A quantum computer has been used to create a horror video game called Quantum Backrooms 鈥� and it鈥檚 available to play online.

Peculiarities of quantum objects have long inspired philosophers and artists, and now game developers are getting the bug too. at Moth Quantum and his colleagues developed Quantum Backrooms, a horror game with labyrinthine levels generated by a real quantum computer.

The game draws inspiration from 鈥渢he Backrooms,鈥� a horror legend developed on internet forums that consists of moving through a series of endless rooms. In Wootton鈥檚 game, each room corresponds to the quantum state of a part of a quantum computer called a qubit, while connections between qubits correspond to possible paths between rooms.

Wootton says that in this way, Quantum Backrooms conveys the feeling of being stuck in a quantum computer. The player can look in a fixed direction, but everything they aren鈥檛 looking at is constantly changing until they focus their gaze on it, conveying the idea that states of quantum objects change when observed, he says.

Players don鈥檛 need access to quantum computers, as they were only used during the game鈥檚 development. Wootton says that he hopes that Quantum Backrooms will reach horror fans who will enjoy the new flavour of creepiness generated by the qubits. 鈥淎 player can be given this link and not have any idea that it was run on a quantum computer,鈥� he says. It is available to play .

at Aalto University in Finland says that hundreds of quantum games exist already, ranging from those that involve content generated on quantum hardware like Quantum Backrooms to those that rely on simulating quantum states on conventional computers. Access to quantum hardware still isn鈥檛 widespread, but the interest in quantum games is growing nevertheless, she says.

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Quantum Backrooms may not be a quantum-computing breakthrough, but it might be the most polished and playable version of a quantum game yet, says at King鈥檚 College London. He says that game developers are often at the forefront of innovating with novel computing technologies, so it is interesting to give them access to quantum hardware that is still impractical for most people. 鈥淥ften, their unusual demands or ideas for new technology drives real change in research,鈥� says Cook.

The Moth Quantum team hope that Quantum Backrooms will be a step towards quantum technology becoming more integrated in everyday consumer products. 鈥淛ust as AI went from being a research product to suddenly becoming something very relevant to consumers within the past few years, I think that we鈥檙e going to see the same thing for quantum computing,鈥� says Wootton.

We鈥檝e all been there: thousands upon thousands of books, films, TV shows and games lie at your fingertips, thanks to the wonders of modern technology. Yet, for some reason, you just can鈥檛 pick one. You sit there, twiddling your thumbs, and nothing gets done.

Choice paralysis is the scourge of the wannabe culture vulture. But fear not: New 女生小视频聽staff and contributors have crafted a bucket list of all-time cultural greats to shock you out of your indecision. It is an eclectic mix of books, films, television, music, video games, board games and more, designed to highlight some overlooked classics that you simply must try. The only thing they all have in common is their celebration of science, technology, the environment or any other topic you聽might find in聽New 女生小视频. We hope you enjoy our favourites. Bethan Ackerley

Outer Wilds is a rare triumph in video game storytelling. Released in 2019, it broke from a stale formula of largely linear plotlines and choreographed cutscenes in the middle of gameplay, instead opting for narrative experimentation.

You begin as a spacefaring alien in a solar system moments from destruction, stuck in a 22-minute time loop that ends with a supernova. You infer the story almost entirely through your own detective work, via alien ruins, cryptic logs and astrophysical oddities.

It is also a physics lover鈥檚 paradise: the game wrestles with quantum entanglement, entropy and non-Euclidean spaces. Its simulation of light bending around black holes is among the most accurate ever rendered in media. The expansion adds a second vanished civilisation and feels decidedly more like horror, but it remains true to the game鈥檚 central design ethos. Outer Wilds isn鈥檛 just a great story in a game; it鈥檚 a great story only games could tell.聽 Jacklin Kwan

What if there were a place where time literally stood still? This is just one of the possibilities explored in Alan Lightman鈥檚 book Einstein鈥檚 Dreams, which imagines the visions Albert Einstein might have had while working on his theory of relativity in 1905.

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Each beautifully written chapter explores a different transformative scenario and what the ramifications of living in such a world would be. Lightman鈥檚 focus is on the emotional more than the scientific, resulting in a read that is equal parts moving and thought-provoking. It鈥檚 a short book, but one that lingers for a very long time.聽 Michael Dalton

The two standout science-fiction films of 2025

From Mickey 17 and M3gan 2.0 to a musical about the end of the world, this was an eclectic year for science-fiction films. Film columnist Simon Ings shares his two breakout hits

I have watched countless wildlife documentaries and I can confidently say that none is as awe-inducing as Blue Planet II. This seven-episode series narrated by David Attenborough 鈥� the indispensable voice of the biggest nature documentaries 鈥� offers an unparalleled glimpse at life beneath the ocean鈥檚 surface. Filmed over four years and across 39 countries, it spans bustling coral reefs, the eerie open sea and lush kelp forests. It contains the first footage of certain animal behaviours: toddler-sized fish seizing birds mid-air, groupers cooperatively hunting with octopuses, and devil rays preying on fish. Plus, Hans Zimmer helped compose the score. Need I say more?

My absolute favourite episode of the series 鈥� and maybe of all television 鈥� explores the deep sea. This otherworldly ecosystem is home to centuries-old sharks and deep-sea sponges that live for more than 10,000 years. There are even underwater lakes on the ocean floor. It is truly mind-boggling. The series is also a powerful reminder that we must protect this miraculous planet we are so lucky to call home. 聽Grace Wade

Sci-fi epic The Creator is my favourite film of the decade (so far), mixing a utopian view of where human-AI synthesis could take us with a cracking tale of love and redemption. The positioning of the synthesised AI humans as the good guys makes a refreshing and very timely change, and the audiovisuals of a colossal spaceship called the USS Nomad and its frighteningly effective laser alone are stunning. The film鈥檚 director, Gareth Edwards, also directed Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, which shares many of The Creator鈥檚 hallmarks. Both are well worth watching together.聽 Kevin Currie

If you haven鈥檛 played Dobble, the rules are simple. There are 55 cards, each with eight symbols. Any two cards share only one matching symbol. Your goal? Be the first to spot your shared symbol as quickly as possible.

It sounds straightforward, but Dobble鈥檚 deceptively complex maths and dash of psychology make it my top pick for family gaming. I love how, invariably, at some point, every player will insist: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 have a match鈥�, before discovering it and wondering just how on earth the designers ensured that each card pairs perfectly with every other.

Now, with patronising superiority, you can tell them that their trick was to base it on a geometrical pattern called a 鈥渇inite projective plane鈥�, in which any two points create a line and any two lines determine a point. Every point has n+1 lines and every line contains n+1 points. A game of Dobble based on the simplest projective plane would have seven cards and three symbols per card. The full game, with eight symbols per card, creates a rather more intricate geometric pattern.

Even ignoring the maths, Dobble gives your brain a remarkable workout. The varying size and position of the symbols combined with the speed of play, challenges your short-term memory, visual pattern-spotting networks and executive functioning. Add a jolt of adrenaline and an excitable child or two and you鈥檝e got a family favourite that is as cognitively rich as it is competitive.聽 Helen Thomson

Ann Leckie鈥檚 Ancillary Justice is an achingly cool book that reset the bar for what modern, grown-up science fiction could look like when it was first published 12 years ago.

Our hero appears to be just an ordinary human, albeit a pretty tough and handy one. But her normal-ish exterior hides a truly extraordinary past. She was once the Justice of Toren, a colossal spaceship. In those days, she had a multitude of enslaved human bodies at her disposal, occupying all of them with her consciousness. Now the ship has been destroyed, and all its enslaved drones with it鈥� all except this last human body. And what this last human body wants is revenge.

Oh, it鈥檚 terrific stuff. Fantastic galactic politics, truly wonderful (and very nasty) aliens and a bold plot that works. The follow-ups in the series aren鈥檛 quite as good as the first book, but 2023鈥檚 Translation State, set in the same universe, was a return to form.聽 Emily H. Wilson

We humans are unique in our desire to unearth the past, and this drive isn鈥檛 limited in time. Chilean director Patricio Guzm谩n artfully and movingly demonstrates this in his 2010 film Nostalgia for the Light. It stitches together astronomers looking for the beginnings of the universe in Chile鈥檚 Atacama desert and the search by a group of Chilean women for the remains of their children, who were disappeared and buried in that same desert during Augusto Pinochet鈥檚 brutal dictatorship in the 1970s.

These efforts may seem very different, but Guzm谩n鈥檚 careful examination makes it clear how important it is not just to understand our past, in all its forms, but to have evidence of it. A line from near the end of the film has always stuck with me: 鈥淭hose who have a memory are able to live in the fragile present moments. Those who have none don鈥檛 live anywhere.鈥澛� Alex Wilkins

While the label 鈥減ost-metal鈥� isn鈥檛 as descriptive as heavy, speed or thrash metal, it shares all of those qualities 鈥� it is loud, it is grating and it employs every instrument to its physical聽maximum. Cult of Luna鈥檚 2004 album Salvation聽is some of the best of the genre, with a rich sonic texture on full display.

The record feels like an esoteric, tech-laden quest, a search for the titular salvation through machines. It could be the soundtrack of some yet-to-be-made sci-fi classic.聽It crashes over you in waves of noise, then pulls back with a beat and a hum, sometimes a robotic whisper somewhere in the distance, then comes crashing back again. It isn鈥檛 post-metal鈥檚 most iconic album, nor a foundational text, but it鈥檚 the record I find I want to keep drowning in most often. 聽Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Mawson鈥檚 Will聽has haunted me ever since I read it. In 1910, Australian geologist Douglas Mawson declined to join Robert Falcon Scott鈥檚 doomed expedition to the South Pole, instead leading his own team to map Antarctica鈥檚 coastline. Mawson鈥檚 Will, also published as This Accursed Land, is a bruising account of a key excursion in the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration. Lennard Bickel writes frankly and beautifully of the constant dangers facing the Australasian Antarctic Expedition.

But the real reason to read this book is for Bickel鈥檚 retelling of the Far Eastern Party, a sledding mission that took Mawson and two others around 500 kilometres from their base camp. When one man plummeted into a crevasse, along with half of their dogs and most of their supplies, the survivors battled starvation, sickness and katabatic winds in their attempt to get home. Mawson鈥檚 Will is utterly riveting, but it isn鈥檛 for the squeamish. 聽Bethan Ackerley

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I spent untold hours as a kid playing a trio of computer games released between 1998 and 2000:聽Caesar 3,听Pharaoh听补苍诲听Zeus: Master of Olympus. The games allowed you to build cities and follow storylines in ancient Rome, Egypt and Greece, respectively. There was something addictive about maximising your city-block layouts (those houses needed access to olive oil and furniture to evolve!) and turning military units loose against enemy soldiers and mythological monsters. Along the way, I learned about ancient geography, politics, religion, trade, mythology and culture.

I am now a voracious reader of ancient history books, and still regularly revisit cities and civilisations I first encountered in these games. (Frankly, few of them could compare to the raw satisfaction of seeing Hercules stroll up to the Hydra and bonk it on the head repeatedly with his club until it withered and died.) For those feeling nostalgic, all three games are available on GOG and Steam. 聽Kelsey Hayes

It was called 鈥渢he best show that nobody watched鈥�, and you should do your part to change that. Halt and Catch Fire did something I鈥檝e never seen before or since: it made the early days of tech 鈥� not the 2000s post-dot-com bubble that gets so much focus, but the processors being built in Texas in the 1980s 鈥� feel as dramatic and consequential as they would turn out to be. If that sounds boring, hang on. The heart of the series comes from the incredible performances that create the four main characters, half of whom refreshingly aren鈥檛 men.

At its core, the show is an exploration of what these antiheroes are willing to put on the line in pursuit of their creative dreams, and the deep connection they find through a shared passion for the technology that would change the world. Lee Pace and Mackenzie Davis have gone on to give more widely acclaimed performances since, but for my money, neither has reached the emotional heights they did on Halt and Catch Fire. 聽Chelsea Whyte

Every couple of weeks, a new episode of If Books Could Kill shows up on my podcast player and I set aside an hour to laugh myself half to death. The premise of the show is simple: many popular non-fiction books are terrible, so let鈥檚 pull them apart and make fun of them.

The hosts are journalist Michael Hobbes and lawyer (until he got fired for his podcasting) Peter Shamshiri. The dynamic between the pair is great: Michael overprepares to the point that his notes are often longer than the actual book in question, while Peter spends most of his time thinking up the funniest thing he could say at any given moment.

The podcast鈥檚 targets range from self-help books to those on history and science. Plenty of New 女生小视频-adjacent authors have come under their microscope 鈥� notably Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt (twice) and Malcolm Gladwell (also twice). You will have read some of these books: you won鈥檛 believe how flimsy they are.

You have three years鈥� worth of episodes at your disposal, so dive in and prepare to clear the dross from your bookshelves. 聽Michael Marshall

Kids ran crying from the cinema when the highly anticipated sequel to Babe, the story of a sheep-herding pig, premiered in 1998. A series of close calls with death, alongside the helplessness of urban living, were too close to the bone even for many parents. But a closer reading reveals Babe: Pig in the City to be a moral guide for our times that brims with optimism.

When Babe arrives at the animal hotel in Metropolis in a bid to save his farm, it is ruled as a hierarchy: dogs are bound to one floor, a choir of cats sings on another and Thelonius, an orangutan who cosplays as an aristocrat, watches from above 鈥� refusing to believe that a pig can be anything other than meat. The hotel reflects our troubled relationship with the natural world, in which some branches of the evolutionary tree are valued more than others.

Yet Babe鈥檚 gospel of kindness soon dismantles the pecking order to create what consciousness and feminist scholar Donna Haraway calls a 鈥渃ompost society鈥�, which recognises that creatures aren鈥檛 isolated or unequal, but entangled in a fundamental way. I鈥檝e come to see this interspecies philosophy as a kind of mutual aid, which, combined with Babe鈥檚 desire for self-determination (鈥淚鈥檓 not any kind of pie, I鈥檓 a pig on a mission鈥�) can only mean one thing: he isn鈥檛 just a sheep-pig, but an anarchist, too.聽 Thomas Lewton

Rachel Carson, one of the most important figures of the 20th century, is primarily known for her fourth and final book, Silent Spring. Its spectacular and deserved success obscures her earlier work, making us forget she was a marine biologist before she was an ecological campaigner. Her first three books were about the ocean and the shore. Under the Sea Wind, her first, was published in 1941, and takes the point of view of a sanderling, a mackerel and an eel.

The book tells the life stories of these animals, and though inevitably a work of imagination, it is also one of great perception and beauty. Carson was in tune with the ebb and flow of tides and the interconnectedness of marine food webs. She knew that life was networked and dynamic. Before her, environmentalism was broad brush, lofty and colonial; it was all about wildernesses. Carson showed us how to think ecologically, how to love life in all its complexity.聽 Rowan Hooper

Backgammon is one of the world鈥檚 oldest board games, with a history tracing back nearly 5000 years. For me, it has the perfect mix of skill and chance. The roll of the dice ensures that anyone can win a single game. A lucky roll can easily turn the tables, allowing a beginner to beat a grandmaster. This element of luck keeps every match exciting and unpredictable.

However, over a series of games, skill will ultimately prevail. Understanding probability and correctly using the doubling cube will pay dividends over time.

Backgammon is a fantastic game that is quick to learn but offers a lifetime of strategic depth. It is also far quicker to play than similar games like chess or Go. The doubling cube makes it perfectly suited for small, friendly wagers, adding an extra layer of excitement to the proceedings if that鈥檚 your sort of thing. 聽Martin Davies

I have never been a huge reader of sci-fi books, due partly to my worry that they will be light on story and heavy on flashy lasers and grotesque aliens. I鈥檓 growing out of that largely unfounded bias, however, and this perfectly poised novel, which I only read this year, has shown me how much I鈥檝e been missing. Ursula K. Le Guin鈥檚 book follows Genly Ai, a human envoy to a planet called Gethen whose people are androgynous most of the time, only taking on male or female bodily traits once a month or so.

The way Le Guin imagines this society so intricately and with such realism is a thrill to read. But what really sets The Left Hand of Darkness apart is its moving portrayal of the friendship 鈥� love, even 鈥� between Ai and Therem Estraven, especially in the brutal trek across an ice sheet that dominates the final third of the book. At times, it sent prickles up my spine. Read this book, you won鈥檛 regret it.聽 Joshua Howgego

It can be hard to start a TV show when you know it was prematurely cancelled. That was the sad fate of Scavengers Reign, an animated series set on a strange planet called Vesta. But I urge you to give this one a go: it鈥檚 some of the most breathtaking sci-fi I鈥檝e seen in years, and it is a beautifully self-contained season.

After the crew of the Demeter 227 are forced to abandon their ship, they crash on Vesta and find themselves surrounded by beautiful, dangerous flora and fauna. These endlessly inventive life forms are a marvel 鈥� there are stampeding horse-like creatures with inflating chest sacs, fish that act like gas masks, and a telepathic, parasitic frog called Hollow that extrudes a dark goo. Then there are the humans and Levi, a robot who is really the heart of the show, each of whom reacts differently to the unsettling environment.

If you want to watch some sci-fi that really feels alien, both in its content and its surreal, meditative tone, Scavengers Reign is the show for you.聽 Bethan Ackerley

Writing a play about physics (or anything physics-y) that isn鈥檛 incredibly onerous must be a difficult task. Setting it in a sanatorium, as Friedrich D眉rrenmatt did with his play The Physicists, is surely a start. Sure, it鈥檚 a bit strange to recommend a play that isn鈥檛 currently being put on anywhere (as far as I know), but if you ever see a flyer for it, or even if you just want to read it, I can鈥檛 recommend it highly enough.

The production I saw in 2012 was at the Donmar Warehouse, hands-down my favourite theatre in London, in a new version by Jack Thorne. I don鈥檛 want to give too much away, but the play follows three patients who think that they are Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Johann Wilhelm Mobius respectively. These 鈥減hysicists鈥� have murdered a series of nurses, and in the course of the investigation secrets are revealed about their true identities and motives.聽 Leah Crane

Chris Beckett鈥檚 sci-fi novel Dark Eden is set on a planet 40,000 light years from Earth, a world with no sun but where life is thriving regardless 鈥� and some of it is human. Almost two centuries earlier, an interstellar spaceship accidentally ended up nearby. Two astronauts were left behind while the others went for help. It never came, and now the world is peopled with the astronauts鈥� descendants, who eat the weird animal life found there and live under 鈥渢rees鈥� that tap into the planet鈥檚 geothermal heat.

Their language and culture have also developed in unexpected ways. Inbreeding and a lack of nutrients mean they are small and plagued with recessive genes, but they are surviving while they wait for the 鈥淟anding Veekle鈥� they have been promised will save them. Winner of the Arthur C. Clarke award in 2013, Dark Eden remains one of my favourite pieces of sci-fi: strange and marvellous, uncomfortable and thought-provoking.聽 Alison Flood

What if, in a period of sheer heartbreak, you could erase a former partner from your mind? Were the warmth and good times in a relationship really worth the break-up and suffering? This is the question Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind asks in its magnificent sci-fi love story.

The film employs a powerfully understated Jim Carrey and an electrifying Kate Winslet, exploring the messiness and untidiness of relationships, and arguing that failure is a vital part of romance. Director Michel Gondry opted for lo-fi yet highly creative visuals that add to the emotional rawness. While the sci-fi elements of the film are simply a plot device used to explore the main and secondary characters, such as a disturbing character played by Elijah Wood, research into memory erasure is now making tiny steps in the same direction.

The non-linear narrative can be a lot to take in on a first viewing, but today it鈥檚 a film I wish I could erase from my mind, just so I can watch it for the first time all over again. Meet me in Montauk? 聽Tim Boddy

Long periods go by when I never touch a controller, but every now and then a game comes along that completely enthrals me. My all-time favourite is Horizon Zero Dawn, a vast open-world game featuring robotic dinosaurs. It sounds ridiculous, but there鈥檚 a strong story involving the origins of the central character, Aloy, with some emotional moments along the way. No spoilers, but AI features heavily.

The reclaimed-by-wilderness landscape is gorgeous, too. The graphics were amazing for 2017, when the game first came out, and got even better with the release of a remastered version last year. While much of the gameplay revolves around fighting the robotic animals 鈥� it will make sense, trust me 鈥� it鈥檚 not just about button-mashing. The key to combat is exploiting weaknesses and taking advantage of features in the environment. There is a 2022 sequel, Horizon Forbidden West, that improves on the original in just about every way, but I鈥檇 recommend you start at the beginning.聽 Michael Le Page

Some films are so ridiculously awful that the only thing you can do is make fun of them. Enter Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K, to its friends). The premise of this cult TV series is that a worker grunt on a spaceship is forced to watch bad 鈥� and I mean, bad 鈥� retro sci-fi movies (think monster costumes with visible zippers and flying saucers made of hubcaps) to see how long it takes him to snap. Rather than break under torture, he watches the films with a pair of sassy companion robots he has built, and the trio shout rapid-fire one-liners at whatever terrible movie they are watching.

MST3K holds a special place in my heart because I used to watch it with my dad as a kid. It鈥檚 impossible to pick a favourite episode, but 鈥淪anta Claus Conquers the Martians鈥� 鈥� named after the real film it features 鈥� is a great bet. Episodes can be tricky to find online, but try Gizmoplex or Amazon Prime Video.聽 Kelsey Hayes

The 13 best popular science books of 2025

Women's hidden extra work, positive tipping points and new thinking on autism 鈥� there's much to chew on in this year's best reads, says Liz Else

Dropped on Amazon Prime with little-to-no fanfare during the covid-19 lockdowns, you鈥檇 be forgiven for never having heard of The Vast of Night, let alone seen it. While this film deserves far more attention and acclaim, its cult status is also rather fitting. Watching it evokes the feeling of stumbling across something on television late one night and, before you know what you鈥檙e watching, finding yourself unable to turn it off.

The film follows a young switchboard operator and a radio DJ in the 1950s who discover a strange audio signal, potentially of extraterrestrial origin. Despite being a low-budget and largely dialogue-driven film, there are some breathtakingly long tracking shots, which transport you to the fictional mid-century New Mexico town in which it is set. For those of you who like your alien films on the smaller side (Independence Day, this is not), The Vast of Night is a must-see modern classic. 聽Michael Dalton

The Chrysalids, first published in 1955, is set in a post-nuclear-war future in which any genetic flaws are branded 鈥渂lasphemies鈥� and are ruthlessly stamped down on. When our hero, David Strorm, makes friends with Sophie, a little girl with six toes on one foot, you know it can only be a matter of time before something bad happens.

In fact, it鈥檚 not just Sophie who has a secret to hide. David and some other children in the community of Waknuk are themselves hiding quite a big mutation: they are telepaths. Eventually, they are forced to flee. Can they reach 鈥淪ealand鈥�, a distant realm where they might be accepted for who they are?

This is very unlike John Wyndham鈥檚 other books: less stiff, more human and exciting. I think it鈥檚 his best book by far. I grew up on it, reading it over and over, and its hugely original story and powerful imagery have never faded from my mind. 聽Emily H. Wilson

Business. Numbers. Money. People. Not much has changed since 1981. At least, that鈥檚 what I think every time I hear the opening track of Computer World. Created by Kraftwerk, the pioneers of electronic music, this album is deliciously nerdy. It feels like respawning into an old-school video game, laser guns and all. You can almost hear the pixels.

That isn鈥檛 to say it is unpolished or archaic. If anything, its production beats that of most modern electronic albums. And there is no fluff. Each beep, boop and bop in the 34-minute runtime feels essential. What I appreciate about Computer World 鈥� and Kraftwerk more generally 鈥� is that it somehow celebrates the burgeoning digital world while critiquing it too. Between a dorky anthem to the pocket calculator and an apt depiction of a lonely night in front of the TV, this album is both retro and relevant to today. 聽Grace Wade

The 1979 film Stalker, directed by Andrei Tarkovsky, is a grey fever dream full of dystopian landscapes and existential questions. Two archetypical characters, a writer and a professor, follow a mysterious guide through a ravaged land into a special room that, supposedly, will turn their innermost desires into reality.

The film is over 2 hours long, but so immersive that it might as well last for centuries. Its core themes of desire, faith and how to live a good life feel equally timeless. Stalker draws on everything from Dante鈥檚 Inferno to Soviet science fiction and ultimately lands on something like a fairy tale gone wrong, except it offers no easy morals 鈥� just an awful lot of contemplation that is much richer than its post-apocalyptic yet minimalistic visuals. It鈥檚 a film that will stay with you even if you鈥檝e never felt lost in the wilderness.聽 Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino has a good claim to be the most original, imaginative and brilliant weaving of science and narrative ever written. It is certainly one of the most enjoyable. Narrated by an omniscient, polymorphic protagonist with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, each of the 12 stories tells of some aspect of cosmic or earthly history, from the big bang and the origin of our solar system to the extinction of the dinosaurs and the evolution of mammals.

Qfwfq 鈥� who was around before time began and, at various points, writes as a mollusc trying to devise a way to mate, a dinosaur, a chromosome and a human 鈥� has seen it all. Calvino typically starts with a statement of scientific fact, such as the distance of the moon from Earth or which creatures were around in the Carboniferous period, and from that has Qfwfq weave a yarn. It鈥檚 true that the value of Cosmicomics lies more in its imagination and joy than its science, but that is no reason not to lap it up. 聽Rowan Hooper

The 12 best science fiction books of 2025

From drowned worlds to virtual utopias via deep space, wild ideas abound in Emily H. Wilson's picks for her favourite sci-fi reads of the year

It鈥檚 hard to even describe what Bo Burnham: Inside is. A comedy special? A visual album? A zeitgeisty earworm factory? A cry for help? Whatever it is, it鈥檚 a masterpiece. Bo Burnham created a time capsule that he wrote, directed, performed, filmed and edited inside his home during the first year of the covid-19 pandemic. He captures how mentally exhausting those months were, but he also puts his finger on something bigger. The songs he sings are funny at surface level, but they laser in on what it鈥檚 like to be a person on the internet, which I鈥檝e always found impossible to sum up succinctly even though I鈥檝e been using some form of it for around 30 years.

Over driving beats and catchy riffs, Burnham poses huge questions. Why is so much of our online life performative? Why is everything so absurd? Why didn鈥檛 we build a better world than this one? With Inside, Burnham walked right up to the edge of our cultural chasm, looked in and came back to report how broken everything was (or is). It is also genuinely laugh-out-loud funny at points, and I will probably never get the doomscroller鈥檚 mantra from Welcome to the Internet out of my head: 鈥淐ould I interest you in everything all of the time?鈥澛� Chelsea Whyte

I鈥檝e just finished a two-year journey reading Robert Jordan鈥檚 epic 14-book series The Wheel of Time, a tale blending prophecy, the interplay between magic and gender, clashing civilisations and hundreds upon hundreds of well-constructed characters, especially powerful women. While it sits firmly within the fantasy genre, aspects of science fiction creep in regularly.

It is set in a world where time is cyclical (the eponymous wheel). Time dilates in a 鈥渨orld of dreams鈥� and the main antagonist, the Dark One, exists outside of space-time. Rand al鈥橳hor embodies the imperfect hero, whose flaws make him one of the best 鈥渟aviour of the world鈥� archetypes I鈥檝e ever read.聽 Pip Orchard

You know that feeling when you turn on the radio and find that you know every single word to a song that you haven鈥檛 heard in a decade? That鈥檚 how I feel when I remember that Symphony of Science exists. I found the first two videos in this series of musical mashups of scientists when I was in secondary school, and immediately memorised their catchy 鈥渨hoop-ah鈥漵 and autotuned audio snippets from Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.

These videos from electronic musician John Boswell are educational, of course, but also strangely calming. Maybe that鈥檚 because of the lo-fi beats behind the scientists, maybe it鈥檚 Carl Sagan鈥檚 voice, maybe it鈥檚 just nostalgia, but something about listening to these songs feels like being read to aloud from a favourite book. I wouldn鈥檛 listen to all of them in a row, perhaps, but once in a while it鈥檚 lovely to be sung a little song about the universe.聽 Leah Crane

Our writers pick their favourite science fiction books of all time

We asked New 女生小视频 staff to pick their favourite science fiction books. Here are the results, ranging from 19th-century classics to modern day offerings, and from Octavia E. Butler to Iain M. Banks

There鈥檚 so much Star Trek: 12 TV series, with a 13th on the way in 2026, plus 14 movies (if you count the recent Section 31, which you shouldn鈥檛). Some of it is great; much of it is terrible. But the most consistently good bit is Deep Space Nine, which ran for seven seasons in the 1990s.

The strengths of the series lay in its willingness to be different. Because it was set on a space station rather than a roving starship, the writers were forced to develop their featured alien cultures in rich detail. It also had the best (and largest) cast of any Star Trek series. It explored religion, politics, xenophobia, cultural trauma and the moral challenges of war. Star Trek鈥檚 setting is a future without poverty and bigotry, but only Deep Space Nine properly digs into what it takes to build and maintain such a society.

And, as a bonus, you get to see ships that look like the Enterprise from Star Trek: The Next Generation get absolutely totalled. 聽Michael Marshall

An artificial intelligence model from Microsoft can recreate realistic video game footage that the company says could help designers make games, but experts are unconvinced that the tool will be useful for most game developers.

Neural networks that can produce coherent and accurate footage from video games are not new. A recent Google-created AI generated a fully playable version of the classic computer game Doom without access to the underlying game engine. The original Doom, however, was released in 1993; more modern games are far more complex, with sophisticated physics and computationally intensive graphics, which have proved trickier for AIs to faithfully recreate.

Now, at Microsoft Research and her colleagues have developed an AI model called Muse, which can recreate full sequences of the multiplayer online battle game Bleeding Edge. These sequences appear to obey the game鈥檚 underlying physics and keep players and in-game objects consistent over time, which implies that the model has grasped a deep understanding of the game, says Hofmann.

Muse is trained on seven years of human gameplay data, including both controller and video footage, provided by Bleeding Edge鈥檚 Microsoft-owned developer, Ninja Studios. It works similarly to large language models like ChatGPT; when given an input, in the form of a video game frame and its associated controller actions, it is tasked with predicting the gameplay that might come next. 鈥淚t鈥檚 really quite mind-boggling, even to me now, that purely from training models to predict what鈥檚 going to appear next鈥� it learns a sophisticated, deep understanding of this complex 3D environment,鈥� says Hofmann.

To understand how people might use an AI tool like Muse, the team also surveyed game developers to learn what features they would find useful. As a result, the researchers added the capability to iteratively adjust to changes made on the fly, such as a player鈥檚 character changing or new objects entering a scene. This could be useful for coming up with new ideas and trying out what-if scenarios for developers, says Hofmann.

But Muse is still limited to generating sequences within the bounds of the original Bleeding Edge game 鈥� it can鈥檛 come up with new concepts or designs. And it is unclear if this is an inherent limitation of the model, or something that could be overcome with more training data from other games, says at King鈥檚 College London. 鈥淭his is a long, long way away from the idea that AI systems can design games on their own.鈥�

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While the ability to generate consistent gameplay sequences is impressive, developers might prefer to have greater control, says Cook. 鈥淚f you build a tool that is actually testing your game, running the game code itself, you don鈥檛 need to worry about persistency or consistency, because it鈥檚 running the actual game. So these are solving problems that generative AI has itself introduced.鈥�

It鈥檚 promising that the model is designed with developers in mind, says at the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, but it might not be feasible for most developers who don鈥檛 have so much training data. 鈥淚t comes down to the question of is it worth doing?鈥� says Yannakakis. 鈥淢icrosoft spent seven years collecting data and training these models to demonstrate that you can actually do it. But would an actual game studio afford [to do] this?鈥�

Even Microsoft itself is equivocal over whether AI-designed games could be on the horizon: when asked if developers in its Xbox gaming division might use the tool, the company declined to comment.

While Hofmann and her team are hopeful that future versions of Muse will be able to generalise beyond their training data 鈥� coming up with new scenarios and levels for games on which they are trained, as well as working for different games 鈥� this will be a significant challenge, says Cook, because modern games are so complex.

鈥淥ne of the ways a game distinguishes itself is by changing systems and introducing new conceptual level ideas. That makes it very hard for machine learning systems to get outside of their training data and innovate and invent beyond what they鈥檝e seen,鈥� he says.

An AI-generated recreation of the classic computer game Doom can be played normally despite having no computer code or graphics. Researchers behind the project say similar AI models could be used to create games from scratch in the future, just as they create text and images today.

The model, called , was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New 女生小视频. According to their on the research, the AI can be played for up to 20 seconds while retaining all the features of the original, such as scores, ammunition levels and map layouts. Players can attack enemies, open doors and interact with the environment as usual.

After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.

The original Doom was released in 1993 and has become a popular subject for computer science projects in the years since, including attempts to such as toasters, treadmills and espresso machines.

But in all those cases, the hardware is simply running the original game鈥檚 code. What GameNGen does is fundamentally different: a type of AI called a neural network has learned by observation how to recreate the game without seeing any of its code.

The researchers first created an AI model that learned to interact with Doom as a human would. That model was then tasked with playing the game over and over again while a second AI model, based on the image generator, learned how hundreds of millions of inputs resulted in changes in the game state.

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That second model essentially then became a copy of the game, with all of the knowledge, rules and instructions from the original code encoded in the mysterious network of artificial neurons in its own architecture. In tests, human players were only slightly better than random chance at distinguishing short clips of the game from clips of the AI simulation.

GameNGen鈥檚 creators claim in their paper that it is a proof-of-concept for games being created by a neural network rather than lines of code. They suggest that games could be generated from text descriptions or concept art, which would make production less costly than using human programmers.

at the University of Surrey, UK, says the idea of getting a neural network to hallucinate a game environment, and the interactions a human has with it, is an interesting step forward, but not one that will replace human game designers.

鈥淚 don鈥檛 think it鈥檚 the end of those game studios. I think what the game studios have is the imagination, the skills, to actually create these worlds, to understand gameplay, to understand engagement, understand how to draw us into a story. It鈥檚 not just the nuts and bolts, the bits and bytes,鈥� he says. 鈥淭here鈥檚 something very human about creating engaging experiences that we as human beings enjoy that, at the moment, and for the foreseeable future, will largely come from other human beings.鈥�

Playing video games really does seem to boost your well-being, despite the pastime often being maligned. The results come from a study that took advantage of a unique situation amid the height of the covid-19 pandemic.

鈥淚 guess if you enjoy your hobby, you鈥檙e going to find a good impact to your well-being,鈥� says at Nihon University in Japan.

In 2019, 聽to its International Classification of Diseases. But research into the effects of playing video games has produced mixed results, with many studies being unable to prove cause and effect when it comes to mental health outcomes. Studies that aim to do so usually take place in the controlled setting of a lab, yet these are 鈥渇ar removed from what it鈥檚 actually like to play video games鈥�, says at Bath Spa University in the UK, who wasn鈥檛 involved in the latest study.

But between 2020 and 2022, Egami and his colleagues hit upon a rare chance to investigate any causal effect of video games on a person鈥檚 well-being in the real world. Consoles were in short supply during this time, so parts of Japan introduced lotteries, where people could enter a ballot to receive either a PlayStation 5 or a Nintendo Switch gaming console.

The researchers surveyed 8192 people, aged between 10 and 69, who had entered one of these lotteries. The respondents answered questions related to their gaming habits and levels of psychological distress, an indicator of mental well-being.

Egami and his colleagues found that those who won the lotteries had slightly better mental well-being scores than those who were unsuccessful, though this plateaued after about 3 hours per day of total playing time.

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They also used a machine-learning model to break down the data, showing that the effect varied depending on the console and the demographics of the owner. For example, younger people with a Nintendo Switch saw an enhanced benefit compared with their older counterparts. The team also found that people who didn鈥檛 have children saw a greater benefit from having a PlayStation 5 than those who were parents.

鈥淚t highlights that, if we care about understanding how video games impact us, we need to be nuanced and specific about what it is that we鈥檙e measuring and how,鈥� says Etchells. But the participants self-reported their playing times, which may not be accurate, he says.

Both Etchells and Egami also point out that the data was collected during the height of the covid-19 pandemic, which may have affected people鈥檚 video game habits and their well-being. Further studies using this method could discover whether the trend holds true in other contexts.