The UK government has announced plans to police content on platforms like YouTube and Facebook, but it won't be able to do more than the social networks are already doing

The US Special Operations Command is developing a portable face-recognition system designed to identify people 1 kilometre away. It could also be used by law enforcement

The super-sensitive smelling ability of American grasshoppers has been used to create biological bomb sniffers, which could prove useful for security purposes

QR codes, tracking apps and drones at toll booths are just some of the tech tools China is deploying to monitor the spread of the new coronavirus

Robots are replacing manufacturing workers in France, making companies more productive and reducing employment across the industry

A new movie reimagines H.G. Wells's novel The Invisible Man. We still can't make people invisible, but it is possible to make tiny objects completely disappear

Electric scooters are a nightmare. Rented by the minute, they clog up pavements and are an ungainly eyesore, but we still need them, says Donna Lu

Tech firms are making record profits but paying little tax. Now global leaders are discussing ways to make them pay their fair share

We’re used to tweaking our digital selves to look thinner or more attractive. A new generation of Instagram filters could drastically change how we perceive ourselves

Adrian Tchaikovsky's latest novel The Doors of Eden rewrites Earth's evolutionary history, with highlights including fish that upload their minds to supercomputers and cats that rule over primates

Flying car hopefuls were meant to take off at a competition on a NASA airbase, but no team claimed the prize after a string of crashes and no-shows

Julia Ebner infiltrated the hidden forums that extremists use. Her experiences lay bare how they hijack social media and video games to spread hate – and how to beat them

Westworld is soon to return with season three. Four episodes in to the impossibly glamorous, highly urbanised future, I can't wait to find out what's going on, writes Emily Wilson

A temporary coronavirus hospital ward in China is being staffed entirely by robots. Around 200 patients with mild symptoms will be fed and treated by machines, while medical staff issue commands from outside

A robot can recreate the mechanism plants use to transport water to bend itself towards the sun and open its leaves like a real plant

Robots are being developed to help with tasks like fixing the sea cages where fish are farmed, and their size seems to be all that affects how the fish react

A self-powered device that generates electricity from the wind can also absorb and break down harmful nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide from the air

The data centres servicing our beloved digital devices gobble huge amounts of electricity. A new way to think about heat and energy could help us meet growing demand without burning through the world's resources

Doom Eternal does contain gratuitous violence, but the evidence suggests violence in video games doesn't affect people's behaviour in the real world, says Jacob Aron

In winter, the veins of leaves don’t get completely covered in frost. Mimicking this effect could be the best way to create ice-resistant surfaces

A spring-powered exoskeleton that minimises the amount of energy our legs lose when running could help boost human running speeds by more than 50 per cent

Lab-grown ‘meat’ often uses gelatin produced in slaughterhouses to give artificial beef a meat-like texture – but substituting soya protein can achieve that without killing animals

Pandemics of the past can teach us about the current one, says John Troyer, who studies how we use technology to alter the experience of death

Join Pearse Keane to find out why the NHS is collaborating with AI company DeepMind and how deep learning could transform ophthalmology

Inside a mountain in the Arctic, Microsoft is building a backup of open-source software that it says will keep the code safe for 1000 years

Pollen has a natural tendency to adsorb mercury and forms the basis of a new class of tiny robots that speed through toxic water to purify it

An analysis of the media consumption habits of people in the US shows that fake news makes up a tiny fraction of what they watch or read every day

Is our love affair with AI really about building a new kind of deity to meet human needs no amount of rationality can fill? Max Barry's disturbing novel Providence lays out the case, says Sally Adee

Glass has an unusual atomic structure that resembles a liquid frozen in place, making it hard to predict how it will behave. DeepMind has developed an AI capable of doing so, which may also be able to predict traffic jams

The video game Resident Evil 3 was in development long before the coronavirus outbreak, but it holds up a mirror to the strange times we live in today

A program that combines artificial intelligence and geometrical modelling can create an accurate 3D model of your face from a single 20-second video

Fabric with tiny vibrating motors elicits sensations associated with clouds, water and rocks on the skin and has been made into a dress that could improve emotions

Qubits are often stabilised by being supercooled, which makes quantum computer chips hard to scale up. Now they have been operated at above -272°C for the first time

An image-editing program designed by researchers at Abode uses AI to let you quickly transform the shape of objects in images and change the lighting

Many countries are hoping to use contact-tracing apps to leave lockdown and suppress further coronavirus outbreaks, but the use of such technology has many issues

Black paint usually absorbs heat, but a new two-layer polymer paint reflects infrared light and keeps objects 16°C cooler, which could help make buildings more energy efficient

Psychologist Pete Etchells explores what the scientific research has to say about game violence and addiction and busts some myths

Robots made of 3D-printed muscle and rat spines could help us understand conditions like motor neurone disease and the technique may eventually be used to build prosthetic devices

In TV series Devs, a tech company has built an extremely powerful quantum computer. The show is both beautiful and captivating, says Rowan Hooper

A robot that uses artificial intelligence to find and remove weeds could eventually be used as an alternative to chemical insecticides

Can you really be addicted to your smartphone? Daria Kuss has shown that it is only a problem for a small number of people - and she knows how to help

Martha Wells's action-packed novel Network Effect puts you inside the head of a Murderbot. It raises fascinating questions you will think about for a long time, says Sally Adee

In a new photography book, the home computer revolution of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s is told through nostalgic industrial-design images

Telling Lies is a game where you sift through video calls to solve a mystery. Half the time you don't know what you should be doing, but that's part of the fun, says Jacob Aron

People in lockdown are no longer trying to use technology to get their old lives back and that's a good thing, says Annalee Newitz

Four decades ago, we introduced a standard way of encoding digital sound. Its first ever upgrade could lead to new genres of music and ways of experiencing sound

Watch everything unfold in real time, rather than reading about it later.

This could be a trial run for the rest of Disney’s parks in the US, Japan, France, and Hong Kong.

TfL as in Transport for London. Greeeeeaaat.

On bank holiday... Friday. For NHS charities.