New research is providing evidence for what pet owners and animal lovers have long suspected: Dogs are remarkably good at reading human emotions.
Why it matters: The findings offer clues about how living as human companions for thousands of years may have shaped dogs.
Zoom in: For the study, published recently in iScience, researchers scanned pups’ brains while they looked at photos of human facial expressions portraying a range of feelings, including happiness, fear, sadness and anger.
Dogs processed the faces just like humans do, focusing on eyes, noses and mouths, and their brainsshowed a distinct response to happy faces.
While smiles elicited the biggest response, dogs appeared to read the other emotions, too. And their brains didn’t put all the negative feelings in the same bucket.
Instead, brain activity differed depending on whether the pups were looking at a fearful, sad or angry face.
The intrigue: This study analyzed dogs’ brain responses when they were looking at photos of strangers.
Their reactions would likely be even stronger when observing their owners’ faces, the study authors note.
The money quote: “Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” study author Raúl Hernández-Pérez from the University of Vienna told the BBC.
The bottom line: Whether it’s your dog or one you meet out and about, you’re not the only one getting something out of saying hello.
The American farmer, novelist and poet Wendell Berry, died on August 31 2026, aged 92. Berry farmed in Port Royal, in his native Kentucky, for over 40 years. Through his writing and his farming, Berry emphasised the importance of both community and care for the planet, advocating for small-scale agriculture as key for both.
He criticised modern consumer culture, suggesting, in his poemManifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front, that instead of buying into the rat race, people should: “Love the world. Work for nothing […] / Say that your main crop is the forests / that you did not plant / that you will not live to harvest.”
Caring for the planet, Berry believed, means recognising your own place in it. Not as the centre, but as part of a wider community of interconnected life. In doing so, Berry’s writing highlights an important new theme in environmental humanities: a growing interest in “georgic” writing as an environmental genre.
The georgic is a classical genre that gets its name from Virgil’s Georgics – a long, four-book poem offering farming advice on ploughing, animal husbandry, fruit growing and beekeeping that was written around 29BC.
While for centuries the georgic was as popular as other classical modes like the pastoral or the epic, by the late 18th-century the form in English had all but disappeared, as the developing science of agriculture became more suited to prose treatises than long, complex poems.
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Farming and environmentalism have long been pitched against each other. Over the 20th century, the worst excesses of industrial farming have decimated insect life in the US, as attested to by Rachel Carson’s environmental science book Silent Spring, as well as declining bird life in the UK.
However, since the 1980s, interest has been growing in agroecology and regenerative farming – practices which balance human and environmental needs. Often small-scale and community-led, these practices offer an alternative way of engaging in food production, with projects flourishing from Berry’s native US to Brazil, Spain, Australia and beyond.
This growing interest in balancing agriculture and the natural world is reflected in contemporary books and culture. In the last five years, there has been a growing academic interest in the ways that contemporary georgic writing might respond to environmental concerns.
The resurgence of georgic is in part due to a reimagining of what the form might be. It’s no longer just long, instructional poems that can be thought of as georgic.
Alongside farming novels such as Addlands by Tom Bullough (2017), or The Long Dry (2014) by Cyan Jones, poet Terry Gifford has identified three types of contemporary georgic non-fiction. These include “traditional instructional georgic”, like gardening manuals or the TV programme Countryfile, as well as memoirs, such as The Cow Book: A Story of Life on an Irish Family Farm by John Connell (2019). Finally, there is the genre of rewilding books, such as Wilding by Isabella Tree (2018), which Gifford terms as “radically future-oriented georgic”.
Environmental humanities scholar Pippa Marland, meanwhile, has identified the “new georgic” – a genre in which farmers are engaged in producing nature itself. She cites English Pastoral by James Rebanks (2021) as a prime example.
While the term “eco-georgic” was only coined in 2011, Wendell Berry’s lifelong commitment to farming for nature and communities and to sharing his ethos and experience through writing, make him a fundamentally eco-georgic figure.
Berry’s legacy
Georgic is a didactic genre: it teaches readers things. Berry can be thought of as a georgic writer not because he wrote how-to manuals on ploughing, beekeeping or fruit-grafting (although he was a contributing editor at both New Farm Magazine and Organic Gardening and Farming), but because there is a fundamental quality about his work that seeks to teach readers how to coexist with nature and care for our planet, while feeding our communities.
In his poem Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front (1973), Berry asks readers to imagine our true crop as the trees that came before us and will outlive us. He urges us to think across the longer span of centuries. In doing so, he asks us to reorient our relationship with the earth. We should not see it simply as something to exploit and profit from. Instead, we should treasure it, even as we enjoy the crops and fruits that sustain us. Every reader, farmers and non-farmers alike, can learn from his broader ethics of care, attention and negotiation with the natural world.
Berry’s legacy, then, reflects a growing interest in agroecology over the past decades. But alongside his environmentally conscious farming, his writing touched many, feeding an appetite for ideas about how to live alongside nature, as much as for the food that farming produces.
The flourishing of the eco-georgic genre over the past decade testifies to a continuing and growing interest from readers and writers in a way of farming and living that cares for both nature and communities. Communicating these ideas is as vital as putting them into practice: making the pen is as mighty as the plough.
This article features references to books that have been included for editorial reasons, and may contain links to bookshop.org. If you click on one of the links and go on to buy something, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.
The climate crisis has a communications problem. How do we tell stories that move people – not just to fear the future, but to imagine and build a better one? This article is part of Climate Storytelling, a series exploring how arts and science can join forces to spark understanding, hope and action.
Hannah GreenPhD Candidate in English Literature and Environmental Humanities, University of Bristol
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AI is supposedly going to kill us all, but at least it’s doing wonders for the stocks for a few multibillion-dollar companies.
Mounting fears over the technology’s existential risks reached a fever pitch over the weekend, tanking AI chip stocks across the globe.
This earthshattering discussion had a curious aftershock, though. Instead of double-checking their fortified bunkers, investors poured even more money into Microsoft, Google, and Meta Platforms — the biggest AI hyperscalers, or companies that operate the largest data centers — which were up by more than two percent on Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported. All remain up by a few percentage points over the past five days.
These gains may not mean much in the grand scheme of things, but they did result in the WSJ publishing what CNBC correspondent Eamon Javers called a “subhead for the ages.”
“Talk of heading off artificial intelligence’s potential role in destroying humanity hurt some stocks and helped others,” it read. There are winners and losers in every scenario, in other words — including humanity’s extinction.
Fears that AI advancements could spell doom for our species have been running high after Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned last week and accused the company of “gambling with our lives,” sending shockwaves through the tech industry.
Coxon’s warning came after months of leading AI labs, including Anthropic, each coming out to say that their powerful agentic systems had been able to break out of containment and launch cyberattacks in the real world.
Talk of slowing down AI development quickly spread from Silicon Valley to Washington, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei intensified these calls on Saturday in a lengthy essay urging other AI companies to cooperate. Elon Musk, who runs SpaceXAI, and Sam Altman, the CEO OpenAI, both came out in agreement.
Some experts are skeptical of these apocalyptic claims from AI leaders, wondering if there might be an ulterior motive. The likes of Anthropic have long been accused of using fear-mongering as a marketing tactic. Whatever’s going on, it seems that the industry is doing its best to keep the narrative around the tech within its control.
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
Interest rates are going UP for the first time in 3 years, with officials unanimously voting for a quarter-point hike to 3.75% to 4%.
Trump has spent more than a year demanding dramatically lower rates and, within hours of the decision, was back on Truth Social calling for rates of “1%, or less.”
“LOWER THE INTEREST RATES FOR THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND FAST!”
Instead, Fed Chair Kevin Warsh, the man Trump picked expecting lower rates, said the Fed had “removed a dose of accommodation.”
The problem is inflation still won’t behave. Tariffs, the Iran war pushing up energy prices and an enormous AI investment boom have all added pressure. The Fed now expects inflation to remain above its 2% target until 2029. And this probably isn’t one-and-done.
16 of 18 Fed officials see at least one more hike before the end of the year. 4 officials even expect 2 hikes.
What does that mean for your wallet?
Credit cards: more expensive almost immediately. Carrying a balance just got uglier. Mortgages: fixed-rate owners are insulated. New buyers and anyone on an adjustable rate, not so much, with mortgage rates already hovering near 7%.
Savings: finally, some good news. High-yield accounts, CDs and money-market funds should benefit, assuming your bank actually passes the higher rates on.
WalletHub estimates this single quarter-point hike could cost credit-card borrowers around $2 billion in additional interest over the next 12 months.
So while Washington fights over whether rates should be 1% or 4%, anyone carrying debt gets to pay for the argument. Sources: Reuters, Bloomberg, Federal Reserve, WalletHub / Writer: Julie
Developing a sophisticated biological weapon has historically required highly specialized expertise, laboratory equipment, and years of trial and error. But artificial intelligence could change that equation by making advanced scientific knowledge easier to access and dramatically shortening the learning curve.
On GZERO World, Ian Bremmer asks investigative journalist and author Annie Jacobsen what happens when an AI system can provide a potential blueprint for a biological weapon. Jacobsen explains why the barriers to developing bioweapons are already much lower than those surrounding nuclear weapons – and how AI could lower them further.
Drawing on a real-world case involving an alleged biological weapons plan discovered in 2008, Jacobsen explains how capabilities that were once largely hypothetical could become more feasible as AI systems grow more powerful. The challenge for governments and AI companies is figuring out where safeguards can actually stop that knowledge from becoming a real-world threat.
Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Stock: Getty Images
AI companies are already building emergency brakes to stop rogue AI systems before they cause serious damage, Axios’ Herb Scribner writes.
Why it matters: Kill switches could become a last line of defense as AI systems grow more capable, but researchers don’t yet know whether humans can stop a system designed to evade them.
What’s happening: Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) plans to introduce a bill today requiring AI companies to maintain the ability to shut down their own systems.
A bipartisan House billintroduced in July would similarly require developers of powerful AI systems to maintain the ability to slow, suspend or shut them down.
The House bill would also give the Department of Homeland Security emergency authority to order companies to slow or shut down AI systems that could cause catastrophic harm.
What today’s AI kill switches look like:
OpenAI: After the Hugging Face incident, the company overhauled its emergency response system.
An AI security guard monitors AI chain-of-thought and alerts staffers to potentially dangerous behavior.
Responders have 30 minutes to identify a false alarm or pause the activity. OpenAI says its goal is “fully autonomous shutdown procedures for severe issues.
“OpenAI says the system would have alerted its security team more than a day before the Hugging Face breach.
Anthropic: The company is also using AI to monitor AI, focusing on whether it can reliably spot dangerous behavior rather than automatically shutting systems down.
Its system can flag suspicious behavior, stall risky actions and alert humans.
But Anthropicfound that half of 40 simulated attacks went undetected across 10 trials. Just eight were caught every time.
Separately, AI research nonprofit METR identified several previously unknown vulnerabilities in Anthropic’s monitoring system.Share this story.Cover: TIME illustration
TIME capsule … The magazine’s new cover story says summer incidents with rogue AI agents “pushed fears long held within the realm of AI safety researchers into the mainstream, raising worries that the companies building these models cannot prevent them from acting in ways they do not intend”:”This is a deep, unsolved issue in AI research and the key piece of evidence underpinning worries that near-future AI might wipe out humanity, intentionally or by accident—perhaps by engineering a new pandemic or taking charge of autonomous weapons. A system far smarter than humans, this thinking goes, might want to prevent our ability to switch it off.”
Zoom in: For the study, 
The intrigue: This study analyzed dogs’ brain responses when they were looking at photos of strangers.
The money quote: “Humans are really good at picking up small details on the face, and so are dogs,” study author Raúl Hernández-Pérez from the University of Vienna 
How kill switch could work
What today’s AI kill switches look like:
