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Slow Horses Season 5 Review: When MI5 Becomes Predictable

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Official promotional artwork for Slow Horses Season 5. Apple TV+ promotional material, used for review and commentary. Season five of Slow Horses begins with events that seem to require different explanations: public violence, political agitation, technical disruption and Roddy Ho’s implausibly glamorous new relationship. The danger lies in the possibility that MI5’s separate responses are themselves part of the design. Adapted from London Rules , the fifth novel in Mick Herron’s Slough House series , Apple TV+’s six-episode fifth season has one of the series’ strongest plot ideas. An adversary does not need to overpower the British security apparatus if it can predict how each part will react. Institutions designed to divide responsibilities, classify threats and protect sensitive information become vulnerable when someone understands the gaps between them. I admired that construction more than I enjoyed its execution. The season offers reversals, concealed conn...
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Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs Review: Plenty Happens, but What Changes?

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Mercy Thompson #4 | First published in 2009 Spoiler warning: This review discusses the aftermath of sexual assault in Iron Kissed and reveals major plot developments, including the ending of Bone Crossed. Cover image: Bone Crossed by Patricia Briggs, published by Ace. Used here for purposes of review and commentary. Four books into Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson series, I keep finishing the novels with the peculiar impression that not very much has happened. Bone Crossed is a good example. Mercy faces retaliation from the local vampires, investigates a haunting in Spokane, encounters another exceptionally dangerous vampire and becomes more deeply entangled with Adam’s werewolf pack. There is plenty of plot to summarise, yet the adventure somehow feels smaller than the Harry Dresden and Anita Blake novels I have been rereading alongside it. I suspect this has less to do with how many things happen than with how much the world changes afterwards. Marsilia remain...
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We Haven’t Uploaded a Fly Brain — But We Can Finally Test How to Simulate One

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In September 2026, researchers published a connectome of the adult male fruit fly containing 166,691 neurons across the brain and ventral nerve cord, linked by roughly 125 million synaptic connections. Google Research describes it as the largest brain map yet produced by number of neurons. Within days, the internet was talking about downloadable fly brains, virtual flies and the beginnings of biological mind uploading. We have not uploaded a fly. What has happened may be more important scientifically: neuroscience is acquiring nervous systems detailed enough that researchers can begin testing, rather than merely speculating about, what a brain simulation actually requires. If we know the wiring in extraordinary detail, how much of the remaining biology must we reproduce before a computational model begins to predict what the real nervous system does? Editorial image generated by the author. A Wiring Diagram Is Not a Brain Upload A connectome is essentially a ma...
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The Self Is a Coincidence: Personal Identity in Speculative Fiction

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Editorial image generated by the author. Most of us have remarkably little difficulty deciding who we are. The person who wakes up this morning is the same person who went to sleep last night. The child in an old photograph is somehow the same person as the adult looking at it. Bodies change, opinions shift, memories fade, cells die and are replaced, yet the underlying continuity feels obvious. Philosophers usually discuss this as the problem of personal identity : what makes a person at one time the same person at another? Speculative fiction has a habit of making the question much harder. Put someone through a teleporter. Copy their mind into two bodies. Remove their memories, or implant someone else’s. Upload their brain. Let another consciousness control their body. Merge them into a hive mind. The apparently simple question — is this still the same person? — begins producing incompatible intuitions. The problem may be that ordinary life hides several different ...
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Post-Quantum Cryptography: Why the Real Challenge Is Migration

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Editorial image generated by the author. Quantum computers are often described as machines that will eventually break encryption. The more precise threat is narrower and, in some ways, more consequential. Shor’s algorithm threatens RSA, Diffie-Hellman and elliptic-curve cryptography, while much of the symmetric encryption protecting the actual contents of our communications remains far more resilient. The first post-quantum replacements are already standardised and beginning to be deployed; the difficult part is replacing the old systems everywhere they have become infrastructure. That changes the nature of the quantum-security problem. It is not primarily a race to invent new encryption after quantum computers arrive. It is a migration that has to begin before anyone knows exactly when a cryptanalytically relevant quantum computer will exist. What Quantum Computers Actually Break Modern public-key cryptography frequently exploits mathematical operations that are e...
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Neuralink's Most Important Contribution May Not Be Its Implant

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Could the neural data collected by brain-computer interfaces eventually help artificial intelligence discover how the human brain works? Neuralink reports having accumulated more than 50,000 hours of human brain recordings. The immediate purpose is practical: improving the software that allows people with severe paralysis to control computers through neural activity. But the recordings also present a scientific opportunity. Developers of implanted brain-computer interfaces are now accumulating extensive datasets of neural activity from people using the technology over months and years. Editorial image generated by the author. In an announcement on October 1, 2026 , Neuralink described how it had begun using this information to train artificial intelligence models without requiring every recording to be labelled with the participant's intended action. According to the company, the approach has already improved the reliability of its brain-computer interfaces, red...
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