Powerhouses: nanotechnology turns bricks into batteries

Research could pave way for cheap supercapacitor storage of renewable energy

How Amazon puts misinformation at the top of your reading list

Algorithms routinely come up with ‘recommendations’ for anti-vax ‘bestsellers’ or juices that can cure cancer

I Saw the World End review – how a bomb changed life on Earth in a flash

Marking 75 years since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, stage designers Devlin and Weston have made a film of immense power – but it won’t be seen as it was meant to

Ron Graham obituary

Prolific mathematician who came up with the inordinately large ‘Graham’s Number’ and was committed to making his subject fun

GPT-3: an AI game-changer or an environmental disaster?

The tech giants’ latest machine-learning system comes with both ethical and environmental costs

Carl Bergstrom: ‘People are using data to bullshit’

The evolutionary biologist on data manipulation, fake news, and the importance of using science as a lie detector

Take a tusk, drill holes, weave a rope – and change the course of history

Scientists have discovered the tool our stone-age ancestors used to manufacture rope – a milestone in technological development

Madonna’s Instagram flagged for spreading coronavirus misinformation

The singer claimed a vaccine had been found but was being concealed to ‘let the rich get richer’

The UK’s app failure sums up our fatally flawed coronavirus response

Thanks to dithering and ineptitude, we may never have contact tracing on our smartphones

Cheap, popular and it works: Ireland’s contact-tracing app success

Irish-made app has more than 1.3m downloads, in stark contrast to the UK’s efforts

Landless review – Brazilian land-access doc doesn’t dig deep enough

A visually sharp film about the struggle of worker-activists against ruthless agribusiness fails to engage on the issues

Eight go mad in Arizona: how a lockdown experiment went horribly wrong

In the 1990s, a troupe of hippies spent two years sealed inside a dome called Biosphere 2. They ended up starving and gasping for breath. As a new documentary Spaceship Earth tells their story, we meet the ‘biospherians’