Creatures can converse and share their stories by voice or text through visitors’ mobile phones at Museum of Zoology If the pickled bodies, partial skeletons and stuffed carcasses that fill museums seem a little, well, quiet, fear not. In the latest coup for artificial intelligence, dead animals are to receive a new lease of life to share their stories – and even their experiences of the afterlife. More than a dozen exhibits, ranging from an American cockroach and the remnants of a dodo, to a stuffed red panda and a fin whale skeleton, will be granted the gift of conversation on Tuesday for a month-long project at Cambridge University’s Museum of Zoology. Continue reading...

As multinationals and researchers harvest rare organisms around the world, anger is rising in the global south over the unpaid use of lucrative genetic codes found on their land Even in the warm summer sun, the stagnant puddles and harsh rock faces of Ribblehead quarry in North Yorkshire feel like an unlikely frontier of the AI industrial revolution. Standing next to a waterfall that bursts out from the fractured rock, Bupe Mwambingu reaches into the green sludge behind the cascade and emerges with fistful of algae. Balancing precariously on the rocks, the researcher passes the dripping mass to her colleague Emma Bolton, who notes their GPS coordinates and the acidity, temperature and light exposure on a phone app. Continue reading...