The decline of men

The best of the week’s science and technology long reads, including how tasty a robot chef’s recipes can be, and why some men are falling behind.

Physics | Layers of reality

Discursive conversation. Carroll, a theoretical cosmologist, talks accessibly about the laws of nature and the limits of knowledge. “What causes what in the natural world? When you open up a book on quantum field theory or particle physics, words like ’cause’ and ‘effect’ appear nowhere in the book. The idea that A precedes B and therefore A causes B is a feature of our big macroscopic world. It’s not a feature of particle physics.” (Sean Carroll, Edge, 6,000 words)

Psychology | Hive consciousness

Scientists are learning to connect brains so that a stimulus to one is felt in the other. Will we eventually be able to share consciousness? Hard to say, since we have no theory of consciousness. But for how it might work, think of the human brain. The brain has two halves that can function independently, but they sum to a single consciousness, a single person; perhaps connected minds will also generate a single person. (Peter Watts, Aeon, 3,800 words)

Biology | The cunning minds of fish

Close study shows fish to be much cleverer than previously imagined. They appear to co-operate, cheat, console, punish – overturning long-standing assumptions that intelligent social behaviours are limited to primates because only primates have big enough brains. If fish can master them, then clearly the “extra computing power of big brains” is not essential; complex social skills can be mastered by simple association. (Alison Abbott, Nature, 2,500 words)

Society | Men adrift

Men are falling behind in the economy, in education and in society, because there is less demand for their physical labour and because their history of dominance over women makes them slow to adjust. “Their ideas of the world and their place in it are shaped by old assumptions about the status due to men in the workplace and in the family, but they live in circumstances where those assumptions no longer apply.” (The Economist, 5,600 words)

Ageing | Why the oldest person in the world keeps dying

Many more people are living beyond 100, but the limit of human longevity has held fairly steady. Only two people in recorded history have ever lived beyond 118, while the average age of the oldest-ever living person people has crept up from around 112 to around 114 in the past 40 years. So if you do get to be the oldest person in the world, you are probably not going to hold the title for very long. “It’s getting crowded at the top.” (David Goldenberg, Five Thirty Eight, 1,190 words)

Artificial intelligence | IBM’s robot chef tells me what to cook

Food writer cooks dishes devised by IBM’s artificial intelligence engine, Watson. You tell Watson what you have around the kitchen and Watson mashes a recipe. In brief: it’s never bad, and sometimes it’s amazing. “I fully expected to throw this meal away. That’s all before I ate two of the pizzas. They taste like nothing on Earth. The addition of Comte cheese and chives is the sort of genius/absurdity that makes people into millionaires.” (Matt O’Leary, How We Get to Next, 2,670 words)

For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser. If you would like to comment on this, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook or Google+ page, or message us on Twitter.