Simon Ings

3 weeks ago | newscientist.com | Simon Ings

Mickey 17Bong Joon HoOn general releaseIn , Robert Pattinson stars as the “expendable” Mickey. Put him in harm’s way and if he dies, you can just print another. And for human colonists on the ice planet of Niflheim, there is plenty of harm to get into. There’s the cold. And the general lack of everything, so the settlers must count every calorie and weigh every metal shaving. Most troublesome are the weevil-like creatures that chomp through the planet’s ice and rock.

1 month ago | telegraph.co.uk | Simon Ings

At the end of his 1940 film The Great Dictator, Charlie Chaplin, dressed in Adolf Hitler's motley, looked directly at the camera and declared war on the "machine men with machine minds" who were, even then, marching roughshod across his world. Nor have they vanished. In fact, if you believe Leor Zmigrod, you may - without knowing it - be an inflexible, dogmatic robot yourself. Zmigrod, a young Cambridge neuroscientist, studies "cognitive rigidity". What does that look like in the real world?

1 month ago | newscientist.com | Simon Ings

When the Earth Was GreenRiley Black (St Martin’s Press (US, available now; UK, later this month))The behaviour of plants is invisible to the naked human eye. They operate on timescales our imaginations can’t entertain, and they run roughshod over familiar categories of self, other and community. I confess that I find them boring. Luckily, others don’t – Riley Black, a palaeontologist and an occasional contributor, for one.

2 months ago | newscientist.com | Simon Ings

CompanionDrew Hancock (Warner Bros (UK and US, on general release))Arriving at a house in the country, Iris (Sophie Thatcher) isn’t sure she is welcome. The owner, Sergey (Rupert Friend), is leery; his wife, Kat (Megan Suri), is unfriendly. It isn’t Iris she dislikes, Kat later admits, it is “the idea” of her: she makes her feel redundant. Iris’s boyfriend, Josh (Jack Quaid), is patient and encouraging, but even he finds her shyness and clinginess hard to bear.

2 months ago | flipboard.com | Simon Ings

Comedian’s reaction labelled ‘brilliant’ after front row heckler refuses to take his feet off the stageA British comedian has gone viral on TikTok after his 'brilliant' response to being heckled by a member of the front row audience who refused to take …