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Since 2002, I have been teaching in the further education sector and have seen the impact of new technologies. AI is the most disruptive so far ( 27 December, p 24 ). I started to think about how these models learn, in the context of some well-established theories of learning. While large language models (LLMs) …

The repeated reference to returning samples to Earth for study in your article "How to spot an alien" gives me a great sense of foreboding. As a virologist, I don't understand how any rational scientific mind could ever contemplate bringing material back to Earth if, never mind because, it shows some signature of alien life. …

I'm a fanboy of Annalee Newitz and hesitate to question anything they say about science fiction. But one aspect of their recent column has me scratching my head ( 27 December 2025, p 16 ). Can they really be mystified by why humans are far more interested in anything a member of their species does …

Richard Smyth says the growing trend of seeing our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing is a mistake. But "existential" or "mysterious" are surely better words to describe it than "spiritual". Bertrand Russell, the great atheist philosopher, famously said: "We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and …

Smyth is absolutely right that there are no lessons to be learned from nature. Morality and meaning cannot be obtained from nature or its study; their true source is elsewhere. It is hard not to feel that the deification of nature is a substitute for traditional religious belief. The fundamental question is: is nature – …

Paul Whiteley points out that 75 per cent of the sunlight hitting solar panels is lost as heat, but roof-top solar water heaters convert 95 per cent into hot water. So let's combine the two! Have a layer of water between the solar panel and a glass plate, as in a solar water heater. The …

Bryn Glover gives a negative assessment of the likelihood of life elsewhere in the universe. This is based on a 91av article stating the odds of the formation of the last universal common ancestor from a soup of chemicals as "less than 1 in a billion" ( Letters, 3 January ). Of course, we …

Decades ago, 91av ran a feature about Rupert Sheldrake's hypothesis of morphic resonance, which posits that once something comes into being, recurrence becomes easier. He used crystallisation as an example: once accomplished, it becomes subsequently easier to do. We are in the universe; the universe is in us. All is one. As far as …

After reading Alex Wilkins's article on the mystery of the missing meteorite, I asked Google's AI assistant whether you can make a pigment for painting rocks using iron meteorites, and whether iron objects look shinier in low morning or midday light. Its answer to both questions was yes. If accurate, this may indicate that Gaston …

Regretfully, I must strongly assert that there is no giant "iron of God" meteorite. If ever there had been, there would be widespread legends about it, artefacts made from it and religious rituals or taboos involving it. If we accept that Ripert was an honest observer and truly saw something, consider that desert mirages are …