We are living through a crisis which we call Anthropocene. Even though we study their ecological impact, their causes are social: the destruction of cultures and biodiversity is the heritage of colonialism, although it is now following different paths or being played out by different actors.

Guaranteeing access to food for a growing human population – based on sustainability criteria and in the face of the climate change threat – is the main challenge for twenty-first-century agriculture. The solutions are inevitably complex, require a variety of coordinated measures, and are dependent on the development of technologies.

Can humans control the future evolution of our species? Based on current knowledge in genetics, one can infer and extrapolate what may happen in the near future. After all, if we are to predict the future, we must first understand the foundations of our present.

Adults and older people have most likely always wondered how the young will manage to survive in the world they are left with, and at this point in history, this is a central question in our debates. In order to resolve it, we must resort to one of the main tools we have devised to try to understand the world we live in, the one we call science.

On the occasion of the 100th issue of Mètode, we present reflections on some of these challenges, such as food and energy production, the processing of information, genetic modification, or synthetic biology.

The growing interaction with machines poses several questions about which we have no previous experience, nor can we reliably predict how they will influence the evolution of society.

Robotics and automation and artificial intelligence technologies hold immense potential in addressing many of the societal challenges as exemplified in the sustainable development goals of the 2030 agenda of the United Nations.

Some say that a humanoid should have a «full body» including two arms and legs, exactly like a human. This article intends to cover research on humanoid robotics in a broad manner.

Brain-computer interfaces allow the control of devices without the generation of any active motor output but directly from the decoding of the user’s brain signals.

Deep learning is an undeniably hot topic. However, interestingly, the current success and practice of deep learning seems to be uncorrelated with its theoretical, more formal understanding.

The ultimate objective of the field of artificial intelligence (AI), the creation of a machine with a general intelligence like that of humans, is one of the most ambitious scientific goals ever set.

Mètode SSJ's monograph tries to offer a general overview of the world of robotics and artificial intelligence from the perspective of six experts on the field.

In the 1980s, three sub-disciplines of ecology emerged – restoration ecology, conservation biology, and invasion biology – and all three embraced the nativism paradigm.

Natural enemies are a fundamental piece of food webs and can contribute to biodiversity preservation. However, they can often produce dramatic losses, especially when humans are involved.

Species richness is not homogeneous in space and it normally presents differences when comparing among different sites. These differences often respond to gradients in one or several factors which create biodiversity patterns in space and are scale-dependent.

Between the mid-1980s and the present day, conservation biology split into two almost independent fields: management ecology and conservation ecology. We have witnessed the recovery of large endangered species and a decrease in small and common species.

Biodiversity has been changing both in space and time. But, luckily, we have remains of ancient organisms, called fossils. These are basically the only direct records of past biodiversity.

Due to the extreme environmental conditions of the Antarctic continental shelf – its distance from other continents, depth, and the weight of the continental ice – it offers us a great opportunity to better understand how a pristine ecosystem would normally be.

The concept of biological diversity has evolved from a simple count of species to more sophisticated measures that are sensitive to relative abundances and even to evolutionary divergence times between species. In the course of this evolution, diversity measures have often been borrowed from other disciplines.

In modern ecology, the traditional diversity indices (usually of richness, abundance, and species evenness) have been highly revealing and useful for monitoring community and ecosystem processes.

Els éssers humans ja fa temps que som conscients de ser una espècie amb gran poder per modificar el món natural. I tant que ho hem fet. Però només fa unes dècades que la societat, amb veu ferma, es revolta contra la desfeta duta a terme.

Forensic genetics brings together all the genetic knowledge required to solve specific legal problems. In recent decades new techniques have shown the potential of DNA as a profiling system.

The lack of information from institutions and organisations regarding the use of animals in scientific research produces a specialised communication niche which non-scientific groups have exploited to make public opinion sympathetic to them.

During a period dominated by positivist thinking, metaphors seemed incompatible with science, at least for the most common manifestations of scientific discourse.