I’m ashamed of my daughter’s messy garden. Should I say something?

Your concern may be an expression of care for your daughter – but you need to dig down into why you feel like this

My daughter, aged nearly 50, lives in a pleasant cul-de-sac of privately owned houses. Her front garden is the only one in it that, frankly, looks a mess. The grass is never cut because she says it’s eco-friendly and has wild flowers. (Mainly dandelions and three prized wild orchids.) It’s a very small garden and is crammed with untended bushes, fruit trees and a central tree that takes all the light from her sitting room. Recently, she’s been given five large fruit bushes in pots, which straggle over the path. I would be very disappointed if I had such an eyesore next door to me.

She’s a single mum with two sons who have recently left school, but she won’t let them tidy up her garden. We live three hours away, but always feel ashamed when we visit and push our way up the overgrown path. Does it matter or are we just pernickety old folk with outdated views? I’d appreciate another opinion.

Published: September 14, 2025, 5:00 am

UK workers wary of AI despite Starmer’s push to increase uptake, survey finds

Exclusive: A third of those polled do not tell bosses about use of tools and half think AI threatens the social structure

It is the work shortcut that dare not speak its name. A third of people do not tell their bosses about their use of AI tools amid fears their ability will be questioned if they do.

Research for the Guardian has revealed that only 13% of UK adults openly discuss their use of AI with senior staff at work and close to half think of it as a tool to help people who are not very good at their jobs to get by.

Published: September 13, 2025, 5:00 am

Password1: how scammers exploit variations of your logins

From avoiding recycling a password, even part of it, to two-step verification, steps to closing an open door for hackers

The first you know about it is when you find out someone has accessed one of your accounts. You’ve been careful with your details so you can’t work out what has gone wrong, but you have made one mistake – recycling part of your password.

Reusing the same word in a password – even if it is altered to include numbers or symbols – gives criminals a way in to your accounts.

Published: September 14, 2025, 6:00 am

Billion-dollar coffins? New technology could make oceans transparent and Aukus submarines vulnerable

Quantum sensing, satellite tracking and AI are part of an accelerating arms race in detection that should prompt a re-evaluation of Australia’s defence strategy

• Follow our Australia news live blog for latest updates

• Get our breaking news email, free app or daily news podcast

Military history is littered with the corpses of apex predators.

The Gatling gun, the battleship, the tank. All once possessed unassailable power – then were undermined, in some cases wiped out, by the march of new technology.

Published: September 13, 2025, 8:00 pm

‘It’s going to be a life skill’: educators discuss the impact of AI on university education

Artificial intelligence is changing how students learn and the world they’ll graduate into. Experts reveal how applicants can get ahead

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told a US podcast that if he was graduating today, “I would feel like the luckiest kid in all of history.”

Altman, whose company developed and released ChatGPT in November 2022, believes the transformative power of AI offers unprecedented opportunities for young people.

Published: September 13, 2025, 12:00 pm

‘Extreme nausea’: Are EVs causing car sickness – and what can be done?

Phil Bellamy’s daughters refuse to ride in his electric car without travel sickness tablets. Are there other solutions?

It was a year in to driving his daughter to school in his new electric vehicle that Phil Bellamy discovered she dreaded the 10-minute daily ride – it made her feel sick in a way no other car did.

As the driver, Bellamy had no problems with the car but his teenage daughters struggled with sickness every time they entered the vehicle. Research has shown this is an issue – people who did not usually have motion sickness in a conventional car found that they did in EVs.

Published: September 13, 2025, 10:01 am

British woman among crew training for Mars simulation mission

Laura Marie is one of six research volunteers preparing to spend 378 days inside Nasa’s Mars Dune Alpha in Houston

It sounds like the premise of a new reality show: take four strangers, isolate them in a 3D-printed Martian habitat for more than a year, and watch them tackle equipment failures, communication delays and attempts to grow vegetables. In fact, it is a scientific simulation – and for the first time a British pilot is among those training for the mission.

Laura Marie, who was born in the UK and is now a pilot for a regional airline in the US, beat about 8,000 applicants to become one of six research volunteers who are preparing to spend 378 days inside the 158-sq-metre (1,700 sq ft) Mars Dune Alpha habitat at Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.

Published: September 13, 2025, 12:00 pm

Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

Need something brilliant to read this weekend? Here are six of our favourite pieces from the past seven days

Published: September 13, 2025, 5:00 am

Autocrats and tech bros want to live for ever. Here’s how bleak that future could be | Hanna Thomas Uose

My novel explores the consequences of extreme longevity. Meanwhile, Putin and Xi are pondering immortality in real life

I was in bed scrolling on my phone when I read the headline: Hot mic catches Xi and Putin discussing organ transplants and immortality. It took me a long time to get to sleep after that. Not yet, I thought. I pride myself on my prescience, but I wasn’t ready for the future I had imagined to arrive so soon.

Since 2017, I’ve been thinking about the implications of longevity research, sketching out possible futures – the shifts in society, the complications and subcultures. This year I published the result of my thought experiment, Who Wants to Live Forever, a speculative literary novel. It follows Yuki and Sam, a couple at a crossroads at the same time that a new drug, called Yareta – which extends the human lifespan by 200 years and preserves youth – becomes available. Sam takes it, Yuki doesn’t, and the novel follows the fallout as the world changes around them. The story ends in 2039. Naively, considering the billions being poured into longevity research by the likes of Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Bryan Johnson (subject of this year’s Netflix documentary Don’t Die), I thought that was how long it might take for my fiction to become reality.

Hanna Thomas Uose is a writer and strategist. She is the author of Who Wants to Live Forever

Published: September 13, 2025, 6:00 am