that will let us see Hawking’s maths play out in the real world. A discovery that could finally move us closer to a single, unified theory of everything.

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