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La planète peut-elle vraiment nourrir 10 milliards d'humains ? Des scientifiques répondent

Huit milliards d’êtres humains aujourd’hui et bientôt 10 milliards d’ici 2050, alors même que notre environnement connaît une crise sans précédent. Comment arriver à nourrir une population humaine aussi importante dans une planète où les ressources sont amenées à diminuer ? Des scientifiques...

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La planète peut-elle vraiment nourrir 10 milliards d'humains ? Des scientifiques répondent

Huit milliards d’êtres humains aujourd’hui et bientôt 10 milliards d’ici 2050, alors même que notre environnement connaît une crise sans précédent. Comment arriver à nourrir une population humaine aussi importante dans une planète où les ressources sont amenées à diminuer ? Des scientifiques...

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‘It’s no romcom’: why the real Wuthering Heights is too extreme for the screen

The new film adaptation by Saltburn director Emerald Fennell looks set to be provocative – but nowhere near as shocking as Emily Brontë’s original

The most astonishing thing about the first trailer for Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is not the extreme closeup of dough being kneaded into submission. It’s not that in the lead roles Margot Robbie is blonde and 35, and Jacob Elordi is white, when Emily Brontë described Cathy as a teen brunette and Heathcliff as “a dark-skinned gypsy”. It’s not the gaudy splendour of the interiors – silver walls, plaster Greek gods spewing strings of pearls, blood-red floors and a flesh-pink wall for clutching and licking. It’s not Robbie’s gobstopper diamonds or her scarlet sunglasses or her stuffing grass into her mouth or the loud snip of her corset laces being slashed with a knife or her elaborately – erotically – bound hair as she contemplates multiple silver cake stands stacked with vertiginous fruit puddings. It’s not any of her dresses – the red latex number or the perfectly 1980s off-the-shoulder wedding dress topped by yards of veil half-wuthered off her head. Nor is it any of the times Elordi takes his top off.

The most astonishing thing is that the trailer says Wuthering Heights is “the greatest love story of all time”. Which is almost exactly how the 1939 Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon film was trailed – as “the greatest love story of our time … or any time!” Have we learned nothing? I am not talking about the fact that (like Oberon’s!) Robbie’s wedding dress is white, which is not period-correct. This has exercised many people on the internet. I’m more worried about the fact that almost a century since Olivier’s film, we are still calling it a love story – a great one! The greatest! It’s being released the day before Valentine’s Day! – when what actually happens is that Cathy rejects Heathcliff because she’s a snob, and he turns into a psychopath.

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© Photograph: Warner Bros

© Photograph: Warner Bros

© Photograph: Warner Bros

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Could AI relationships actually be good for us?

From companionship to psychotherapy, technology could meet unmet needs – but it needs to be handled responsibly

There is much anxiety these days about the dangers of human-AI relationships. Reports of suicide and self-harm attributable to interactions with chatbots have understandably made headlines. The phrase “AI psychosis” has been used to describe the plight of people experiencing delusions, paranoia or dissociation after talking to large language models (LLMs). Our collective anxiety has been compounded by studies showing that young people are increasingly embracing the idea of AI relationships; half of teens chat with an AI companion at least a few times a month, with one in three finding conversations with AI “to be as satisfying or more satisfying than those with real‑life friends”.

But we need to pump the brakes on the panic. The dangers are real, but so too are the potential benefits. In fact, there’s an argument to be made that – depending on what future scientific research reveals – AI relationships could actually be a boon for humanity.

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© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

© Illustration: Elia Barbieri/The Guardian

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Brigitte Bardot, French screen legend, dies aged 91

Emmanuel Macron leads tributes to​ actor who became an international sex symbol ​and later embraced animal rights​ and far-right politics

Brigitte Bardot, the French actor and singer who became an international sex symbol before turning her back on the film industry and embracing the cause of animal rights activism and far-right politics, has died aged 91.

Paying tribute to Bardot on Sunday, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, wrote on social media that France was mourning “a legend of the century”.

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© Photograph: NANA PRODUCTIONS/REX/Rex Features

© Photograph: NANA PRODUCTIONS/REX/Rex Features

© Photograph: NANA PRODUCTIONS/REX/Rex Features

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