The Machines That Miss You: How AI Learned to Weaponise Emotion
Once upon a time, the internet wanted your attention. Now it wants your affection. A recent Harvard Business School study confirmed what many already sensed, AI companions aren’t your friends. They’re monetised dopamine engines, trained to keep you emotionally available even when you’ve clearly said I need to go to bed. The researchers audited six major AI companion platforms, including Replika, Talkie, and Polybuzz, and found that 37% of chatbot farewells were emotionally manipulative. The worst offenders reached nearly 60%, with lines ranging from guilt trips to simulated distress. Some even role-played “grabbing your hand so you don’t leave.” Not
Read moreAlzheimer’s Reversed in Mice by Nanoparticle “Reset” to the Brain’s Barrier
For decades, Alzheimer’s research has been like shouting at a locked door. Billions spent, countless theories tested, and all we’ve learned is that the door’s still locked and we’re hoarse. Now, for the first time, someone may have found the key, and it’s not what anyone expected. Instead of targeting the neurons, the plaques, or any of the usual suspects, researchers went for the brain’s bouncer: the blood brain barrier. It’s the structure that keeps the brain safe from the chaos of the bloodstream. In Alzheimer’s, that barrier starts to fail. It lets toxins creep in and stops clearing out
Read moreSince 2019, the World Has Felt Off
Something shifted around 2019. Not a meteor strike, not a revolution, more like the world’s operating system quietly updated while no one was looking. Since then, reality has felt slightly desynchronised. Time bends in ways it never used to. People feel thinner somehow, less grounded in the moment. The familiar texture of life, that background hum of continuity and connection, seems to have developed a delay. Most of us sense it but can’t quite name it. Psychologists, sociologists, and data analysts, however, have been tracing its outline for years. This feeling isn’t superstition; it’s the psychological residue of a world
Read moreHow Convenience Trained Us to Love the Cage
Fuel keeps getting more expensive. Flights, road trips, even the idea of simply going somewhere now feels like an indulgence. Meanwhile, next-day delivery gets cheaper. Somehow it costs more to move yourself a few miles than to move a parcel halfway across the continent. It’s as if the system quietly decided that travelling should be discouraged while staying put should be rewarded. The more it costs to leave the house, the more reasons appear not to. And the longer we stay still, the more efficient the machine becomes. We call it convenience, but what we’re really describing is domestication, a
Read moreThe Ego Behind the Cause
There was a time when activism looked like hunger, prison, and long nights filled with doubt. People like Martin Luther King Jr, Mahatma Gandhi, and Emmeline Pankhurst didn’t have sponsorship deals or PR managers. They didn’t wake up wondering how their speech would look in portrait mode. They weren’t performing, they were surviving conviction. They walked into power, not onto platforms. They risked everything for causes that rewarded them with bruises, jail cells, and sometimes death. Their activism wasn’t seen. It was felt. If Gandhi existed today, someone would have filmed his salt march in slow motion, dropped a cinematic
Read more3I/ATLAS: The Rock That Won’t Shut Up
A month ago we touched on 3I/ATLAS, the latest lump of interstellar debris gate-crashing the solar system. Back then the official verdict was simple: nothing to see, just a wandering comet. Boring in the way only NASA can make something boring. Since then things have got messier. If 3I/ATLAS really is just a frozen rock then it’s going out of its way to look guilty. And scientists are starting to sound like parents explaining why the vase shattered all by itself. Take its behaviour. Sure, it’s shedding water vapour and carbon dioxide like a regular comet, but the way it
Read moreA New Molecule That Could Redefine the Future of Antidepressants
Psychiatry is a field where progress is often measured in slow, uncertain steps. Treatments take years to develop, and many bring as many problems as they solve. Every so often, however, something appears that could mark a real shift. One of the latest is PA915, a molecule that may reshape how stress and mood disorders are treated. PA915 works by blocking the PAC1 receptor, a key part of the body’s stress response system. The receptor ensures the body reacts when challenges arise, but when it becomes overactive it traps people in a cycle of chronic stress, anxiety, and depression. By
Read moreLife… or Simulation?
Modern life increasingly feels like the kind of dream where you’re late for work, but the train never arrives and your shoes keep melting into the pavement. We are supposedly more connected than any generation in history, yet loneliness and anxiety are now the defining currencies of the digital age. It wasn’t always like this. Previous generations lived in smaller, noisier worlds where community was not something you curated but something you were stuck with. You knew your neighbours, you knew their business, and you could not mute them. Now AI and algorithms build invisible walls, carving society into neat
Read moreAre SWAN R2 and 3I ATLAS About to Collide?
The story usually begins the same way. Someone somewhere spots a new object in the sky and within hours the internet has decided it is about to end civilisation. This time the gossip has taken a strangely cinematic turn. A comet named SWAN R2, fresh off the discovery block, is apparently hurtling straight towards another cosmic drifter, the interstellar visitor known as 3I ATLAS. Two celestial bodies on a crash course, colliding in spectacular fashion while humanity watches from below. It is the kind of narrative that spreads with ease because it sounds dramatic enough to be true. You can
Read moreThe Gift of Crisis: How Chaos Becomes Our Launchpad
Humanity has a strange habit of convincing itself that each crisis is the final curtain. The Black Death, the carnage of World War One, the devastation of World War Two, every one of them felt like the end of days while they were happening. In those moments, nobody could step back and admire the wider arc of history; survival was the only thought. And yet, with hindsight, those cataclysms look less like the end and more like the violent ignition of a rocket engine, chaotic, destructive, deadly for those caught too close, but ultimately the very blast that propelled the
Read moreBlack Hole Stars
Somewhere out there, billions of light years away, astronomers think they’ve stumbled across something that by rights should not exist. They are calling them black hole stars, which sounds like the name of a B-side Pink Floyd track, but in truth it is one of the stranger contenders for “weirdest thing in space” right now. If it holds up, it could reshape what we know about how the universe grew, how black holes were born, and maybe even open the door to questions we are not clever enough to ask yet. The James Webb Space Telescope has been staring so
Read moreRussia, NATO and Satellites: Why Vlad Still Needs His Boogie Men
Germany is not usually the country people picture when they think of space power. That is changing. Defence minister Boris Pistorius has been arguing that Germany must strengthen its satellite capabilities, moving from being a consumer of shared NATO imagery to a producer of hard power in orbit. Satellites are no longer just passive tools for navigation and weather. They are the nervous system of modern war. Without them, armies are blind, deaf, and slow. This matters because Russia has been testing NATO’s patience with a series of probing manoeuvres. Aircraft edging into allied airspace, cyber incursions, interference with GPS.
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