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Imagine you are planning the funeral music for a loved one who has died. You can’t remember their favourite song, so you try to login to their Spotify account. Then you realise the account login is inaccessible, and with it has gone their personal history of Spotify playlists, annual “wrapped” analytics, and liked songs curated to reflect their taste, memories, and identity.

We tend to think about inheritance in physical terms: money, property, personal belongings. But the vast volume of digital stuff we accumulate in life and leave behind in death is now just as important – and this “digital legacy” is probably more meaningful.

Digital legacies are increasingly complex and evolving. They include now-familiar items such as social media and banking accounts, along with our stored photos, videos and messages. But they also encompass virtual currencies, behavioural tracking data, and even AI-generated avatars.

This digital data is not only fundamental to our online identities in life, but to our inheritance in death. So how can we properly plan for what happens to it?

The term says it all: human zoos.

Strange as it may seem, human beings — largely Indigenous people from across the globe — were recruited to perform in ethnographic displays, also called human zoos, from the mid-19th century to the 1930s, mostly in Europe and the United States.

It's estimated that 60,000 people were trafficked in this global trade — including three documented Aboriginal groups: three Badtjala people from K'gari in south-eastern Queensland in 1882, and eight Bwgcolman or Manbarra-speaking people from Palm and Hinchinbrook Islands in north Queensland in 1883, who were followed by nine of their compatriots in 1894.

There was an appetite to see Indigenous people in their "natural state" and, as popular demand surged, the staging of human zoos grew into more exaggerated displays.

Some featured reconstructions of housing, enclosures and other encampments with domesticated animals tended by familial groups of Indigenous people in "traditional" clothing.

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A wave of newly homebound people got the itch to knit during the COVID-19 pandemic, and in response, scores of knitters recorded how-to videos and posted them on YouTube.

"But videos don't give you feedback," said Dina El-Zanfaly, an assistant professor in Carnegie Mellon University's School of Design. She and Kris Kitani, associate research professor in the School of Computer Science's Robotics Institute, think artificial intelligence offers a better way.

There are around 7,000 languages spoken in the world, but that number is shrinking. Unesco estimates that half could disappear by the end of the century. So how are languages lost, and what does that mean for the people who speak them?

The House has preliminarily approved Senate Bill 10 even though a similar Louisiana law was deemed unconstitutional. Supporters say Christianity is core to U.S. history.