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Features

- How to extend and improve your life by getting more creative (paid): 2025 Dec 23

- How lab-grown lichen could help us to build habitations on Mars (paid): 2025 Dec 23

HEALTH | DEC 23, 2025, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How to extend and improve your life by getting more creative

Growing evidence reveals that creativity is one of the best-kept secrets for boosting your health. From live theatre to a quick crafting break, here’s how to harness the power of art in your everyday life

By Daisy Fancourt

FOTOGRAFIA INC./Getty Images

Cut your sugar, get some exercise, stop smoking, eat your vegetables, take supplements, don’t stress, sleep well. Every day, we are bombarded with information about how to live longer, healthier, happier lives. But there is one crucial piece of health advice I bet you have never been given. It’s probably the most enjoyable health tip you could be told, but the data supporting it has – to date – remained a bizarrely well-kept secret: engage in the arts.

Over the past few decades, evidence has been accumulating to suggest that being more creative works wonders for our health. Programmes being developed around the world are starting to integrate the arts into healthcare, with astonishing results, from music in surgery reducing the amount of sedatives, opioids and anti-anxiety meds needed, to dance programmes helping people with Parkinson’s disease to walk.

But the arts aren’t just there for us when we are sick. Crafts, singing, theatre, dance, reading, writing and drawing are inherently good for us as part of our day-to-day lives, even if thoughts about our health are far from our minds. In my forthcoming book, Art Cure, I argue that they are a “health behaviour” akin to exercise, diet and sleep. Here’s why, and how, you should get more art into your life in 2026.

As an epidemiologist, I spend my days looking at data from cohort studies – massive datasets that contain thousands of individuals who have completed questionnaires, had nurse interviews, donated blood samples and undergone brain imaging every few years of their lives. Many of these studies in countries around the world contain buried questions on arts engagement. Using complex statistical methods, we can look at the long-term relationship between everyday arts engagement and dozens of health outcomes.

The results are remarkable. People who participate more frequently in the arts, watch artistic performances and visit cultural venues are happier and feel more satisfied with their lives over the years and decades that follow. Children who engage more with the arts have a reduced risk of developing problems like depression by the onset of adolescence. Among adults over the age of 50, those who regularly go to live music events, the theatre or museums and exhibitions have nearly half the risk of developing depression over the next few years.

You might be wondering if this isn’t about the arts at all. What if people who are creatively engaged are wealthier, healthier or also busy engaging in other health behaviours that might, in fact, be responsible for these effects? The statistics underpinning these analyses are sophisticated – we can not only take account of potential confounding factors like these, but also consider other factors like genetics, family environment and childhood experiences, and the results still hold.

The benefits aren’t just psychological either. Toddlers who engage in music activities have increased prosocial skills as they head into primary school. Adolescents who are involved in bands, dance and editing school newspapers are less likely to get involved in antisocial behaviours or crime. And older adults who go to cultural events have a 32 per cent lower likelihood of being lonely 10 years later.

Live events can be a great way to get more creativity into your life

Sean Gardner/Getty Images

The results are particularly strong as we age. Looking at data from nearly 100,000 people across 16 different countries, my team and I at University College London have found that having hobbies – things like gardening, baking, needlework and journalling – is related to higher self-reported health as we get older. Better balance, reduced pain levels, better sleep, longer preservation of cognition, reduced frailty, even a reduced risk of certain diseases like diabetes – the benefits accumulate the more we engage. And, notably, many of these studies have compared arts with better-known health behaviours like physical activity and found that the effect sizes are surprisingly similar. In fact, multiple studies have now found that people who spend more time reading books, making music, dancing and attending artistic events actually live longer than people who don’t engage with the arts.

How are all these incredible effects happening? There are psychological, social and behavioural mechanisms at play. But, personally, the mechanisms I find most exciting are the biological ones. Increasing numbers of studies show that people who regularly engage in the arts have lower blood pressure and heart rate, lower cholesterol, reduced inflammatory markers, better regulation of immune function and lower body-mass index.

In the past few years, major developments in the calculation of biological clocks – which compare if our bodies are ageing faster or slower than our chronological age – have enabled scientists to consider how health behaviours influence our “pace” of ageing. And various studies that combine data from our cardiovascular, respiratory, circulatory and musculoskeletal systems and even patterns of our gene expression suggest that regularly engaging in the arts could even help you to stay biologically younger. People who dance, make music and paint have brains that appear younger in age.

I want to be clear: I am not suggesting the arts are any kind of panacea. Arts can be inaccessible to people because of cost, and there are a whole host of myths about purported health benefits, from the improbable to the downright ridiculous. But the evidence remains that engaging regularly in creative activities that you enjoy is an investment in your health that is worth making this year. And doing so would be an altruistic act too – economists working with the UK government have estimated that the health benefits of arts engagement in the UK are worth over £18.6 billion each year to society.

“ Screen-based arts activities tend to be the ultra-processed foods of the arts world “

So how can we all increase our arts consumption in 2026? It’s a question I come back to across every chapter of Art Cure, giving a “daily dose” of recommendations for how you can use the arts to achieve your health goals. Overall, my advice is to think about the arts as you think about food. Avoid the temptation to go out and binge on arts – in the same way that crash dieting doesn’t work, you aren’t going to experience long-term benefits from short-term engagement that then fizzles out. Instead, try to figure out what your arts equivalent of “five-a-day” fruit and veg is. Maybe that’s just 10 minutes of creative writing before you start work each day or putting aside 15 minutes for a crafts activity each evening. Make easy creative substitutions – swap a date-night dinner for a gig, a gym session for a dance class and reading the news on the train for reading a book of poetry.

Mix up your ingredients, too. Diversity of arts experiences is actually just as important as frequency of engagement. Each creative encounter brings different sensory treats for our brains and bodies that have their own health benefits. Experiment with new flavours of creative experience, heading for “moderate novelty” – something that is outside your comfort zone, but still something you think you will enjoy. Make your engagement real life, not virtual – screen-based arts activities tend to be the ultra-processed foods of the arts world.

Most of all, be a mindful chef. In our busy lives, it’s easy to want to distil the arts down to a pill that we can just pop and then forget about. But the very beauty of the arts is that they aren’t a pill. They are one of the most diverse, complex and personal behaviours we can engage in, one of the crowning glories of our species’ evolution. So we should all give the arts the time in our lives they deserve. And we should revel in our engagement – allow art to make us feel exhilarated, intoxicated, elated. Because it is fundamentally, measurably good for us.

This article is part of a series on easy changes you can make for better health in the new year.

Read the rest here

ENVIRONMENT | DEC 23, 2025, 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How lab-grown lichen could help us to build habitations on Mars

Scientists cultivating partnerships of fungi and algae believe their invention has far-out implications for how we create the buildings of the future

By Rowan Hooper

Dr Klaus Schmitt

When I usually examine lichens, I am in a forest, peering at frilly growths on tree branches with my hand lens. Or on exposed rocks high in the Alps, or old gravestones, or the rocky seashore, in the zone where the seaweed stops growing but before bigger land plants take over. I have been looking at a lot of lichens during research for a book on symbiosis, but where I have never seen them before is in a lab flask swirling in an incubator. And while I often think about what lichens tell us about the past, I hadn’t until recently thought about what they tell us about the future.

The green cloudy fluid I am looking at in the incubator is not at all what we think of as a lichen, which is a symbiotic partnership between a fungus and an alga. “That’s because this is a synthetic lichen,” says Rodrigo Ledesma-Amaro, who is the director of the Bezos Center for Sustainable Protein here at Imperial College London. The fluid is a co-culture of two species, a fungus (yeast) and a cyanobacterium. Like a natural lichen, the fungus provides a scaffold, a host structure for the bacterium, and the bacterium makes sugars through photosynthesis using light, water and carbon dioxide, and feeds them to the fungus.

Why on earth would you want to make such a potion? Because, Ledesma-Amaro tells me, we can gene-edit yeast to get it to create all sorts of useful products – food, fuels, chemicals, materials, pharmaceuticals – and if we can drive that production through photosynthesis, then we can make those things sustainably. For that reason, synthetic lichens are sparking excitement not only in the biotech industry but also beyond it. Lichens, it transpires, could be harnessed to repair buildings, fight the climate crisis and even build habitations on Mars.

“Synthetic lichens recreate the symbiosis of natural lichens, but grow much faster, and using yeast as a partner allows us to sustainably produce a whole range of high-value compounds,” says Ledesma-Amaro. Yeast is a well-known, industrialised organism that is “programmable” and easily grown at scale. In the synthetic lichen I see, Ledesma-Amaro and his team use yeast that is genetically engineered to make caryophyllene, a compound that has applications in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic and fuel industries. In the near future, he foresees a range of useful products: antibiotics, biofuels and synthetic palm oil. Another form of synthetic lichen might be engineered to capture and store carbon dioxide. Other scientists see lichens being deployed to repair ageing concrete structures around the world. The ambitions for lichens are high, even reaching beyond our own planet. On the moon and on Mars, NASA and private space companies plan to use synthetic space lichen – properly known as an engineered living material – to grow on regolith and make material for constructing buildings and furniture.

Living together

Modest in appearance and slow in growth, lichens are the archetypal demonstration of symbiosis, which means “living together” and refers to the cohabitation of two different species. In the case of lichen, the textbook explanation is that a fungal partner hosts an individual of another species, known as the photobiont. Usually, this is algal, but sometimes bacterial, and it makes food through photosynthesis and shares it with its host. The fungal partner provides, among other things, superb protection from the elements, such that the lichen can survive in extreme conditions where little else can make a living. This is why some scientists are repurposing lichens and making synthetic versions of their own.

Lichens have two qualities in their favour. First, as a symbiotic organism, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In other words, each lichen can do things that the fungus alone or the photobiont alone cannot do. From afar, lichens may be modest in appearance, but up close, they are complex, luxuriant, charismatic organisms. Natural lichens are also far more than the textbook two-species partnership of fungus plus alga. Often, there are these two organisms, plus a secondary fungus in the form of yeast and an extra bacterial species, making a community of four. But even that is an underestimate. “In nature, what we call a ‘lichen’ colloquially is actually a community of many – tens to hundreds – of different microbes,” says Arjun Khakhar, a biologist who makes synthetic lichens at Colorado State University. “Two lichens that look identical and are right next to each other can have hugely different members.” Various analyses of fresh lichen tissue have found that they contain between 1 million and 100 million bacteria per gram.

The second thing lichens have going for them is that they are robust. They can live and photosynthesise in the harshest of conditions. In Svalbard, far within the Arctic circle, there are around 700 species of lichen. They cope with low temperatures, aridity and high ultraviolet radiation. On the seashore, they tolerate repeated immersion in saltwater – an experience that most other land plants can’t cope with. Some species grow inside rock (“endolithic” lichen, literally “inside rock”). It is an open question as to just what aspect of their biology allows them to cope with desiccation and extreme temperatures.

Lichens, which naturally thrive in a variety of environments, are a unique lifeform, made from a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and a partner like algae or cyanobacteria

Jose B. Ruiz/naturepl.com

In Colorado, Khakhar suggests lichens’ resilience comes from biomolecules the filamentous fungus produces, which protect the entire community in the lichen. “The unique molecules it is able to make are potentially due to lichens’ capacity to leverage both bacterial and fungal biochemistries via distributing tasks across the community,” he says. For example, components in the photobionts can make various pigments with chlorophyll, and the fungus can make sunscreen by synthesising compounds such as carotenoids (the pigments in carrots, ripe tomatoes and autumn leaves) and melanins (which colour our skin). Together, the symbiotic lichen community has access to a greater range of compounds than a single organism can hope to produce, and this unlocks the lichen’s superpower. Physically, too, the fungal component helps buffer the community from swings in temperature and humidity. Then there’s its slow growth, which allows it to live with minimal resources.

Lichens in space

These attributes have been enough to get NASA excited. Lichens can survive exposure to both simulated and real space conditions. Starting in 2014, a lichen species called Circinaria gyrosa lived – or at least, didn’t die – on a shelf on the exterior of the International Space Station for 18 months. When it was brought back inside and given water, it started growing. The fact that lichens can grow inside rock and tolerate the conditions of space excites proponents of lithopanspermia, the idea that microbes could travel between planets in asteroids.

Congrui Jin, an engineer specialising in living materials at Texas A&M University, started thinking about the potential of lichens for a forward-thinking NASA project aimed at finding efficient ways to build places to live and work on Mars – whenever we eventually get there. Some proposals for off-planet housing rely on inflatable structures, the idea being that fewer materials are needed to make air-filled housing. But every item of prefabricated material transported there by rocket is still expensive. A cheaper alternative to hefting such items up from Earth is to find a way to produce building materials from the regolith already on the planet. For Jin, lichens are the perfect solution. But a naturally occurring species may not necessarily work.

An experiment aboard the International Space Station has shown that lichens can be extremely hardy, surviving for more than 18 months in space

ESA

“We want to pair the fungi with some photosynthetic species like cyanobacteria. They can convert sunlight and water into organic nutrients and precipitate calcium carbonate,” she says. “It acts as glue to bind the soil particles on Mars into a cohesive structure.” This biomaterial can then be used in a 3D printer to produce building materials – floors, partitions, walls, furniture, you name it. The bulk of what you need, whether sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, nutrients or vast supplies of basalt rock, is already there on Mars.

Jin’s work has recently shown that lichens are promising candidates for turning Mars regolith into building material and for producing other biominerals and biopolymers. Lichens are tough, and some eager futurists consider them good candidates for helping to terraform the Red Planet. But even if there weren’t planetary protection measures to abide by, lichens can’t grow on the surface of Mars, exposed to the elements. Mars has no magnetic field, and any life on the surface needs to be shielded from the harsh radiation. So, Jin envisions her Mars lichens growing in shelters.

The future of building

However, colonising other planets is a long way off, and Jin realised her lichens had a more immediate role on Earth. There are many occasions when it would be useful to bind rubble together and make a usable building material. Think about the wrecked buildings left by natural and human-caused disasters. As well as that, a way to sequester carbon during the concrete-making process would help moderate its huge carbon footprint. And what if we could produce self-healing concrete? Buildings and structures would be cheaper to maintain and would have a longer life, too. Previous attempts to use microbes to perform these functions have faltered because concrete is an inhospitable place in which to live. But if lichens can cope in space, Jin reasoned, surely they can cope with concrete.

Jin and her colleagues showed that a lichen-based approach, pairing fungi with cyanobacteria, makes a co-culture that can grow on concrete. Not only that, her synthetic lichen precipitates calcium carbonate – the mineral that forms chalk, limestone and marble – healing cracks in the structure. “We tried filamentous fungi and cyanobacteria and found that they have better survivability [than other microbes] under the dry and nutrient-poor conditions in concrete,” she says. “They get along with each other and the process is autonomous, and they also have [a] very good capability to precipitate calcium carbonate.” Unlike single-species approaches, the co-culture doesn’t require the addition of external nutrients, because the synthetic lichen extracts nitrogen from the air and makes its own fertiliser.

Khakhar is also attempting to make fast-growing lichen by selecting microbes that are already fast growers, before tweaking them and pairing them to become lichen-like. His lab, in work similar to Jin’s, has made a synthetic lichen in which the fungal component becomes mineralised. “Filamentous fungi are fed by the cyanobacteria embedded in them and grow a mycelium that has a stone exoskeleton,” he says. “In the future, this will enable the sustainable biomanufacture of building materials.” He calls the engineered product mycomaterials.

My investigations of symbiosis have deepened my appreciation of lichens as dynamic mini ecosystems, a living lesson in the reality of interdependence, as has understanding their sci-fi potential in crafting the materials of tomorrow. So the next time you see those frilly growths on a tree, a gravestone or an old bench, perhaps take a moment to pause – and consider what a future-shaping marvel you are beholding.

News

- Microsoft made a splash with a controversial quantum computer in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 29

- Human-plant hybrid cells reveal truth about dark DNA in our genome (paid): 2025 Dec 29

- Mathematicians spent 2025 exploring the edge of mathematics (paid): 2025 Dec 26

- 2025's best photos of the natural world, from volcanoes to icebergs: 2025 Dec 26

- Was 2025 the year we found signs of past life on Mars? (paid): 2025 Dec 26

- 'Spectacular' progress has been made towards useful quantum computers (paid): 2025 Dec 26

- A ghostly glow was seen emanating from living things in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 25

- 6 incredible new dinosaurs we discovered in 2025: 2025 Dec 25

- The world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope blew up in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 25

- Physicists used 'dark photons' in an effort to rewrite physics in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 24

- More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 24

- Alpine communities face uncertain future after 2025 glacier collapse (paid): 2025 Dec 23

- The best space pictures of 2025, from supernovae to moon landings (paid): 2025 Dec 23

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- New Scientist changed the UK's freedom of information laws in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 22

TECHNOLOGY | DEC 29, 2025, 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Microsoft made a splash with a controversial quantum computer in 2025

The Majorana 1 quantum computer was hailed as a significant breakthrough by Microsoft, but critics say the company has yet to prove it actually works despite a year of debate

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Microsoft’s Majorana 1 quantum chip

John Brecher/Microsoft

In February, Microsoft unveiled a new quantum computer called Majorana 1 and it quickly became one of the most controversial devices in quantum computing.

Majorana 1 caused controversy because it relies on a particular kind of quantum bit, or qubit, called a topological qubit. Theoretically, these are a lot more immune to errors than alternatives, making them an attractive proposition for building a largely error-proof quantum computer. For years, Microsoft has attempted to do just that, using elusive quasiparticles called Majorana zero modes (MZMs) as its basis for topological qubits – but its track record is mixed.

In 2021, a paper by a group of Microsoft researchers was retracted from the scientific journal Nature after independent experts identified a flaw in the analysis that had aimed to establish the basic building block of topological qubits. Then, in 2023, an experiment concerning a predecessor to Majorana 1 was heavily criticised by several experts.

As such, Microsoft’s 2025 Nature paper announcing Majorana 1 was always going to be heavily scrutinised. In an unusual move, the paper was published alongside a note from the Nature editorial team stating that “results in this manuscript do not represent evidence for the presence of Majorana zero modes in the reported devices”, while a press release from Microsoft stated the exact opposite.

Microsoft’s Chetan Nayak attempted to address concerns in a packed presentation at the American Physical Society Global Summit in Anaheim, California, in March. He shared details of new data, but critics remained unconvinced.

“The data they presented then and since simply does not show a functional topological qubit. It doesn’t even show the basic building blocks of a topological qubit,” says Henry Legg at the University of St Andrews in the UK, one such critic.

Nayak says that the response from the community this year has been enthusiastic and energising. “As anticipated, there has been thoughtful debate and inquisitive engagement around our recent discoveries and continued research.”

In July, the firm released more data, and Eun-Ah Kim at Cornell University in New York says that these measurements showed behaviour more indicative of a topological qubit than those presented previously. “[I am] very happy to see the progress,” she says.

Nayak and his colleagues are now confident that further progress is on the horizon and they are working on making their next quantum computer bigger than Majorana 1, which will, in theory, allow it to run complex computations in an error-proof way. The project has also been selected to advance to the final phase of the Quantum Benchmarking Initiative run by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with the aim of rigorously identifying a feasible way to build useful quantum computers.

“This past year has been transformative for our quantum programme. The launch of the Majorana 1 chip marked a pivotal moment, not just for Microsoft, but for the field of quantum computing,” says Nayak.

But will 2026 be the year that Microsoft’s work satisfies its critics? Legg remains sceptical. “Fundamental physics does not respect the timelines set by big tech companies,” he says.

LIFE | DEC 29, 2025, 3:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Human-plant hybrid cells reveal truth about dark DNA in our genome

It has been claimed that because most of our DNA is active, it must be important, but now human-plant hybrid cells have been used to show this activity is mostly random noise

By Michael Le Page

Cells containing human and plant DNA reveal something fundamental about our genome

Es sarawuth/Shutterstock

How much of our genome really matters? Some argue that because most of our DNA is active, it must be doing something important. Others say even random DNA would be highly active. This has now been put to the test by studying human cells containing massive chunks of plant DNA, New Scientist can exclusively reveal – and the effectively random plant DNA was indeed nearly as active as human DNA.

The finding shows that a high proportion of genome activity is just noise, rather than having anyn purpose, and thus adds to the evidence that most of the human genome is junk.

“A large amount can simply be explained by background noise,” says Brett Adey at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. “This seems to be broadly consistent with the junk DNA idea.”

The main function of DNA is to store the recipes for making proteins, the molecular machines that do almost all the work in cells. The DNA recipes are copied to make messenger RNAs that carry the recipes to ribosomes, the cell’s protein-making factories.

It was initially assumed almost all DNA consists of recipes for making proteins, but we now know that just 1.2 per cent of the human genome codes for proteins. So what does the rest do?

Since the 1960s, many biologists have argued that it is mostly junk. Yes, a small percentage of non-protein-coding DNA is really important and we are likely to keep discovering bits that do useful things for decades, but such discoveries, they say, won’t change the overall picture of the vast majority of non-coding DNA being junk.

For instance, a 2011 study found that only around 5 per cent of the genome is conserved over deep time – evolution doesn’t seem to care about the rest of it. Biologists in the mostly-junk camp also point out that the size of genomes varies wildly between species. Why does an onion need five times as much DNA as a human, for instance? Why does the lungfish have 30 times as much?

But other biologists have focused on whether human DNA does anything – for instance, whether it gets turned into RNA, even if that RNA has no known purpose. In 2012, a large project called ENCODE concluded that more than 80 per cent of the human genome was active in this sense, and claimed this showed that it isn’t junk after all. Some biologists in this camp use the term “dark DNA” to refer to non-coding DNA, the idea being it is important for reasons we don’t understand yet.

In response to ENCODE’s claim, in 2013, Sean Eddy at Harvard University proposed the random genome project. “Suppose we put a few million bases of entirely random synthetic DNA into a human cell, and do an ENCODE project on it,” he wrote.

Will we still see all the activities ENCODE hailed as proof of function? “I think yes,” Eddy concluded.

“You can’t really conclude anything just from measuring activity. And so that’s the brilliance of Sean Eddy’s random genome idea, that what we really need is this baseline,” says Austen Ganley, also at the University of Auckland. “Without that baseline, anything you look at is not really meaningful in terms of deciding between function and junk.”

Making synthetic DNA, however, is expensive. Until now, the only attempts at a random genome project have involved small pieces of DNA no longer than around 100,000 base pairs.

But when Adey and Ganley learned that researchers in Japan had created human-plant hybrid cells containing 35 million base pairs of DNA from thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana), they realised this could be seen as by far the largest random genome project to date.

Eddy, who wasn’t involved in the study, agrees. Plants and animals diverged from a common ancestor at least 1.6 billion years ago, so in that time mutations have “effectively randomised” the non-coding DNA in A. thaliana. Every single site has mutated several times, Eddy estimated when asked about this approach.

After initial studies to check the plant DNA is indeed effectively random, as far as the human cell is concerned, Adey and Ganley then measured the number of starting points for turning DNA into RNA per 1000 base pairs of non-coding DNA.

If DNA being turned into RNA really is a sign of function, then hardly any plant DNA should be turned into RNA. In reality, Adey and Ganley found only slightly less activity – there were around 80 per cent as many start sites per kilobase of non-coding A. thaliana DNA compared with human non-coding DNA.

In other words, this strongly suggests that almost all the activity seen by ENCODE is noise.

“This is an excellent demonstration of how biology is, indeed, noisy,” says Chris Ponting at the University of Edinburgh in the UK. “The biochemical activities happening within this [plant] sequence clearly confer no function on the human cell.”

“This very elegant study was needed,” says Dan Graur at the University of Houston, Texas. “It offers yet more experimental evidence confirming what has been obvious for years: most of the human genome is junk. The term ‘dark DNA’ is laughable nonsense, dreamed up by people with a bad case of physics envy.”

In a perfectly designed system, there would be no noise, says Ganley, but evolution doesn’t create perfect designs. And noise can have advantages. “If you have these imperfect systems that have a lot of noise, that noise can actually create interesting things that then can then be picked up by selection,” he says.

As yet, the team can’t explain why there was 25 per cent more activity in human DNA. “All we can really say is that that needs explanation,” says Ganley.

It is possible some of the extra RNAs do have functions – this wouldn’t change the mostly-junk conclusion – but there are other potential explanations too. The researchers are now using machine learning to see if they can find ways to distinguish potentially meaningful activity from background noise.

The team plans to publish the findings, but hasn’t yet written a paper.

MATHEMATICS | DEC 26, 2025, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Mathematicians spent 2025 exploring the edge of mathematics

Somewhere at the edge of mathematics lurks a number so large that it breaks the very foundations of our understanding - and in 2025 we came a step closer to finding it

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

When numbers get large, things get weird

Jezper / Alamy

In 2025, the edges of mathematics came a little more sharply into view when members of the online Busy Beaver Challenge community closed in on a huge number that threatens to defy the logical underpinnings of the subject.

This number is the next in the “Busy Beaver” sequence, a series of ever-larger numbers that emerges from a seemingly simple question – how do we know if a computer program will run forever?

To find out, researchers turn to the work of mathematician Alan Turing, who showed that any computer algorithm can be mimicked by imagining a simplified device called a Turing machine. More complex algorithms correspond to Turing machines with larger sets of instructions or, in mathematical parlance, more states.

Each Busy Beaver number BB(n) captures the longest possible run-time for a Turing machine with n states. For example BB(1) is 1 and BB(2) is 6, so making the algorithm twice as complex increases its runtime sixfold. But the rate of this increase turns out to be extreme, for example, the fifth Busy Beaver number is 47,176,870.

Members of the Busy Beaver Challenge pinned down the exact value of BB(5) in 2024, which ended a 40-year effort to study all Turing machines with five states. So, naturally, 2025 was marked by a collective chase after BB(6).

In July, a member known as mxdys discovered a lower limit on its size, and that number turned out not only to be much bigger than BB(5) but truly enormous even when compared with the number of particles in our universe.

Writing down all of its digits is physically impossible, so mathematicians use a kind of notation called tetration instead. This is equivalent to repeatedly raising a number to a higher power, for example, 2 tetrated to 2 is equal to 2 raised to the power of 2 raised to the power of 2, which is 16. BB(6) is at least 2 tetrated to 2 tetrated to 2 tetrated to 9, a gargantuan tower of iterated tetration.

Pinning down BB(6) won’t just be a matter of setting records, but it may also have deep implications for all of mathematics. This is because Turing proved that there must be some Turing machines whose behaviour cannot be predicted under a set of axioms called ZFC theory, which forms the foundation on which all standard modern mathematics stands.

Already, researchers have proven that BB(643) would elude ZFC theory, but whether this could happen for smaller numbers is an open question – one that the Busy Beaver Challenge may contribute to answering.

In July, there were 2728 Turing machines that have six states but whose stopping behaviour had not yet been checked. By October that number dropped to 1618. “The community is being super active at the moment,” says computer scientist Tristan Stérin, who launched the Busy Beaver Challenge in 2022.

One of the holdout machines could hold the key to the exact value of BB(6). One of them could also turn out to be unknowable, exposing the bounds of the ZFC framework and much of modern mathematics. Over the course of the next year, mathematics enthusiasts across the globe will certainly be hard at work trying to understand them all.

ENVIRONMENT | DEC 26, 2025, 9:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

2025's best photos of the natural world, from volcanoes to icebergs

A village buried by a landslide, the world’s largest tidal bore and the aftermath of ferocious storms and wildfires appear in our pick of images from environment stories this year

By Alec Luhn

Mount Etna erupting

European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery

Mount Etna in Sicily is the world’s most active stratovolcano, which is a high, conical volcano created by repeated eruptions of viscous lava. In February, it erupted with ash clouds and a lava flow that travelled 3 kilometres, forcing a local airport to partially close. One of the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites captured this image of the lava flow on 12 February.

An iceberg in Innaarsuit, Greenland

Dennis Lehtonen / SWNS

A giant iceberg drifted into the harbour in Innaarsuit in western Greenland in July, looming over the village of 180 for more than a week. Authorities warned people to stay away in case it collapsed and crushed something or generated a destructive wave. This is the second time in less than a decade that a massive iceberg has threatened the town. As Greenland melts, more icebergs are calving off its glaciers.

Hurricane Melissa destroyed buildings in Jamaica

RICARDO MAKYN/AFP via Getty Images

Hurricane Melissa tied with the 1935 Labor Day Hurricane as the strongest storm to ever make landfall around the Atlantic Ocean. On 28 October, it pummelled Jamaica with winds of nearly 300 kilometres per hour and 76 centimetres of rain, destroying structures including these buildings in Black River. Early analysis suggested climate change intensified Melissa’s winds by about 16 kilometres per hour. This year saw three category 5 hurricanes for only the second time on record.

The Qiantang river tidal bore

VCG/VCG via Getty Images

The Qiantang river in China is home to the world’s largest tidal bore, a phenomenon where the rising tide enters a shallow river, generating a wave up to 9 metres high that can move upriver at speeds approaching 40 kilometres per hour. Locals have nicknamed the tidal bore the “silver dragon”, and surfers come to ride it for dozens of kilometres. Here, people watch the tidal bore in Jiaxing in October.

Blatten after the landslide

ALEXANDRE AGRUSTI/AFP via Getty Images

On 29 May, the Birch glacier in the Swiss Alps collapsed under the weight of 9 million tonnes of fallen rock that had gradually accumulated from the mountain above. The landslide buried most of the 800-year-old village of Blatten with an impact equivalent to a magnitude 3.1 earthquake, damming the Lonza river. The village had been evacuated, and only one person died. Scientists blamed the falling rocks on the thaw of permafrost, permanently frozen ground that holds the mountains together. At current rates of carbon dioxide emissions, 90 per cent of glaciers in the Alps could disappear by 2100.

Homes destroyed by the Palisades fire in California

Mario Tama/Getty Images

In January, wildfires roared down from the forested hills into northern Los Angeles and annihilated entire neighbourhoods like this one in the Pacific Palisades. Potentially the costliest natural disaster in US history, the fires killed 31 people, razed 16,000 structures and caused hundreds of billions of dollars in damages. Some have blamed California’s home insurance regulations for encouraging risky construction near woodlands. But global warming has also extended the fire season and made hot, dry and windy conditions more likely.

SPACE | DEC 26, 2025, 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Was 2025 the year we found signs of past life on Mars?

Tantalising signs of past microbial life showed up on Mars this year, but to truly know whether they contain the answer to the biggest question in the universe, we will need to bring samples back to Earth

By Leah Crane

NASA’s Perseverance rover, the first mission to collect and cache Martian rock and regolith

NASA/JPL-Caltech

On Mars, it’s the little things that hint at past life. In 2025, tiny details in rocks across the Martian surface have revealed some of the most exciting clues yet that there may once have been microbial life there.

These come from analysis of samples collected by NASA’s Perseverance rover, which began to provide evidence of life last year: Perseverance came across rocks with tiny splotches, each just millimetres wide with a ring of dark material around it. These splotches, dubbed “leopard spots”, are similar to features we see on Earth associated with fossils of microbes.

This year, Joel Hurowitz at Stony Brook University in New York state and his colleagues did more detailed analyses on the leopard spots, finding forms of iron and sulphur that often come from chemical reactions involving microbes. “I find it much more promising [an indication of life] than anything I’ve seen in the last 20 years,” says Hanna Sizemore at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona.

Past findings that hinted at life on Mars included unexpected variation in the planet’s methane levels, along with fossil-like structures in Martian meteorites. “I am more enthusiastic about these findings than any of those,” says Sizemore. “That was all at the wrong physical scale.” The leopard spots, on the other hand, are just about the right size to be caused by microbes, she says.

The same is true for the other potential biosignatures Perseverance found this year: tiny greenish nodules of minerals that, on Earth, tend to be linked with microbial life. “It was always obvious that life there isn’t obvious. It’s not herds of wildebeests sweeping majestically across the plain,” says Andrew Steele at Carnegie Science in Washington DC, who was part of the team that developed the science goals for Perseverance. “Whatever these signs are, they’re going to be subtle, and we need the best instruments available to us to look for them.”

The Perseverance rover captured an image of a rock with distinctive “leopard spots”

NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

Perseverance does have a sophisticated suite of scientific instruments, but if we want to definitively determine whether these rocks have signs of past life, we have to bring the samples back to Earth to be examined in laboratories here. That was always the plan: Perseverance would cache samples, and a future mission would pick them up and bring them back.

“These samples represent the best chance that we have of a next step in the analysis of whether there is [or has been] life on Mars – we just have to bring them back,” says Steele.

Unfortunately, that prospect is looking less and less likely. The Mars Sample Return project is marked for cancellation in the Trump administration’s proposed NASA budget for 2026; if that budget is approved, there will be no plan to pick up the samples that Perseverance has so carefully collected.

Indeed, it is possible that we have found signs of life on Mars and might never know it. “We keep making so much progress, but our big picture of Martian habitability keeps not moving,” says Sizemore. “We’re right on the edge – we cannot dismiss it and we cannot prove it. It’s only missions on the ground that will change that.”

The world capital of astronomy: Chile

Experience the astronomical highlights of Chile. Visit some of the world’s most technologically advanced observatories and stargaze beneath some of the clearest skies on earth.

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TECHNOLOGY | DEC 26, 2025, 3:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

'Spectacular' progress has been made towards useful quantum computers

At the Q2B Silicon Valley conference, scientific and business leaders of the quantum computing industry hailed "spectacular" progress being made towards practical devices – but said that challenges remain

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Practical quantum computers are moving closer to reality

Alexander Yakimov / Alamy

Fully practical quantum computers haven’t arrived yet, but the quantum computing industry is ending the year on an optimistic note. At the Q2B Silicon Valley conference in December, which brings together quantum business and science experts, the consensus seemed to be that the future of quantum computing is only getting brighter.

“On balance, we think it is more likely than not that someone, or maybe multiple someones, are going to be able to make a really industrially useful quantum computer, which is not something I thought I’d be concluding at the end of 2025,” said Joe Altepeter, programme manager for the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI) at a presentation during the conference. The goal of QBI is to determine which of the several currently competing approaches for building quantum computers can produce a useful device, which would also have to correct its own errors, or be fault-tolerant.

The programme will run for several years and involve hundreds of expert evaluators. Taking stock of the programme after its first six months, Altepeter said the team identified “huge obstacles” in the way of each of the approaches, but he also expressed surprise that this didn’t disqualify any of them from the race to produce a useful quantum device.

“In late 2025, it feels to me like all of the key hardware building blocks seem to be more or less in place, at roughly the required fidelity, maybe for the first time, leaving only these enormous questions about… the engineering challenges,” said Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin in another presentation. A respected expert and long-time commentator on the industry, Aaronson noted the ongoing challenges with identifying new algorithms that could lead to more practical uses for quantum computers, but described the recent progress in hardware development as “spectacular”.

There are good reasons to be excited about quantum computing hardware, but applications lag behind, said Google’s Ryan Babbush. At the conference, Google Quantum AI and several partners announced the finalists in the XPRIZE competition, which aims to change this.

The work of the seven finalists includes simulations of biomolecules relevant for human health, algorithms that could augment classical simulations of candidate materials for clean energy solutions and computations that may factor into diagnosis and treatment of diseases that have complex causes.

“A few years ago, I wasn’t that excited about running applications on quantum computers. I am getting more interested now,” said John Preskill at the California Institute of Technology, another significant scholar and defining voice within quantum computing. In his presentation, he made a case for near-term uses of quantum computers for scientific discovery.

In the past year, several quantum computers have in fact been used for computations in, for example, the physics of materials and high-energy particles, in a way that may soon rival or surpass the best traditional computing methods.

A handful of applications have traditionally been identified as particularly suitable for quantum computers, but here, too, there is work left to do. For instance, Pranav Gokhale at Infleqtion, a firm that builds quantum devices from extremely cold atoms, presented on a classic algorithm – Shor’s algorithm – that could be used to break much of the encryption used by today’s banks. The work represents the first implementation of a version of Shor’s algorithm on logical qubits – quantum computer components protected from errors. However, this demonstration was still nowhere near the computational complexity and computing power needed to allow for the easy decryption of encrypted information in the real world, underlining how significant hardware and software improvements are still necessary despite recent progress.

Dutch start-up QuantWare presented a possible solution to the industry’s big hardware challenge – making quantum computers larger, which would make them more computationally powerful, without making them less reliable. The firm’s quantum processor unit architecture promises to incorporate 10,000 qubits made from superconducting circuits, which is about a hundred times more than the currently most used superconducting quantum computers have. Matt Rijlaarsdam at QuantWare says the first devices of this size could be fully working within two-and-a-half years. Several other firms, such as IBM and Quantinuum, aim to build large quantum computers on a similar timescale, while QuEra plans on 10,000 qubits made from ultracold atoms within just a year, so competition will be as fierce as the engineering challenges.

And the industry is only projected to keep growing, from $1.07 billion in global investments in 2024 to about $2.2 billion in 2027, according to a survey of the quantum computing industry conducted by Hyperion Research.

“More people are getting access to quantum computers than ever before, and I have a suspicion that they’ll do things with them that we could never even think of,” said Jamie Garcia at IBM.

LIFE | DEC 25, 2025, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A ghostly glow was seen emanating from living things in 2025

The detection of mercurial particles of light emanating from mice led to a flurry of interest in biophotons, a mysterious phenomenon that could have applications in agriculture

By Alex Wilkins

Living things produce “biophotons”

Mike_shots/Shutterstock

This year, scientists observed an eerie glow emanating from mice that disappears after death, reminiscent of paranormal ideas of a bodily aura. The discovery led to a flurry of interest in the underlying science of biophotons.

Biophotons are ultraweak particles of light that are produced by structures in living cells including mitochondria, which generate energy. Researchers have long sought out these mercurial, faint signals, and the field has often been controversial, in part due to the extreme difficulty of separating out biophotons from other sources of light, like infrared radiation, and proving that they are real.

The experimental hurdles have meant that previous biophoton studies tended to focus on smaller, specific body parts. But in May, Daniel Oblak at the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues detected biophotons emanating from the entire body in four hairless mice. After the mice died, these biophotons rapidly faded away.

They also detected biophotons being emitted from the leaves of an umbrella tree (Heptapleurum arboricola). This more comprehensive, and careful, study made their existence more difficult to deny.

In the weeks after New Scientist reported on the study, a number of other media outlets contacted Oblak and his team for more interviews. The phenomenon’s resemblance to a psychic “aura”, the glow that psychics claim can indicate a person’s physical and spiritual health, may have partly explained people’s interest in the work, says Oblak. “There was a person from Argentina who insisted that we study how his hand seemed to radiate when he was touching or healing people.”

But the underlying science of biophotons is real, and many scientists have approached his team about collaborating on further studies, says Oblak. One proposal involves searching for possible biophoton production mechanisms in plants – an expert in genetically modifying seeds suggested that they could explore this by disabling certain genes and observing how the amount of biophotons produced changes.

Working out how biophotons correlate to the process of seed germination could also find uses in agriculture, says Oblak. “You could look at a sample of seeds, and just know whether the germination process actually occurred for each of the seeds without actually touching them.”

LIFE | DEC 25, 2025, 9:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

6 incredible new dinosaurs we discovered in 2025

Palaeontologists reported some remarkable dinosaur fossils this year, including a Velociraptor relative, a dome-headed pachycephalosaur and one of the most heavily armoured creatures that ever lived

By James Woodford

Zavacephale rinpoche

Masaya Hattori

If there’s ever a creature you would not want to bump heads with, it is Zavacephale rinpoche. This dome-headed dinosaur found in Mongolia lived 108 million years ago, making it the oldest of its kind ever discovered. When palaeontologists first saw the fossil skull protruding from the ground, they described it as looking like a “cabochon jewel”. While other species in the group could reach 4 metres in length and up to 400 kilograms, this specimen was a mere teenager and would have been about a metre long, weighing about 6 kilograms.

Spicomellus afer

Matthew Dempsey

When scientists were trying to describe a 165-million-year-old dinosaur fossil found in Morocco, named Spicomellus afer, they were lost for words. The dinosaur, a kind of ankylosaur, may be one of the most heavily armoured creatures that ever lived. According to Susannah Maidment at the Natural History Museum in London, the creature was so bizarre that there weren’t enough hyperboles to describe it. In the end, the team settled on the word “baroque” to attempt to capture its unique look.

Duonychus tsogtbaatari

Masato Hattori

Duonychus tsogtbaatari, a 90-million-year-old fossil found in the Gobi desert, may be the closest thing the dinosaurs had to Edward Scissorhands. It was a bipedal, herbivorous animal that had only two fingers on each hand, which it may have used to grasp branches and pull them towards its mouth. But they were no ordinary fingers, as they were armed with two giant claws up to 30 centimetres long that belie its vegetarian diet.

Shri rapax

Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences, Brussels

While fans of Jurassic Park may shiver at the sight of that movie’s velociraptors, those predators were probably nothing compared with the Velociraptor-like Shri rapax, found in the Gobi desert. It had hands and claws so fierce that its name was inspired by the word rapacious. At 2 metres in length, the dinosaur may have been one of the most dangerous creatures hunting in the sprawling sand dunes and intermittent lakes when it lived between 75 and 71 million years ago.

Baminornis zhenghensis

ZHAO Chuang

Is it a bird? Is it a dinosaur? A 150-million-year-old fossil from China, named Baminornis zhenghensis, had researchers baffled about where in the evolutionary tree it belonged. Ultimately, they concluded that the quail-sized creature may be the earliest known bird – although birds are also a kind of dinosaur, of course. The kicker leading to the decision was that it had a much shorter tail than Archaeopteryx, another fossil long considered to be an early relative of modern birds. The discovery shows that the short tails characteristic of modern birds evolved much earlier than previously thought.

Joaquinraptor casali

Andrew McAfee, Carnegie Museum of Natural History

No amount of dental floss would have helped a ferocious 66-million-year-old dinosaur discovered in Patagonia with a crocodile leg stuck in its jaw. Joaquinraptor casali, a new species of megaraptor, was armed with a thumb claw the size of a human forearm and it may have been one of the fiercest predators of the Cretaceous. While Tyrannosaurus rex was probably bigger, the new dinosaur had much stronger and more muscular arms. This specimen of J. casali would have been at least 19 years old when it died, about 7 metres long and weighed at least a tonne.

Dinosaur hunting in the Gobi desert, Mongolia

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TECHNOLOGY | DEC 25, 2025, 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope blew up in 2025

A microscope that cost less than £50 and took under 3 hours to build using a common 3D printer could be transformative for students and researchers with limited funding

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

The 3D-printed microscope

Dr Liam M. Rooney/University of Strathclyde

At the beginning of 2025, a preprint of a paper about a new microscope caused an awful lot of excitement among researchers. It was the world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope, made in only a few hours and for a fraction of the typical cost.

Liam Rooney at the University of Glasgow in the UK, who worked on the project, says that after New Scientist reported on the microscope, people reached out from all over the world, from biomedical researchers to community groups and even film-makers. “Community reception was incredible,” he says. The work has now also been published in the Journal of Microscopy.

For the body of the microscope, his team used a design from OpenFlexure, which is a resource for 3D-printing scientific instruments that anyone can access. They also used a store-bought camera and a light source, while the control for all the microscope’s parts came from a Raspberry Pi computer.

The real breakthrough, however, was that the team 3D-printed the microscope’s lens out of clear plastic – this is what made their microscope both more affordable and more accessible than more conventional devices. While such microscopes can cost thousands, creating the new one cost less than £50.

“We must have printed about a thousand more lenses of different shapes since January,” says team member Gail McConnell at the University of Strathclyde in the UK.

She says several companies that make commercial products that require lenses reached out about the team’s work, as cheap and lightweight 3D-printed lenses are not at all common in large-scale manufacturing. She and her colleagues tested the microscope by examining a blood sample and a thin section of a mouse kidney, which established that it could be useful in medicine and biology studies.

But the team says their goal with the work was to democratise access to microscopes, and those dreams are coming true. They are now collaborating with a laboratory at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana to make microscopy more available to researchers and students in West Africa, and they have received grants from the UK Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy, says Rooney. They are also participating in programmes that upskill and empower students who face barriers to accessing education.

Additionally, the researchers have incorporated the new microscope into the Strathclyde Optical Microscopy Course, which is designed for researchers at all levels of experience and, according to Rooney, a unique educational opportunity within the UK. “This is really changing how we teach,” he says.

And there is scope for the 3D-printed microscope to become even better. The researchers have been working on improving its resolution without making it more costly, and they have already worked out how to increase its contrast by up to 67 per cent.

McConnell says that because the microscope was designed to be created with consumer electronics and accessible 3D printers, the limitations on how much it could do in the future, and how well, really lie with the limitations of current 3D-printing technology.

“As these printers get better, we will get better too: this is the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not imagination,” she says. “We are getting emails constantly from people asking us to print something new.”

PHYSICS | DEC 24, 2025, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Physicists used 'dark photons' in an effort to rewrite physics in 2025

A new theory of "dark photons" attempted to explain a centuries-old experiment in a new way this year, in an effort to change our understanding of the nature of light

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Dark photons offer a new explanation for the double-slit experiment

RUSSELL KIGHTLEY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

A core tenet of quantum theory was imperilled this year when a team of researchers put forward a radical new interpretation of an experiment about the nature of light.

At the centre of the new work was the double-slit experiment, which was first conducted in 1801 by physicist Thomas Young, who used it to confirm that light acts like a wave. Classically, something that is a particle can never also be a wave, and vice versa, but in the quantum realm, the two aren’t mutually exclusive. In fact, all quantum objects exhibit so-called wave-particle duality.

For decades, light seemed to be a prime example of this: experiments showed that it sometimes behaves as a particle called a photon and sometimes as a wave that produces effects like those that Young saw. But earlier this year, Celso Villas-Boas at the Federal University of São Carlos in Brazil and his colleagues proposed an interpretation of the double-slit experiment that only involves photons, effectively eliminating the need for the wavy part of light’s duality.

After New Scientist reported on the study, the team behind it was contacted by many colleagues who were interested in the work, which has since been cited very widely, says Villas-Boas. One YouTube video about it has been viewed more than 700,000 times. “I was invited to deliver talks about this in Japan, Spain, here in Brazil, so many places,” he says.

In the classic double-slit experiment, an opaque barrier with two narrow, adjacent slits is placed between a screen and a source of light. The light passes through the slits and falls onto the screen, which consequently shows a pattern of bright and dark vertical stripes, known as classical interference. This is usually explained as a result of light waves spilling through the two slits and crashing into each other at the screen.

The researchers ditched this picture and turned to so-called dark states of photons, special quantum states that don’t light up the screen because they are unable to interact with any other particle. With these states explaining the dark stripes, there was now no need to invoke light waves.

This is a notable departure from the most common view of light in quantum physics. “Many professors were saying to me: ‘You are touching one of the most fundamental things in my life, I have been teaching interference by the book since the beginning, and now you’re saying that everything that I taught is wrong’,” says Villas-Boas. He says that some of his colleagues did accept the new view. Others remained if not outright sceptical, then cautiously intrigued, as New Scientist’s reporting bore out when the study first became public.

And Villas-Boas has kept busy since, examining several new implications of photons’ dark states. For instance, his and his colleagues’ mathematical analysis revealed that thermal radiation, such as light coming from the sun or the stars, can have dark states that carry a significant portion of its energy, but as they don’t interact with other objects, that energy is, in some sense, hidden. This could be tested in experiments that place atoms in cavities where their interactions with light can be precisely monitored, says Villas-Boas.

He says that his team’s reinterpretation of interference also makes it possible to understand seemingly impossible phenomena, such as waves interfering even when they don’t directly overlap or interference between mechanical and electromagnetic waves. In either case, leaving behind the wave model in favour of bright and dark photon states opens up new possibilities. Villas-Boas can even imagine using some of these findings to build new types of light-driven switches or devices that are only transparent to certain types of light.

In his view, all this work relates to a fundamental truth about quantum physics: it is impossible to discuss quantum objects without describing how they interact with detectors and other measuring devices, including being dark. “This is not new, in my opinion. This is what quantum mechanics already says to us,” says Villas-Boas.

SPACE | DEC 24, 2025, 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025

Astronomers discovered a new moon of Uranus and hundreds of moons around Saturn over the past year, and there may be many more yet to be found

By Matthew Sparkes

Uranus’s new moon, S/2025 U1, was spotted using the James Webb Space Telescope

NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI/M. El Moutamid (SwRI)/M. Hedman (University of Idaho)

This year, astronomers discovered more than 100 previously unknown moons in our own solar system. There may be many more yet to be discovered, and cataloguing them could help us better understand how planets form.

In March, Edward Ashton at Academia Sinica in Taiwan and his colleagues discovered 128 moons around Saturn, bringing the planet’s total to 274. The team gathered hours’ worth of images from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and stacked them on top of each other to spot objects that are otherwise too dim to see.

Ashton’s team now has the right to name the new moons, although Saturn’s moons are so numerous that many are no longer given informal names.

In August, a small and dim new moon was found in orbit around Uranus, bringing the planet’s total to 29. Maryame El Moutamid at Southwest Research Institute in Colorado and her colleagues made the discovery using 10 long-exposure infrared images taken by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

The team remains tight-lipped on potential names for the moon, so it still has the provisional name S/2025 U1. In time, it will probably be named along the same lines as 27 of Uranus’s moons, which take a character’s name from one of Shakespeare’s plays. This convention dates back to the discovery of the planet’s first two moons, Titania and Oberon, in 1787.

Nigel Mason at the University of Kent, UK, says there are likely to be many more moons to be discovered in our solar system, particularly around Neptune and Uranus, although the largest ones have probably already been mapped.

“Everybody always likes to find new moons and everybody always likes to think about what they’re going to call them,” he says. “It’s an exciting moment. It’s a bit of a legacy.”

The more we catalogue and measure our local moons, the more we can find out about how they are created and use that information to update our models of planet formation, says Mason.

“Why are there so many? What is it that triggered [planets] to make 40, 50, 60 of such varying shapes and sizes?
That’s why they’re exciting,” he says. “It’s not just stamp collecting. It really is ‘wow’. Really surprisingly, the whole planet-formation process is not as well as understood as we think.”

ENVIRONMENT | DEC 23, 2025, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Alpine communities face uncertain future after 2025 glacier collapse

Careful slope monitoring prevented mass casualties in the landslide at Blatten, Switzerland, this year, but mountain communities may face a growing risk of disasters

By Michael Le Page

Blatten in Switzerland was buried by a landslide in May 2025

ALEXANDRE AGRUSTI/AFP via Getty Images

In May, the village of Blatten in the Swiss Alps was destroyed when a huge chunk of a glacier collapsed, but thanks to careful monitoring, almost all of its residents were saved.

The first sign of an impending disaster appeared on 14 May, when an official observer for Switzerland’s snow avalanche warning service reported a small rockfall above the village. These observers have other full-time jobs in the area, but are trained to keep an eye on the slopes.

The service then took a look at images from a camera installed on the glacier above the village after snow avalanches in the 1990s. “In those photos, they could see changes on the ridge on the mountain,” says Mylène Jacquemart at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. “It just so happened that the camera was looking at it from a very useful angle.”

That led to further investigations, which found that a major landslide was likely. On 18 and 19 May, 300 people were evacuated from the village, with just one 64-year-old man refusing to leave.

On 28 May, a large part of the mountain above the glacier collapsed. “This is a really, really large rock avalanche on its own,” says Jacquemart.

The glacier was already covered in a large amount of rubble from smaller rockfalls over the preceding months and years. When the rockfall hit it, the entire lower part gave way, resulting in 3 million cubic metres of ice and 6 million cubic metres of rock plunging into the valley and destroying most of the village. The man who refused to leave was killed.

Many stories in the media have suggested there was some kind of high-tech monitoring of the glacier going on, says Jacquemart, but that isn’t the case. “There was not some fancy alarm system, you know, in someone’s office, a little red light [that] started blinking, saying, hey, there’s an issue there.”

But what Switzerland’s system does have is clear lines of communication and responsibility, she says. From the observers onwards, people know who to talk to and who makes the decision on whether to evacuate or not.

Satellite image from 30 May showing the extent of the area affected by the landslide

European Union, Copernicus Sentinel-2 imagery

So what caused this disaster? The risk of ice falls has been diminishing as Alpine glaciers shrink, but there is no doubt that global warming is increasing the frequency of rockfalls. The upper parts of the mountains are usually permanently frozen, with ice sealing any cracks or crevices.

As these regions warm – Switzerland is now nearly 3°C warmer than it was in pre-industrial times, on average – this permafrost is sometimes thawing, while water is often falling as rain rather than snow. This means cracks can become filled with liquid water that expands as it freezes, forcing rocks apart.

“We see a pretty close connection with climate change and rock failures, or rockfall,” says Jacquemart. “There are dramatic changes going on in high mountains and those are, as far as I can tell, all bad.”

But she is cautious about blaming recent warming for events on a scale as vast as the Blatten disaster. It is possible that the ultimate cause is the warming since the last glacial period ended around 10,000 years ago, she says. “Maybe this is a slope that’s adjusting to its ice-free conditions, compared to the last ice age, and this adjustment is really slow, and eventually it leads to failure.”

What happens next for the residents of Blatten isn’t clear either. The village can’t be rebuilt on the unstable debris – a mix of rock and ice – but local authorities have already announced plans to rebuild nearby. However, this area is also at risk from landslides and building protective structures is extremely expensive.

“Mountain communities around the world, from the Alps to the Andes and the Himalayas, are threatened by increasing intensity and frequency of mountain-related hazards,” Kamal Kishore, head of the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction, said in a statement after the disaster. “Their lives, ways of life, culture, and heritage are all threatened.”

SPACE | DEC 23, 2025, 9:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The best space pictures of 2025, from supernovae to moon landings

The year’s most memorable moments from astronomy and space exploration include a double-detonating supernova, a private moon landing and a stunning lunar eclipse

By Alex Wilkins

The supernova remnant SNR 0509-67.5 as seen by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope

ESO/P. Das et al. Background stars (Hubble): K. Noll et al.

This two-toned sphere is evidence of a rare double-detonating supernova, captured by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile.

Astronomers at the University of New South Wales in Canberra, Australia, think the spectacular ball of gas and dust formed when a white dwarf star – which may have once been like our sun but ran out of nuclear fuel long ago – exploded after it siphoned helium from another star. The initial explosion happened around 300 years ago, and could have been one of the brightest objects in the southern hemisphere’s night sky if the sun hadn’t blocked the view from Earth.

Starship explosion

James Temple Photography

It has been a mixed year for SpaceX’s Starship, the world’s largest and most powerful rocket, which the firm’s CEO Elon Musk hopes will eventually ferry astronauts to Mars. While the rocket had a successful orbital test flight in August, the previous three launch attempts were failures, ending in fiery explosions (or “rapid unscheduled disassemblies”, as SpaceX refers to them). James Temple, a chef working on a yacht near the Turks and Caicos Islands, caught the kaleidoscopic streaks of Starship’s seventh failed flight test as it burnt up across the sky in January.

A SpaceX Dragon spacecraft in the water off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida, on 18 March

NASA/Keegan Barber

Aside from Starship, SpaceX has had a successful year in other domains, continuing to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station in the absence of a suitable NASA rocket. This picture caught the moment when a SpaceX Dragon capsule splashed down near a dolphin pod. The craft was carrying two NASA astronauts who had been “stuck” on the ISS for nine months after Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft was deemed unsafe to return them as planned.

A photo taken by the Blue Ghost lander on the surface of the moon

Firefly Aerospace

In March, Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lander became only the second commercial spacecraft to land on the moon, and the first to do so upright, after a previous attempt toppled over on touchdown. After a 45-day journey, it landed in a smooth volcanic basin called Mare Crisium, where it snapped this selfie of its own shadow against the light of the sun, with Earth a small dot in the sky above.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s view of the Trifid and Lagoon nebulae

NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

The Vera C. Rubin observatory, one of the world’s most powerful telescopes, began operations this year and is set to scan the night sky daily for the next decade. One of its first images showed the Trifid Nebula, a star-forming region of the Milky Way around 5000 light years away, here seen as a pink-and-blue cloud towards the upper right corner. The pink swirl below it is the Lagoon Nebula, another stellar nursery 4000 light years away. This image was created from 678 different pictures taken over 7 hours by Rubin.

A composite shot of the lunar eclipse in the sky over Tokyo in September

Kyodo News via Getty Images

Astronomers keenly awaited the lunar eclipse in September, when the moon passed through Earth’s shadow. This gave it a distinctive red colour for reasons similar to why sunsets appear red, due to the diffraction of light passing through Earth’s atmosphere and shining onto the moon. This composite photo shows the moon’s successive appearance as it moved through the night sky above Tokyo.

HEALTH | DEC 23, 2025, 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Gene therapy for Huntington’s disease showed great promise in 2025

An experimental gene therapy seems to slow the progression of Huntington’s disease by about 75 per cent, and researchers are working to make its complicated delivery much more practical

By Grace Wade

Huntington’s disease gradually kills brain cells, affecting movement, mood and thinking

Science Photo Library/Alamy

This year marked a pivotal moment in the quest to treat Huntington’s disease, a rare but devastating form of dementia. Scientists found that an experimental gene therapy slowed the condition’s progression – the first time this has ever been achieved. Although a huge feat, delivering the therapy is challenging, so researchers are already working on a more practical intervention.

“It is a giant step forward,” says team member Sarah Tabrizi at University College London, referring to the existing therapy’s success in a late-stage trial earlier this year. “It tells you that Huntington’s disease has the potential to be treatable. This gives us a huge window of opportunity.”

Huntington’s disease occurs due to a genetic mutation that causes the normally harmless huntingtin protein to accumulate in toxic clumps inside the brain. Over time, this kills brain cells, leading to difficulties with movement, thinking and mood. There are no approved treatments that stop symptoms from worsening, with interventions instead focusing on supporting people through the process.

But the experimental therapy, known as AMT-130, targets these abnormal proteins by carrying genetic instructions to brain cells, directing them to make a molecule that blocks their production.

In the trial, Tabrizi and her colleagues gave 17 people with Huntington’s disease a high dose of the treatment, then compared their cognition, movement and daily functioning with those of untreated individuals three years later. The drug’s developer, biotechnology company uniQure, shared preliminary results in September, which showed the treatment slowed the condition’s progression by about 75 per cent, on average.

“We have had so many setbacks in therapies for Huntington’s disease in the last couple of years,” says Sarah O’Shea at Mount Sinai in New York, who wasn’t involved in the research. “So this was huge, not just because it is a breakthrough in terms of slowing disease progress, but also [because] it came at a time where we really needed this hope.”

Yet the treatment isn’t without its setbacks. It is delivered deep into the brain over a 12-to-18-hour surgery – an operation only a few facilities are capable of, even in countries like the US and the UK, says Tabrizi. What’s more, if it were approved for use, it would almost certainly come with an exorbitant price tag. “So, do I think it is going to be able to get to everyone? It is going to be challenging,” she says.

To get around this, she and her colleagues have since developed a similar treatment that is injected into the fluid surrounding the spinal cord. “That is currently in a phase I study. We dosed the first patient in November 2024,” says Tabrizi, noting that the results, which should inform us about the approach’s safety, are expected around July 2026.

In the meantime, uniQure executives said in September that they planned to submit AMT-130 to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for approval in early 2026. But in a statement in November, they said the submission timeline was now unclear after the FDA expressed reservations about the study’s design, particularly its makeshift control group, which was made up of individuals from a database of people with Huntington’s who received no intervention.

The lack of a control group within the trial makes it difficult to know the degree to which the placebo effect may have influenced the results. But the invasive nature of the surgery makes it difficult to justify creating such a group.

“We strongly believe that AMT-130 has the potential to bring substantial benefit to patients, and we remain fully committed to working with the FDA to determine the best path forward to rapidly bring AMT-130 to patients and their families in the US,” Matt Kapusta, CEO of uniQure, said in the statement.

HEALTH | DEC 23, 2025, 2:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

IVF success may depend on how long men abstain from ejaculation

Ejaculating within 48 hours of providing a sperm sample for IVF seems to lead to greater success rates than abstaining from ejaculation for longer

By Helen Thomson

A simple intervention could make a big difference to IVF success

CHRISTOPH BURGSTEDT/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Men should ejaculate less than 48 hours before in vitro fertilisation egg collection to maximise the chances of it leading to an ongoing pregnancy, according to the first clinical trial to test how different ejaculation abstinence intervals affect the success of the fertility treatment.

Towards the end of an IVF cycle, the woman takes a “trigger” drug that pushes developing eggs to maturation. This is injected 36 hours before the eggs are collected and fertilised.

To ensure the healthiest possible sperm for fertilisation, men are usually advised to ejaculate within a window of between two and seven days before providing the sample that will be used for IVF. “There is an optimal period between ejaculations when sperm are at their best,” says David Miller at the University of Leeds, UK, who wasn’t involved in the trial.

But two to seven days is a wide range. On the one hand, the longer sperm are stored in the testes, the longer they are exposed to various toxins, most notably free oxygen radicals, which are formed naturally during metabolic processes, and those from external factors such as pollution. This can cause DNA damage and impair sperm quality, says Richard Paulson at Keck School of Medicine of USC, Los Angeles, who also wasn’t involved in the trial. But too short a time between ejaculations reduces sperm numbers.

Until now, there hasn’t been any robust clinical data that shortening the ejaculation interval translates into improved pregnancy outcomes, but there have been hints. For instance, a 2024 meta-analysis found that leaving less than four days between ejaculations improved semen quality in men who are infertile. Another study reported that an interval of less than 4 hours reduced the amount of sperm that had DNA damage and improved sperm motility.

To test the idea directly, Yang Yu at First Hospital of Jilin University in Changchun, China, and his colleagues asked 226 men undergoing conventional IVF to ejaculate around 36 hours before producing their final sample. Another 227 were asked to ejaculate between 48 hours and seven days beforehand.

The group with the shorter abstinence interval had higher ongoing pregnancy rates – 46 per cent compared with 36 per cent. “The better pregnancy rate looks encouraging,” says Miller, “but of course, this doesn’t necessarily reflect fully, the final treatment outcome, which is live birth rate.” Nevertheless, he says that because the miscarriage rate was lower (although not statistically so) in the shorter abstinence group, he would expect more live births, too.

Paulson says that while the study makes an interesting observation, it has weaknesses, such as including both fresh and frozen embryos, when IVF success rates may vary between the two. He also points out that the data shows a decreased fertilisation rate but an increased number of ongoing pregnancies in the shorter abstinence group, suggesting fewer couples conceived, but of those who did, more continued past 12 weeks, which is something that needs more careful analysis. “This type of extraordinary claim would require extraordinary proof, with careful control of all possible factors,” he says.

Further research could also reveal whether frequent ejaculation improves pregnancy outcomes for couples not having IVF. “This trial is a nice proof that a shorter abstinence is a good way of having better sperm,” says Jackson Kirkman-Brown at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Reference:

Preprints with The Lancet DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.5821645

SPACE | DEC 23, 2025, 3:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Europa's thick ice may hinder the search for life in its oceans

The liquid ocean on Jupiter’s moon Europa appears to be completely sealed off from the planet’s surface, which may reduce the chances of finding life there

By James Woodford

Europa has a vast, salty ocean covered by a thick shell of ice

Claudio Caridi / Alamy

Europa’s liquid ocean may be sealed off from the surface under a frozen sheet six times thicker than the deepest Antarctic ice, making it harder for any life there to be detected.

Thanks to the abundance of liquid water, Jupiter’s moon Europa is seen as a high-priority target in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Previous estimates of the thickness of the ice covering the ocean range from less than 10 kilometres to nearly 50. But it was also thought that cracks, fissures, pores and other imperfections in the frozen sheet might make it possible for nutrients to be transported between the surface and the ocean.

Now, a team led by Steven Levin at the California Institute of Technology has studied data collected by the Juno spacecraft, which has been in orbit around Jupiter since 2016.

On 29 September 2022, the probe flew within 360 kilometres of Europa and scanned the surface with its microwave radiometer, providing the first direct measurements of the ice. This instrument measured the heat emitted by Europa’s frozen shell, says Levin, effectively measuring the temperature of the ice at various depths. It was also able to detect changes in temperature resulting from imperfections in the ice sheet.

The team estimated the most probable thickness of the ice sheet was about 29 kilometres – thicker than most previous estimates – but it could be as thin as 19 kilometres or as thick as 39 kilometres.

Crucially, the cracks, pores and other imperfections probably extend only to depths of hundreds of metres into the ice, and the pores have a radius of just a few centimetres, they found.

“It means that the imperfections which we see with the microwave radiometer don’t go deep enough, and aren’t big enough, to carry much of anything between the ocean and the surface,” says Levin.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean the chances of life existing on Europa are reduced. “The pores or cracks which we see are too small and shallow to carry nutrients to and from the ocean, but there could be other mechanisms of transport,” he says.

There may also be regions of the moon, not yet explored, where the situation is different, he adds.

Ben Montet at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, says the thickness of the ice could make it more challenging to look for life. “That protection could help life persist for long periods of time, but it makes the ocean harder for us to reach and study,” he says.

While there does not need to be “communication” between Europa’s surface and the ocean under the ice for life to exist, a transport link might increase the likelihood, says Helen Maynard-Casely at Australia’s Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation. Without such connections, “you would be essentially saying you are trapped with what was there in the ocean at the beginning,” she says.

NASA launched the Europa Clipper probe in 2024, and it is due to reach Jupiter’s moon in 2030. That mission should answer the question of the nature of Europa’s ice more definitively, says Maynard-Casely.

Journal reference:

Nature Astronomy DOI: 10.1038/s41550-025-02718-0

Mysteries of the universe: Cheshire, England

Spend a weekend with some of the brightest minds in science, as you explore the mysteries of the universe in an exciting programme that includes an excursion to see the iconic Lovell Telescope.

Find out more

TECHNOLOGY | DEC 22, 2025, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

New Scientist changed the UK's freedom of information laws in 2025

By requesting copies of the then-UK technology secretary's ChatGPT logs, New Scientist set a precedent for how freedom of information laws apply to chatbot interactions, helping to hold governments to account

By Chris Stokel-Walker

Our successful request for Peter Kyle’s ChatGPT logs stunned observers

Tada Images/Victoria Jones/Shutterstock

When I fired off an email at the start of 2025, I hadn’t intended to set a legal precedent for how the UK government handles its interactions with AI chatbots, but that is exactly what happened.

It all began in January when I read an interview with the then-UK tech secretary Peter Kyle in Politics Home. Trying to suggest he used first-hand the technology his department was set up to regulate, Kyle said that he would often have conversations with ChatGPT.

That got me wondering: could I obtain his chat history? Freedom of information (FOI) laws are often deployed to obtain emails and other documents produced by public bodies, but past precedent has suggested that some private data – such as search queries – aren’t eligible for release in this way. I was interested to see which way the chatbot conversations would be categorised.

It turned out to be the former: while many of Kyle’s interactions with ChatGPT were considered to be private, and so ineligible to be released under FOI laws, the times when he interacted with the AI chatbot in an official capacity were.

So it was that in March, the Department for Science, Industry and Technology (DSIT) provided a handful of conversations that Kyle had had with the chatbot – which became the basis for our exclusive story revealing his conversations.

The release of the chat interactions was a shock to data protection and FOI experts. “I’m surprised that you got them,” said Tim Turner, a data protection expert based in Manchester, UK, at the time. Others were less diplomatic in their language: they were stunned.

When publishing the story, we explained how the release was a world first – and getting access to AI chatbot conversations went on to gain international interest.

Researchers in different countries, including Canada and Australia, got in touch with me to ask for tips on how to craft their own requests to government ministers to try to obtain the same information. For example, a subsequent FOI request in April found that Feryal Clark, then the UK minister for artificial intelligence, hadn’t used ChatGPT at all in her official capacity, despite professing its benefits. But many requests proved unsuccessful, as governments began to rely more on legal exceptions to the free release of information.

I have personally found that the UK government has become much cagier around the idea of FOI, especially concerning AI use, since my story for New Scientist. A subsequent request I made via FOI legislation for the response within DSIT to the story – including any emails or Microsoft Teams messages mentioning the story, plus how DSIT arrived at its official response to the article – was rejected.

The reason why? It was deemed vexatious, and sorting out valid information that ought to be included from the rest would take too long. I was tempted to ask the government to use ChatGPT to summarise everything relevant, given how much the then-tech secretary had waxed lyrical about its prowess, but decided against it.

Overall, the release mattered because governments are adopting AI at pace. The UK government has already admitted that the civil service is using ChatGPT-like tools in day-to-day processes, claiming to save up to two weeks’ a year through improved efficiency. Yet AI doesn’t impartially summarise information, nor is it perfect: hallucinations exist. That’s why it is important to have transparency over how it is used – for good or ill.

Physics

- Inside world's ultimate X-ray machine before it becomes more powerful (paid): 2025 Dec 29

PHYSICS | DEC 29, 2025, 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Inside world's ultimate X-ray machine before it becomes more powerful

The Linac Coherent Light Source in California has been firing record-breaking X-ray pulses for years, but now it’s due for a shutdown and an upgrade. When it is turned back on, it will be even more powerful

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

An illustration of an electron beam traveling through a niobium cavity, a key component of SLAC’s LCLS-II X-ray laser

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

The Klystron Gallery, a concrete hallway studded with evenly spaced metal cylinders, is long enough to extend past my line of sight. But as I stand inside it, I know that something even more spectacular hides beneath my feet.

Below the Klystron Gallery is a gigantic metal tube that extends for 3.2 kilometres: the Linac Coherent Light Source II (LCLS-II). This machine, located at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California, generates X-ray pulses more powerful than those produced at any other facility in the world, and I am visiting it because it recently broke one of its own records. Soon, however, its most powerful components will shut down for an upgrade. Once it is turned back on, possibly as early as 2027, its X-rays will have more than double the energy.

“It will be like going from a twinkle to a lightbulb,” says James Cryan at SLAC.

Describing LCLS-II as a mere twinkle is a massive understatement. In 2024, it produced the most powerful X-ray pulse ever recorded. It lasted just 440 billionths of a billionth of a second, but carried almost a terawatt of power, which far surpasses the average yearly output of a nuclear power plant. What’s more, in 2025, LCLS-II generated 93,000 X-ray pulses in one second – a record for an X-ray laser.

Cryan says that this latter record paves the way for researchers to get an unprecedented look into the behaviour of particles inside molecules after they absorb energy. It’s comparable to turning a black-and-white film of their behaviour into a sharper one teeming with colour. Between this accomplishment and the upcoming upgrade, LCLS-II stands a chance of radically improving our understanding of the subatomic behaviour of light-sensitive systems, whether they be photosynthesising plants, or candidates for better solar cells.

LCLS-II achieves all of this by accelerating electrons until they approach the speed of light – the ultimate cosmic speed limit. The cylindrical devices that I saw, which are the klystrons that give the Klystron Gallery its name, are responsible for producing the microwaves that achieve this acceleration. Once sufficiently fast, the electrons pass through rows of thousands of magnets whose poles are carefully arranged to make the speeding electrons wiggle. This, in turn, produces X-ray pulses. Like medical X-rays, these pulses can then be used to image the inside of materials.

On the day of my visit, I tour one of the several experimental halls where the X-rays complete their journey by crashing into molecules. I peek at some of the chambers where a molecule and an X-ray meet. They are like something out of a futuristic submarine: thick metal cylinders with round glass windows, all of which are carefully bolted together so as not to let in any stray molecules of air that could interfere with the experiment.

Cryan and his colleagues ran an experiment the night before my visit, investigating the motion of protons inside molecules. Imaging methods other than X-rays struggle to accurately determine how protons move, yet accurate details of the process are important for solar cell development, he says.

What will happen to such investigations once LCLS-II completes its “High Energy” upgrade to become LCLS-II-HE? The ability to study the behaviour of particles and charges within molecules will increase significantly, says Cryan. Getting there, however, will be no easy task.

CERN and Mont Blanc, dark and frozen matter: Switzerland and France

Prepare to have your mind blown by CERN, Europe’s particle physics centre, where researchers operate the famous Large Hadron Collider, nestled near the charming Swiss lakeside city of Geneva.

Find out more

John Schmerge at SLAC says that the more energetic the electron beam becomes, the more the team must worry about even just a few particles going astray. He says he once saw an imperfectly controlled beam burn a hole in an instrument at a different facility, so there is little room for error. SLAC’s Yuantao Ding says that all the new parts the team will be installing during the upgrade have been designed to withstand the new, higher power of the facility, but that it will be crucial to ramp the power up step-by-step and verify that everything is working as intended. “We will be turning on the beam and carefully watching what happens,” he says.

He and his colleagues will spend most of 2026 making a big engineering push to get all the parts in place, which will then set them up for this incremental process throughout the following year or two. If all goes according to plan, researchers worldwide will be able to use LCLS-II-HE by 2030. Conversations between researchers who use the X-rays, like Cryan, and those who control it, like Schmerge and Ding, will also play a big role. “Ultimately, it is a big tool, and people will learn how to use it well,” says Schmerge. “We will be constantly tweaking it.”

Technology

- How not to misread science fiction (paid): 2025 Dec 23

COLUMNIST TECHNOLOGY | DEC 23, 2025, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How not to misread science fiction

Focusing on the futuristic tech that appears in sci-fi without paying attention to the actual point of the story is a big mistake, says Annalee Newitz

By Annalee Newitz

Not so futuristic: Saruman with a palantir in The Lord of the Rings

LANDMARK MEDIA/Alamy

We are approaching the Gregorian New Year, and it’s a great time to ponder what’s coming next. Are we about to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the sun in a Dyson sphere? If, like me, you are a nerd who loves science and engineering, sci-fi is the place you turn to imagine the answers. The problem is that most people are getting the wrong messages from these visions of tomorrow.

As a science journalist who also writes science fiction, I am giving you an end-of-year present: a quick guide to not misreading sci-fi stories. Pay attention, because all our civilisations depend on it.

There are two main ways that people misread sci-fi. Let’s start with the simpler one, known as the Torment Nexus Problem. It appears most often in tech conferences and business plans, and gets its name from an iconic social media post by the satirist Alex Blechman. In 2021, he wrote:

“Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”.

You get the idea. The Torment Nexus Problem crops up when people read, watch or play a sci-fi story and focus on its futuristic tech without paying attention to the actual point of the story.

As a result, you get billionaire Peter Thiel co-founding a company that specialises in data and surveillance called Palantir, named after the fantasy tech of the “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings that drive their users to evil and madness. Palantir’s products have been used by the Israel Defense Forces to strike targets in Gaza. Earlier this year, the firm signed a contract with the US government to build a system for tracking the movements of certain migrants. J. R. R. Tolkien would not be amused.

There are less disturbing examples as well. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to pivot Facebook to virtual reality, he renamed it Meta, after the metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. But this fictional metaverse isn’t something you would want to emulate, if you paid attention when reading the story. It’s a hostile corporate space that unleashes a mind virus that causes people’s brains to “crash” like computers.

“ Zuckerberg and Thiel overlooked the fact that a palantir and the metaverse destroy people’s minds “

You might be sensing a theme here. Thiel and Zuckerberg wanted to make fictional tech real and appear to have overlooked the fact that a palantir and the metaverse destroy people’s minds. That’s a profound misreading of sci-fi.

The second major way people misread science fiction could be called the Blueprint Problem. Essentially, it’s the mistaken idea that sci-fi provides an exact model for what is coming next and if we replicate what happens in sci-fi, we will arrive in a glorious future.

The Blueprint Problem inspired a lot of early space programmes in the 1950s, which prioritised putting humans into space rather than exploring it remotely with robotic spacecraft. Generations of people had watched Flash Gordon and read Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had been promised that people would fly spaceships to colonise alien worlds. Today, we have robots discovering incredible things on Mars and space probes grabbing chunks of asteroids for analysis. But the media are still more likely to make a fuss over Katy Perry riding in Jeff Bezos’s rocket than to celebrate when the autonomous Voyager spacecrafts hit the termination shock that marks the edge of our solar system.

Most of the hype around AI products can also be blamed on the Blueprint Problem. We were promised AI servants and savants in so much sci-fi over the past century that robocops and holographic doctors have come to feel inevitable. But they aren’t.

Science fiction isn’t a map, a recipe book or a prescription. Instead, it is a world view, a way of approaching problems with the underlying assumption that things don’t have to be the way they are. This conviction inspired the book We Will Rise Again, a sci-fi anthology about social change that I co-edited with Karen Lord and Malka Older. We collected stories and essays intended to dislodge people’s preconceptions about where human civilisations are headed. In our book, the future isn’t predestined; it’s a process, and people are actively shaping it.

The more you appreciate this process, the weirder the present-day world starts to seem. Why do we build machines to fold tissues into boxes? Why do we believe in invisible lines called borders? Why do we assume there are only two immutable genders? Asking those kinds of questions is the real point of science fiction. They are the gateways to new worlds.

If you want to build a better future, you cannot merely replicate something you read. You must imagine it yourself.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is techsploitation.com

What I’m reading

404 Media, an incredible online publication for investigative journalism about tech.

What I’m watching

Heated Rivalry, a gay ice hockey romance series that is extremely Canadian.

What I’m working on

Planning the European tour for sci-fi anthology We Will Rise Again.

Humans

- Ancient rock art revealed in all its glory in stunning photographs: 2025 Dec 23

- Why do we feel the need to humanise everything, from dogs to cars? (paid): 2025 Dec 23

HUMANS | DEC 23, 2025, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Ancient rock art revealed in all its glory in stunning photographs

Images capture the remarkable variety of petroglyphs etched into rock across a wide swathe of land, from Mongolia to the Sahara

By Alex Wilkins

A Bronze and Iron Age tableau of ancient humans and animals from the Great Nafud Desert in northern Saudi Arabia

Christoph Baumer

Christoph Baumer & Therese Weber

Bloomsbury Academic

In 1954, Pablo Picasso told his secretary that for all the artistic developments in the millennia since humans first engraved images into rock, these works of ancient art had still “never been surpassed”, such was their “purity of expression”. It is easy to see why Picasso was so enamoured. In their book Rock Art and its Legacy in Myth and Art, historian Christoph Baumer and artist Therese Weber catalogue a vast array of petroglyphs, which are made by etching into rock.

“Many of these petroglyphs are masterpieces,” says Baumer. “They are very simple, and just with a few strokes you very clearly recognise not just an animal, but its main attributes.”

The rock art photographed for the book, some of which is shown in this article, comes from a large area, ranging from Mongolia in the east to the Sahara in the west. The oldest dates back at least 8000 years.

A so-called deer stone from a burial site in northern Mongolia, dated to 1400-850 BC

Christoph Baumer

This wide swathe of territory means there is remarkable variety, both between and within images, such as in the Bronze and Iron Age tableau of ancient humans and animals seen in a horizontal limestone rock from the desert in northern Saudi Arabia, shown in the main image at the top of this article. But there is also remarkable similarity, given the low populations and enormous separation between them.

Sun-like figures and deer images found in Kyrgyzstan, from the Bronze Age

Christoph Baumer

Picasso might disagree, but these drawings are still deeply mysterious, in part because they are difficult to accurately date. But Baumer is enthusiastic about how much they can explain: “It tells us something about the beliefs, habits and economy of very ancient peoples, which we otherwise know of very little.”

A large petroglyph found in Aspeberget, Sweden

Christoph Baumer

The image above of a petroglyph found in Sweden shows warriors, ships, farm scenes and a sun-like disc. These Bronze Age images have been painted red for tourists, but would have originally been the colour of the rock.

An Iron Age petroglyph from Saudi Arabia

Christoph Baumer

Above is a shot of one of the largest petroglyphs in southern Saudi Arabia, showing a dromedary camel, from the Iron Age. Below are some human-like stone slabs from a burial site in Xinjiang, China, dated to the start of the second millennium BC.

Stone slabs from a burial site in Xinjiang, China

Christoph Baumer

HUMANS | DEC 23, 2025, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why do we feel the need to humanise everything, from dogs to cars?

Our tendency to anthropomorphise our pets and possessions reveals the baggage we bring to our relationship with the natural world, says Justin Gregg in his fascinating new book Human-ish

By Elle Hunt

Humans bring plenty of emotional baggage to their relationship with other animals

Ryan J Lane/Getty Images

Human-ish

Justin Gregg, One World

In the late 19th century, a strange debate raged in the journal Nature about the “reputed suicide of scorpions”. They had been seen stinging themselves in the head and deliberately self-destructing when trapped by fire. Did this “scorpionic suicide” (if it happened as described) amount to existential hopelessness, as credible men of science argued?

Zoologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan was so energised by all this that he experimented on scorpions himself, declaring it his “duty”, given the implications for the emerging theory of natural selection. Morgan surrounded scorpions with fire, heated them in glass jars and coated them with acid. None attempted suicide; they did, however, burn to death.

Today, this may register as an oddity, but we still cling to ideas about non-human life and minds that say more about us than them. In Human-ish: How anthropomorphism makes us smart, weird and delusional, Justin Gregg explores the baggage we bring to our engagement with other animals.

Gregg is a dolphin cognition researcher and an author whose last book, If Nietzsche Were a Narwhal, looked at what animal intelligence says about human stupidity. Here, his focus is our tendency to attribute human-like thoughts, feelings and intentions to non-human beings.

Through many entertaining examples, Gregg reveals the mind-boggling lengths to which we take this projection, such as in the existence of “neuticles”: prosthetic testicles for neutered dogs to counter perceived emasculation and “loss of dignity”. He also tells us about the couple who contacted him about an “ocean birth”, dissuaded only when he pointed out they would attract sharks as well as dolphins.

Despite his genial tone, Gregg is serious in exposing how animals suffer due to our chronic anthropomorphism, for example in our lop-sided relationship with pets, increasingly treated as substitute children. Bulldogs, pugs and Persian cats – inbred to satisfy our love of large eyes, small noses and baby faces – are plagued with health issues, even struggling to breathe. And the plot of the film Jaws turned sharks from rarely seen ocean-dwellers into public enemies facing official culls, to the detriment of ocean ecosystems.

Irrational as Gregg reveals our anthropomorphism to be, he is sympathetic to the inclination: we are hard-wired for it, and it’s fun. But it can rebound: projecting human needs and desires onto other beings (even ones as unlike us as scorpions) affects which species we study. For instance, “mammalcentrism” means we know relatively little about insects.

Like another recent book, The Arrogant Ape by primatologist Christine Webb, Human-ish also examines “human exceptionalism” and our tendency to place ourselves at the centre of nature. This even extends to natural phenomena: it is known, for example, that hurricanes tend to kill more people if they have feminine names, because they are perceived as less dangerous, meaning people are less likely to take adequate precautions.

In Human-ish‘s final third, Gregg shows how projecting human characteristics onto machines and products (think cars and bottles) leaves us vulnerable to marketing. It is also increasingly leading us astray in tech as people project human-like sentience onto AI. Anthropomorphism may seem like a low-stakes diversion, even a natural impulse, but Gregg shows it is worth taking seriously – and keeping in check.

Elle Hunt is a writer based in Norwich, UK

Health

- New Year's resolutions work better if you know what to measure: 2025 Dec 23

- Gene-edited babies are the future – but these CRISPR start-ups aren’t (paid): 2025 Dec 29

LEADER: HEALTH | DEC 23, 2025, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

New Year's resolutions work better if you know what to measure

From our immune systems to our microbiomes, if you're planning to make health improvements in the new year, having an eye on the numbers can help set you up for success

By New Scientist

plainpicture/Nordic Life/Terje Rakke

As 2025 draws to a close, it is traditional to look back at the year that was and forward to what may come next. Many of us will be considering New Year’s resolutions, such as getting fitter, eating better and boosting our immune system – but how do you know if your new habits are truly working?

To start with, “boosting” your immune system is a misnomer, since an overactive immune defence would be a bad thing, but as new research is revealing (see page 26), it is possible to assess our ability to fend off infection by measuring levels of certain immune cells. From this, your “immune grade” can reveal if you are fighting fit.

Tests alone aren’t very useful, though, if you don’t know what you are measuring. We are increasingly aware of the need to have a diverse gut microbiome, with numerous DIY faecal tests now for sale. The trouble is, no one agrees which microbes give you a high score. That should soon change, thanks to a study using the Zoe health app, which can now score the overall health of your microbiome from 0 to 1000 (see page 11).

That said, it is important not to be blinded by statistics. Body mass index (BMI), for example, is one of the most commonly used measures of health, but it is heavily flawed. It remains popular because it is a simple calculation of a person’s weight relative to their height, yet this fails to take into account whether a person’s weight is high because of excess fat, which can reflect poor health, or more bone and muscle mass. This is why researchers proposed a whole new definition of obesity earlier this year.

“ Boosting your immune system is a misnomer, as an overactive immune defence would be bad “

There are two things we can take from all of this. The first is that if you are trying to make a change in your life, be sure that you have the right numbers to measure that change. It’s no use pledging to get up early to exercise each day if you measure success by what time your alarm goes off. The second is that the science of what works is always changing, and you should aim to keep up with the best evidence available. Of course, if you’re reading this, you are already off to a good start.

COLUMNIST HEALTH | DEC 29, 2025, 1:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Gene-edited babies are the future – but these CRISPR start-ups aren’t

Three start-ups are aiming to create gene-edited babies. Columnist Michael Le Page has no doubt that editing our offspring will one day become routine, but not like this

By Michael Le Page

Every baby has around a hundred new genetic mutations

moodboard – Mike Watson/Getty Images

I hate to break this to you, but every child is a genetic experiment – and nature doesn’t care if things go wrong. Our genomes are awful messes created by conflicting evolutionary forces, and every one of us is a new throw of the genetic dice, with a hundred or so brand–new random mutations thrown into the mix.

For this reason, I have no doubt that if civilisation survives the various looming crises – including but not limited to climate change – gene-editing embryos will one day become routine. Eventually, natural conception could even come to be regarded as irresponsible.

We’ve an awfully long way to go before we get to that point – although you would be forgiven for thinking otherwise, if you’ve been listening to tech-bro hype this year. In 2025, we learned of no fewer than three start-ups that are aiming to create gene-edited babies.

So, are CRISPR babies just around the corner – or could start-ups like these actually be counterproductive?

Preventing genetic disease

Two of the start-ups – Manhattan Genomics and Preventive – have said their aim is to prevent serious inherited diseases rather than enhance people. A worthy aim. But the good news is that such conditions can already be prevented by various screening methods, such as genetic testing of IVF embryos before implantation. There are very few cases where screening will not work.

So why would you found a company to develop a technically and legally tricky product – gene-edited embryos – when there’s already an existing product – IVF screening – without these issues?

When I put this question to the two companies, Preventive didn’t reply, but a spokesperson for Manhattan Genomics said that couples undergoing IVF often don’t have enough embryos to select from. If embryos that carry disease can be edited rather than discarded, this increases the chances of a child being born. The company estimates that gene editing “could correct approximately 10 Huntington’s disease-affected embryos and 35 sickle cell disease-affected embryos each year just for couples currently using IVF”.

This would equate to a tiny number of children – only around a third of implanted IVF embryos result in a live birth and this is likely to be lower after editing. What’s more, there are also serious issues with doing this. Firstly, while CRISPR methods have advanced hugely, there’s still a risk of dangerous mutations occurring as a side effect.

Secondly, the editing process often doesn’t start or can continue after an embryo begins dividing. That means there will be different changes in different cells within a single embryo – a phenomenon called mosaicism seen in CRISPR children illegally created in China and announced in 2018.

What this means is that you cannot tell for sure whether a disease-causing mutation has been successfully corrected in an edited embryo, and without any dangerous mutations. That’s a showstopper.

Doing it the right way

There are potential solutions. For instance, some gene-edited animals are created by altering stem cells and then cloning cells once you’re sure they have the desired changes. However, as I described in my previous column, cloned animals have lots of health issues and unexpected physical differences. This is why much more basic research is needed, and why rigorous scrutiny will be hugely important, if this approach is ever tried in humans.

We now have two excellent examples of how the gene editing of embryos could be responsibly introduced, in the form of the rollout of mitochondrial donation in the UK and Australia. Mitochondria are energy-producing structures in cells that have their own tiny genome. Mutated mitochondria can cause serious diseases if passed on to children, but this can be avoided by replacing them with healthy donor mitochondria.

A form of the mitochondrial technique was offered by private fertility clinics in the US in the 1990s, resulting in the birth of what I would describe as the first genetically modified humans. Those early efforts resulted in the technique being banned in the US.

Mitochondrial donation used to be illegal in the UK, but after campaigning by patient groups, and widespread consultation and discussion, the law was changed and there is now case-by-case approval on a trial basis. Australia is doing much the same.

What’s the real goal?

This is how new reproductive techniques should be introduced: openly, legally and as part of independently overseen trials. Instead, at least two of the start-ups are reportedly considering doing experiments in countries where there are fewer laws governing the use of gene editing in embryos.

This wouldn’t advance the science, as we wouldn’t be able to trust claims made by private companies operating outside regulatory oversight. On the contrary, it could lead to a backlash, with more countries introducing or tightening laws against gene editing.

If billionaires – Preventive’s investors include Sam Altman of OpenAI and Brian Armstrong of Coinbase, for instance – really care about preventing serious inherited diseases, they would achieve far more by putting the money into non-profit research organisations.

Or, rather than helping other couples have healthy kids, is the ultimate aim to have enhanced children of one’s own? That is the explicit goal of the third start-up, Bootstrap Bio.

So, could we use gene editing to enhance our kids if we wanted? I’ll give you the answer in my column next month.

Table of Contents

New Scientist: 2025 Dec 29

Features

How to extend and improve your life by getting more creative (paid): 2025 Dec 23

How lab-grown lichen could help us to build habitations on Mars (paid): 2025 Dec 23

News

Microsoft made a splash with a controversial quantum computer in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 29

Human-plant hybrid cells reveal truth about dark DNA in our genome (paid): 2025 Dec 29

Mathematicians spent 2025 exploring the edge of mathematics (paid): 2025 Dec 26

2025's best photos of the natural world, from volcanoes to icebergs: 2025 Dec 26

Was 2025 the year we found signs of past life on Mars? (paid): 2025 Dec 26

'Spectacular' progress has been made towards useful quantum computers (paid): 2025 Dec 26

A ghostly glow was seen emanating from living things in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 25

6 incredible new dinosaurs we discovered in 2025: 2025 Dec 25

The world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope blew up in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 25

Physicists used 'dark photons' in an effort to rewrite physics in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 24

More than 100 moons were discovered in our own solar system in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 24

Alpine communities face uncertain future after 2025 glacier collapse (paid): 2025 Dec 23

The best space pictures of 2025, from supernovae to moon landings (paid): 2025 Dec 23

Gene therapy for Huntington’s disease showed great promise in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 23

IVF success may depend on how long men abstain from ejaculation (paid): 2025 Dec 23

Europa's thick ice may hinder the search for life in its oceans (paid): 2025 Dec 23

New Scientist changed the UK's freedom of information laws in 2025 (paid): 2025 Dec 22

Physics

Inside world's ultimate X-ray machine before it becomes more powerful (paid): 2025 Dec 29

Technology

How not to misread science fiction (paid): 2025 Dec 23

Humans

Ancient rock art revealed in all its glory in stunning photographs: 2025 Dec 23

Why do we feel the need to humanise everything, from dogs to cars? (paid): 2025 Dec 23

Health

New Year's resolutions work better if you know what to measure: 2025 Dec 23

Gene-edited babies are the future – but these CRISPR start-ups aren’t (paid): 2025 Dec 29