The Economist: Science and technology

Why China is building a Starlink system of its own

When it is finished, Qianfan could number 14,000 satellites, rivalling Elon Musk...

Dreams of asteroid mining, orbital manufacturing and mu...

Ideas for making money in orbit that seemed mad in the 1960s now look sane

AI can bring back a person’s own voice

And it can generate sentences trained on their own writing

Academic writing is getting harder to read—the humaniti...

We analyse two centuries of scholarly work

Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why

Paradoxically, cleaner emissions from ships and power plants are playing a role

Humans and Neanderthals met often, but only one event m...

The mystery of exactly how people left Africa deepens

Elon Musk is causing problems for the Royal Society

His continued membership has led to a high-profile resignation

Can anyone realistically challenge SpaceX’s launch supr...

And if its boss now tries to kill NASA’s own heavy lifter, will that matter?

Carbon emissions from tourism are rising disproportiona...

The industry is failing to make itself greener

Giving children the wrong (or not enough) toys may doom...

Survival is a case of child’s play

Why some doctors are reassessing hypnosis

There is growing evidence that it can help with pain, depression and more

New firefighting tech is being trialled in Sardinia’s a...

It could sniff out blazes long before they spread out of control

Can Jeff Bezos match Elon Musk in space?

After 25 years, Blue Origin finally heads to orbit, and hopes to become a conten...

How the Gulf’s rulers want to harness the power of science

A stronger R&D base, they hope, will transform their countries’ economies. Will ...

Training AI models might not need enormous data centres

Eventually, models could be trained without any dedicated hardware at all

Volunteers with Down’s syndrome could help find Alzheim...

Those with the syndrome have more of a protein implicated in dementia

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