Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari review – chilling
The epic, widely celebrated Sapiens gets the sequel it demanded: a breathless, compulsive inquiry into humanity’s apocalyptic, tech-driven future
Worried face: the battle for emoji, the world’s fastest-growing language
It started with 176 icons. Now it’s grown to 1,800. But who decides what becomes an emoji? We lift the lid on the California coders who live and breathe smiling cats and banned aubergines
Meet Generation M: the young, affluent Muslims changing the world
Burkinis, misery memoirs and people on camels: the caricatures of Islam don’t leave much room for modernity. The author of a new book argues that this image is absurd – and that a new demographic is about to flex its economic muscles
If technology makes humans into gods, old questions return
Loose canon: Yuval Noah Harari’s new book Homo Deus imagines a world in which life is painless, purposeless and long
Can you get to know a person through data alone?
That’s the challenge two designers set themselves with a year-long exchange of hand-drawn infographics
The Cyber Effect by Mary Aiken – review
A cyberpsychologist is worryingly persuasive about the potential damage to children of a life online
John Hearle obituary
Other lives: Expert in textiles who advanced understanding of the behaviour of fibres
No Man’s Sky’s cultural influences, from Dune to post-rock
Hello Games’ title is one of the most visually interesting games of the past decade. But where does its approach to sci-fi come from?
Holiday downloads: what to put in your digital suitcase
We now spend more time deciding what to take with us on our tablets, phones and e-readers than we do packing our bags. Here’s how to organise your digital luggage
Germaine Greer’s archive: digging up digital treasure from the floppy disks
Archivists trying to preserve material stored in obsolete formats face a mighty challenge in retrieving decades of work by the Australian writer and feminist
Vatican library digitises 1,600-year-old edition of Virgil
Seventy-six pages and 50 illustrations from the great Latin epic made available to all, part of a project to put all its 80,000 manuscripts online
A Twitter love story: the woman who wed @WstonesOxfordSt
He wrote the tweets, she followed the account, and then, reader, she married him. This is the full story
Art Cockerill obituary
Other lives: Engineer and writer who established the technical publishing company Delta Tech Systems
Pinpoint: How GPS Is Changing Our World by Greg Milner – review
The story of GPS and its impact on our natural homing instinct is both fascinating and unsettling
Alvin Toffler obituary
Author and futurist whose books accurately predicted much of the social upheaval brought about by fast-paced technological change