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Humans 16 December 2020 Nonglak Bunkoet/Legrand/Alamy With the coronavirus pandemic causing a sharp rise in unemployment, one idea is rapidly growing in popularity: universal basic income (UBI), in which the government pays people a regular sum, no strings attached. A Finnish study published in May (although carried out in 2017 and 2018) with 2000 unemployed people found that UBI boosted recipients’ financial well-being, mental health and cognitive functioning, and also modestly improved employment rates. Pe...

Technology 16 December 2020 ANGHI/Getty Images Y2020 arose from a lazy fix to the Y2K (or millennium) bug. This was the concern that computer systems that saved years as two digits – 99, say, instead of 1999 – would treat 00 as 1900 rather than 2000. Thanks to mass patching in 1999, this didn’t happen. Yet it turns out that an estimated 80 per cent of computers solved this using a cheap and quick method known as “windowing”, in which all dates from 00 to 20 would be treated as the 2000s rather than t...

Technology 16 December 2020 Graeme Jennings/AP/Shutterstock THIS was a year in which governments went head-to-head with big tech firms. As we went to press, US regulators were suing Facebook over its historic acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, asking the courts to consider breaking up the company. An executive order signed by President Donald Trump in August, banning the use of Chinese-owned apps WeChat and TikTok, has also led to a break up – TikTok’s parent company ByteDance is working on a deal to ...