Adi Gaskell Blog

The lingua franca of global science has long been settled. Walk into any laboratory from Lagos to Lahore, and the journals on the shelf, the posters on the wall, and the grant applications on the desk will almost certainly be written in English. For researchers whose mother tongue is Mandarin, Arabic, or Swahili, this is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural tax levied on every paper written, every conference attended, every idea expressed in a borrowed tongue.

Teenagers now spend much of their waking leisure online: scrolling, sharing, and, at times, stumbling into misinformation, toxicity, and performative feuds. The question for parents and schools is no longer whether adolescents should inhabit the digital world, but how they might do so without being consumed by it. That challenge is becoming more urgent.

There is a certain type of person who chooses to work for the government. They are not, by and large, drawn by the pay. Nor, in an era of contractor-heavy, cost-cutting public administration, are they seduced by lavish resources. What motivates them, researchers have long argued, is something harder to quantify: a genuine desire to do good for the community. Academics call this “public service motivation,” or PSM. For decades, the assumption has been that more of it is better.

Every office has one: a manager whose weary disdain for the job seems to seep into the team like damp through a poorly insulated wall. Colleagues grow listless. Enthusiasm curdles. Somehow, what began as one person’s private disenchantment becomes the shared property of an entire unit. For decades this phenomenon was dismissed as anecdote. A recent study from the University of Vaasa in Finland suggests it is something considerably more systematic — and quantifiable.

The starving artist is one of capitalism’s most durable myths — the idea that penury sharpens creativity, that the muse arrives only when the rent is overdue. A new study from researchers at Washington University in St. Louis, Indiana University, Appalachian State University, and New York University suggests the opposite is true. Give struggling artists unconditional cash, and they make more art, better art, and feel considerably less like they are about to collapse.

The battle to regulate artificial intelligence has always felt a bit like having a pea shooter in a gun fight. The tech industry not only has almost limitless resources to spend on lobbying, but also has access to the finest talent. As a result, it feels like governments around the world are both bending to their every whim but also bending over backwards to attract companies they believe will drive the economy in the future.

Ask someone sleeping rough in Portland, Oregon, what they want, and the answer is almost insultingly obvious. They want a home. Not temporary accommodation hemmed in by curfews and room inspections. Not a shelter bunk shared with strangers in various states of crisis. Just a place to live, affordable enough to keep, where they can cook a meal, keep a cat, and have their family visit.

If we were to ponder what AI’s “killer app” was, there might not be a consensus yet, but to most economists, the answer would be automation (to cut costs) and innovation (to produce new ideas). While both of these are important, a recent paper from UC Berkeley suggests that AI’s biggest impact may be in helping us to accelerate organizational learning. It’s an intuitive idea.

Fewer than half of parents believe their children’s schools are equipped to handle the risks posed by “nudification” apps—tools that use artificial intelligence to generate sexualised images. A small survey of 57 parents and caregivers across six London schools found that only 47% felt confident, or very confident, in their school’s ability to respond if a pupil became a victim of such abuse, which may itself be perpetrated by other students. The findings point to a broader unease.

Where one lives may shape not only one’s prospects, but one’s cells. Researchers at New York University report that neighbourhood conditions are associated with biological ageing, suggesting that disadvantage can become embedded at a molecular level. Their study focuses on CDKN2A RNA, a marker linked to cellular senescence—the process by which cells cease dividing but remain metabolically active, often promoting inflammation.