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Future Humans

Is the future flesh or metal? From alien children to brains on microchips we explore the new shapes that the human mind and body might take.

  • Series
Photograph of a large robot walking and talking with a young boy in school uniform who's holding a football, down a winding path in the park.
The school run, Thomas SG Farnetti. Source: Wellcome Collection. Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0).
  • Article

Artificial intelligence and the dream of eternal life

Until now, eternal life was the stuff of fiction, or in the unknowable realms of religion. But an artificial intelligence that ‘remembers’ the whole of an individual’s experience could be the way to life after death.

  • In pictures

Drugs, space travel and the ‘age of promise’

Space-age wonder drug Terramycin promised utopia, but might instead have triggered one of the biggest threats to our future.

  • Article

The unearthly children of science fiction’s Cold War

In the 1950s a new figure emerged in British novels, film and television: a disturbing young alien that revealed postwar society’s fear of the unruly power of teenagers.

  • Article

Why the scariest monsters look almost human

Something is wrong, but you’re not sure what. Amy Jones explores exactly why your worst nightmare is the monster that’s almost human.