Books & Arts in 2017

Maria Konnikova detects the fictional sleuth's inner researcher, 130 years on from his 'birth'.

W. Bernard Carlson relishes a biography of a self-taught engineer who revolutionized telecommunications.

Computer scientist Luc Steels uses artificial intelligence to explore the origins and evolution of language. He is best known for his 1999–2001 Talking Heads Experiment, in which robots had to construct a language from scratch to communicate with each other. Now Steels, who works at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), has composed an opera based on the legend of Faust, with a twenty-first-century twist. He talks about Mozart as a nascent computer programmer, how music maps onto language, and the blurred boundaries of a digitized world.

Raja Adal investigates the 150-year history of a typewriter able to reproduce thousands of characters.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Alex Wellerstein commends a biography of James Conant, scientific 'cold warrior'.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Paul Cairney examines the tangled history of one nation's drive for social equity.

Stuart Russell weighs up a book on the risks and rewards of the AI revolution.

Alexandra Witze applauds a documentary on the twin NASA probes as they sail out of the Solar System.

Henry Nicholls relishes a book on how the biologist's home became a lab for dazzling experimentation.

Kierán Suckling extols a study of looming threats to the country's publicly owned territory.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Roger Bilham savours two rich accounts of seismicity across the continent.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Kevin Padian hails a stunning, provocative book probing evolutionary mechanisms.

Michael Mann views the US statesman's second film probing climate change.

As the world is reshaped by another industrial revolution, Gareth Stedman Jones revisits Karl Marx's opus.

Barbara Kiser reviews five of the week's best science picks.

Daniel Cressey surveys the remains of John Franklin's fatal 1845 voyage.