Battle of the blobs: scientists feud over the nature of intelligent life, while the BBC fights for funding

‘A completely unique opportunity’: the secretive process that will decide the BBC’s future | Barbara Speed

Every decade, the BBC’s continued existence must be secured through an elaborate multi-year negotiation with the government. But what does charter renewal actually involve – and will it secure the BBC’s long-term future?

‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence | Samanth Subramanian

Scientists are battling over whether these supposedly simple organisms should be considered “intelligent”. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place within it.

This week we published Samanth Subramanian’s article on the extraordinary life of slime moulds. We asked Samanth about immersing himself in this surprisingly contentious subject.

What was the genesis of this piece?
As with many long reads, it started with a casual chat with my editor David Wolf, who remarked on how weird and surprising slime mould experiments are. We see many of their results in the daily press. But only after I started digging a little and talking to experts did I learn about the fierce debates that these results trigger among scientists – and how fundamental they are to understanding ourselves and other living beings.

I know you had childhood ambitions to be a scientist. Did the “fraught, sometimes dirty” battle over whether slime moulds can think make you wish you had stuck with it?
I’d wanted to be a physicist, as a kid, and I haven’t yet encountered – or at least written about – similarly fraught and dirty battles in that field. (I wonder if they exist. Readers, get in touch!) But researching this piece did rekindle that old itch, of wanting to be neck-deep in the really fundamental questions about the universe. Even though I imagine that, on a day-to-day basis, being a scientist – like being in any profession, really – involves routine and some drudgery and lots of frustration and plenty of admin, rather than constant immersion in deep thinking.

You describe studying the growth and behaviour of a single-cell organism while watching the development of a five-month-old baby. What did you learn?
Somehow, the sense of wonder that these scientists communicated to me about slime moulds amplified my already keen sense of wonder about my baby. It kept me alive to the things that seem near-miraculous in his development. Here’s one: we point out babies in prams to him when we go to the park, and say “baby”. Then one day he pointed to a cartoon baby in a cartoon pram in one of his books and said “baby”. How did his brain match real life to a rudimentary sketch? Or: how did he learn “dog” by looking at one breed – and then begin extending that to all the breeds, without being confused about whether they were cats? It’s a constant mystery!

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The trial of Björn Höcke, the ‘real boss’ of Germany’s far right | August 2024

This week, the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) won its first state election. One man is considered responsible for the party’s metamorphosis from a Eurosceptic, economically liberal movement into a nativist, anti-Islam, climate-denialist party. In 2024, Alex Dziadosz attended his trial for using language that echoed the Nazis.

Debunking the myth that anti-Zionism is antisemitic | March 2019

This week, prominent Israelis and Jewish community leaders in different countries have welcomed the British government’s announcement of sanctions on Israeli settlements. Conflating anti-Zionism with Jew-hatred is a tragic mistake, as Peter Beinart explains – as this response to sanctions attests.