What DNA ancestry kits can and cannot tell you
The ancestry percentages in a home DNA kit are statistical estimates made by comparing your markers against reference panels, not a fixed…
Amelia Hart
Amelia Hart
Technology Correspondent
Amelia Hart covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech and the platform economy. She has written about the technology industry for more than a decade.
Passkeys explained: the plan to kill the password
Passkeys replace typed passwords with cryptographic key pairs held on your device, making credentials unphishable and unleakable, but…
Amelia Hart
School admissions appeals: how the panel actually decides
Admissions appeals are decided by a two-stage legal test balancing the school's case about capacity against the family's case about the…
Amelia Hart
Why water companies lose a fifth of supply before it reaches a tap
Leakage persists because finding buried leaks is genuinely hard and fixing the last ones costs more than the water saves, a threshold the…
Amelia Hart
How weather forecasts are made and why day ten is fiction
Forecasts are built by assimilating millions of observations into physics models run dozens of times on supercomputers, and chaos theory…
Amelia Hart
Student loan repayments explained: why it works more like a tax
English student loans behave like a time-limited graduate tax on earnings above a threshold, which changes how borrowers should think about…
Amelia Hart
How GPS knows where you are and why it sometimes does not
A phone fixes its position by timing radio signals from satellites carrying atomic clocks, and the same physics explains city-centre drift…
Amelia Hart
Peat bogs: the unglamorous carbon store Britain spent centuries draining
UK peatlands hold more carbon than the forests of Britain and France combined, yet most are degraded and leaking it, which makes rewetting…
Amelia Hart
Retraining in your forties: what realistically works
Mid-career retraining succeeds most often when it builds sideways from existing experience rather than starting from zero in a fashionable…
Amelia Hart