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- We can block the spread of HIV: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The one diet that’s good for everything: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Embracing quantum spookiness: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Pinning extreme weather on climate change: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Filming the universe’s biggest dramas: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The invention of net zero: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- A revolution in how we do chemistry: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- There’s no such thing as a normal brain: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The one innovation that supercharged AI: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The immense interconnectivity of the brain: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- End-to-end encryption: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Revealing the epic story of ancient humans: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The totemic 1.5°C climate target: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- How fear drastically shapes ecosystems: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The electrification of everything: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Our solar system is extremely weird: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Crowdsourcing Wikipedia’s encyclopedia: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Smartphones (yes, really): Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The 5 worst ideas of the 21st century – and how they went wrong (paid): 2026 Jan 19

HEALTH | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

We can block the spread of HIV: Best ideas of the century

The “enormous revelation” that drugs can be used to prevent catching HIV has benefitted millions and helped slash transmission rates

By Carissa Wong

Stephan Walter

HIV is one of the world’s biggest killers. The virus has claimed more than 44 million lives, sparking fears around sex and immense stigma towards those most at risk, particularly men who have sex with men. But drugs that prevent the sexually transmitted infection have drastically cut this threat, enhancing sexual freedom for millions.

The virus spreads via sex when infected bodily fluids enter the blood of someone who is HIV-free, but it can also be transmitted by sharing needles or breastfeeding. If left untreated, HIV infects and wreaks havoc on the immune system, leading to acquired immunodeficiency syndrome, or AIDS.

Early on in the HIV epidemic, it became clear that condoms provide protection. But these can fail and they make sex less pleasurable, meaning many prefer not to use them, says Benjamin Weil at The Love Tank, a not-for-profit organisation in London that promotes the sexual well-being of communities underserved by the healthcare system.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

It wasn’t until 2010 that a landmark trial revealed the power of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, for HIV prevention. People who took a daily antiviral pill were substantially less likely to catch HIV than those taking a placebo. Two years later, the US Food and Drug Administration approved PrEP for HIV.

Soon after, a slew of studies showed that, when used correctly, PrEP cuts the risk of HIV transmission by more than 90 per cent. The World Health Organization recommended PrEP in 2015 and, in the following years, more than 150 countries adopted the approach. “The advent of PrEP really was an enormous revelation for lots of people because it allowed them to have the kind of sex they wanted to have, where bodily fluids could be exchanged and you could actually feel the contact of another’s skin,” says Weil. In 2023 alone, more than 3.5 million people worldwide took PrEP at least once.

Together with antiretroviral therapy, or ART – drugs that suppress the virus to undetectable levels in infected people, so they can’t transmit the virus – PrEP has slashed HIV rates. In 2024, there were 1.3 million new cases of HIV, a 61 per cent reduction compared with the peak of 3.4 million seen in 1996. “Those two things together certainly have played the lion’s share in reducing HIV rates,” says Weil.

Today, PrEP comes in many forms. Oral pills can be taken just before and after sex, while injectable drugs provide longer-lasting protection. Yet HIV rates are still rising in certain groups, such as Black African and Asian populations in the UK, partly due to stigma and poor healthcare access. Ironing out such inequalities will be crucial to unlocking the true potential of PrEP – and eliminating HIV entirely.

HEALTH | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The one diet that’s good for everything: Best ideas of the century

Time and time again, scientists have found that one diet beats all others when it comes to our health. Fortunately, it's delicious – and also good for the planet

By Carissa Wong

Stephan Walter

The Mediterranean diet is the crème de la crème of healthy eating. Filled with fibre, vegetables, legumes, fruit, nuts, some fish and minimal meat and dairy, it brings a smorgasbord of health – and planetary – benefits, all while being utterly delicious. “It’s not only healthy, it’s also extremely tasty,” says Luigi Fontana at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Unlike certain dietary fads, the Mediterranean diet is backed up by decades of evidence. But it is only in the 21st century that a series of randomised controlled trials established it as the scientific gold standard.

In the 1940s, physiologist Ancel Keys was among the first to argue that the diet cuts the risk of heart disease thanks to low levels of saturated fat – found in meat and dairy – which increases the presence of artery-clogging cholesterol.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

Keys and his wife Margaret, a nutritionist, conducted a study comparing people’s diet and heart health across seven countries, discovering that the Mediterranean diet was linked to a lower risk of heart disease. But they didn’t account for other factors, such as participants’ income levels, that may have influenced the association.

Stronger evidence came in 1999 when scientists randomly assigned people who had previously had a heart attack to follow either a Mediterranean diet or a low-fat one. This demonstrated that the Mediterranean diet really does seem to reduce the risk of stroke and heart attack.

The finding paved the way for a revolution in our understanding of the diet over the next 25 years. After 2000, several randomised controlled trials confirmed the cardiovascular benefits. They also revealed that the Mediterranean diet cuts the risk of type 2 diabetes. That’s not all: subsequent studies have linked it to a reduced risk of breast cancer, slower cognitive decline and a greater chance of successful in-vitro fertilisation, although more evidence is needed to confirm all this. “By eating a Mediterranean diet, you decrease your risk of developing multiple chronic diseases,” says Fontana.

We are also gaining insights into why the diet is so good for us: fibre and extra virgin olive oil seem to be crucial. Both are thought to boost “good” gut bacteria that reduce harmful inflammation. “A lot of chronic diseases are driven by inflammation, so that’s one reason why eating [the] Mediterranean diet is so beneficial,” says Richard Hoffman at the University of Hertfordshire, UK.

Eating this diet also helps the environment, because producing meat and dairy accounts for about 15 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, while legumes and vegetables have a much lower impact. As the world heats up, we need to brush away the fads and embrace the diet that has been there all along.

PHYSICS | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Embracing quantum spookiness: Best ideas of the century

The strange principle of quantum entanglement baffled Albert Einstein. Yet finally putting quantum weirdness to the ultimate test, and embracing the results, turned out to be a revolutionary idea

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Stephan Walter

In the 1920s, Albert Einstein thought he had found a fundamental flaw in quantum physics. This set off a chain of investigations that, over several decades, showed he had instead discovered a crucial feature of quantum theory – and one of its oddest.

This property, now called Bell non-locality, which involves quantum objects maintaining coordinated behaviours even across cosmically large distances, has been unkind to our intuition. Yet embracing it in the 21st century has turned out to be a fantastic idea.

The issue can be set out with the help of two hypothetical experimenters, Alice and Bob, who each have one of a pair of “entangled” particles. Entanglement allows the particles to exhibit correlations even if they are so far apart that no signal could ever pass between them quickly enough to make a difference. Yet, for those correlations to become obvious, each experimenter must interact with their particle. Do the particles “know” they are correlated before Alice or Bob interacts with them, or is there something spooky going on between them?

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

Einstein, working with Nathan Rosen and Boris Podolsky, rejected spookiness. He proposed that there must be “local hidden variables” that researchers could measure to work out how the particles were always in the know. This would make quantum physics more like our daily experience, where objects only influence each other when they are nearby.

In the 1960s, physicist John Stewart Bell outlined a way to test the trio’s idea. After decades of attempts, in 2015, several experiments turned Bell’s test into reality in an unprecedentedly rigorous way, earning three of the physicists involved the Nobel prize in 2022. “That was the final nail to the coffin of all those ideas,” says Marek Żukowski at the University of Gdańsk in Poland. Hidden variables couldn’t save locality in quantum physics, says Jacob Barandes at Harvard University. “You can’t escape non-locality.”

And there are real benefits if we stop trying to escape non-locality and embrace it instead. For Ronald Hanson at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who led one of the experiments, the issue was never about spookiness. Rather, he conceived of the experiment as a feat of “quantum advantage” – something beyond the abilities of any conventional computer. His intuition bore out: some of the machinery necessary for “Bell tests” became a foundation for unprecedentedly secure quantum cryptography.

Hanson now builds quantum communication networks, leveraging entangled particles to develop a nearly unhackable future internet. Quantum computing researchers similarly use entangled particles to make computations more effective. Physicists haven’t yet fully unravelled the meaning of entanglement and are continuing to examine the assumptions that underlie Bell’s work, but entangling quantum objects reliably has become a technological resource, a stunning second act for a key player in the debate about our world’s quantumness.

ENVIRONMENT | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Pinning extreme weather on climate change: Best ideas of the century

It never used to be possible to attribute individual weather events to climate change and map their full consequences. Thanks to the work of two pioneering climate scientists, it is now

By Madeleine Cuff

Stephan Walter

In January 2003, physicist Myles Allen watched as floodwaters from the Thames river threatened to seep into his home in Oxford, UK. He wanted to know why meteorologists at the time were refusing to blame climate change for the event.

Later that year, Peter Stott, a climate scientist at the UK’s Met Office, arrived in Italy for a summer holiday. But instead of a week of ice cream and beach reads, Stott found himself trapped in one of the longest, deadliest heatwaves in European history. “For me, that was a really striking experience, because I’d never experienced 40°C heat before,” he says.

Both Allen and Stott wanted to pin down the role of climate change in driving the extreme weather they had experienced. Stott realised existing climate models could be used to run an experiment simulating two model worlds in which the European heatwave occurred: one mirroring the 2003 climate and one without human-caused warming.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

Together, Stott and Allen ran the model simulations for both worlds thousands of times and concluded, in a groundbreaking 2004 paper in Nature, that human activities had at least doubled the risk of the 2003 heatwave striking.

It was the start of a whole new field of climate science, for the first time identifying our influence on a specific extreme weather event. Soon, attribution analysis was being performed on all kinds of extreme events, from heatwaves to severe droughts and rainstorms.

But there was still a hitch. It took months, sometimes years, after an extreme weather event for researchers to produce the analysis to declare the influence of climate change.

A group of researchers, including Friederike Otto at Imperial College London, decided to change that with the launch of World Weather Attribution in 2014. The team performs rapid analysis of extreme weather events to quantify the possible influence of climate change, often getting the results out to the public and media within days of the extreme weather hitting.

The result was a huge shift in how such events around the world are communicated, with contemporary news reports now able to directly blame climate change for deadly weather, driving home the real-world impact of rising emissions.

“When we started doing this 10 years ago, every scientist and every journalist was saying, ‘you can’t attribute an individual weather event to climate change’, and that has dramatically changed,” says Otto.

It has even paved the way for climate lawsuits, with attribution studies acting as evidence in dozens of cases against polluters around the world. It has also opened the door to climate change reparation payments, with a new international loss and damage fund established by the United Nations in 2022.

Writing in 2003, Allen asked: “Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?” The answer, thanks to the advancement of attribution science, is now a resounding “yes”.

SPACE | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Filming the universe’s biggest dramas: Best ideas of the century

Astronomers used to rely on chance to catch a glimpse of fleeting explosions in space. A fresh approach to watching these flashes has completely transformed astronomy

By Alex Wilkins

Stephan Walter

Step back 1000 years, look up at the night sky and you might notice some extra dots of light compared with today. Back then, Chinese astronomers called these “guest stars” and believed them to be harbingers of great change.

We now know these were likely to have been supernovae – explosions borne from dying stars – and they are one of many happy accidents caught when astronomers were looking at the right spot at the right time.

But at the turn of this century, looking for these “transient” events became a tactic in its own right, and it is changing the way we do astronomy altogether. We have since found a myriad of intermittent events throughout the cosmos, lasting from nanoseconds to longer than a human lifetime.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

“You think the universe has a different range of spatial scales, but it also has these ranges of time scales, and they’re incredibly poorly explored in astronomy,” says Jason Hessels at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands.

Relying on chance to capture these events risks missing much of the action, so astronomers have now automated the process of serendipity, with surveys like the Palomar Transient Factory, which ran from 2009 to 2012, coordinating telescopes as one well-oiled machine. The main telescope in San Diego, California, would see an interesting flash and another would investigate further. “It was really set up like a conveyor belt,” says Hessels.

Many more telescopes whose purpose is to search in time, rather than space, have followed. These include the Zwicky Transient Facility, Palomar’s successor, and the Pan-STARRS survey, which has collected the largest volume of astronomical data of all time, at 1.6 petabytes, from its perch in Hawaii.

These telescopes and others have produced a torrent of data that has unveiled the universe’s blinks and flashes: gamma-ray bursts, fast radio bursts, gravitational waves and stars exploding either of their own accord or because they are being torn apart by black holes.

Transient astronomy is transforming the way we depict the universe. “We started with drawings, and then we had photographs, and then we had something like stop-motion film,” says Hessels. Now, we are getting closer to a full movie, he says. “It seems like every time we tweak the way we look at the sky, we fill in more and more of the movie.”

ENVIRONMENT | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The invention of net zero: Best ideas of the century

Net zero wasn’t always the target – the consensus used to be that we could continue releasing greenhouse gases and maintain global temperatures. How did that change?

By Madeleine Cuff

Stephan Walter

In 2005, physicists David Frame and Myles Allen were on their way to a scientific conference in Exeter, UK, and had been, in Frame’s words, “fiddling about” with a climate model to prepare for their presentation.

At the time, most research focused on stabilising the number of greenhouse gas molecules in the atmosphere to prevent dangerous climate change. But scientists were struggling to figure out how much the world would warm at a fixed level of greenhouse gas concentration.

Frame and Allen turned the problem on its head. Rather than focusing on atmospheric concentrations, they turned to emissions. What if humanity shut off human-caused carbon dioxide emissions? The duo tested the idea out on their climate model right there on the train. The result? Global temperatures remained stable at their new level. In short, the world would stop warming once humanity reached “net-zero” carbon emissions. “It was quite cool sitting on the train looking at these figures for the first time and thinking: ‘Wow, that’s a big deal,’”

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

That presentation – and the subsequent Nature paper published in 2009 detailing their findings – kicked off a new way of thinking in the climate community. Before the advent of net zero, it was widely believed humans could still emit a fair chunk of emissions, around 2.5 gigatonnes per year – about 6 per cent of annual global emissions today – while holding global temperatures stable. But now, it was clear emissions would have to reach net zero to stabilise the climate, with any human-made emissions balanced by equivalent removals from the atmosphere.

The idea of a global need to eventually reach net-zero CO2 emissions quickly caught on, becoming a headline conclusion of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report in 2014. The next question was timing: when would we have to get to net zero? With parallel research uncovering the dangers of surpassing 1.5°C of warming, the world decided in Paris in 2015 to aim to keep warming as close as possible to that threshold. That meant achieving net-zero emissions by roughly mid-century.

Almost immediately, governments around the world came under intense pressure to set net-zero goals. Hundreds did so, along with thousands of companies and financial institutions, which spotted the economic opportunities a clean-energy transition promised. This net-zero fever has led to some dubious pledges that rely far too heavily on using the world’s forests and swamps as sponges for human pollution, but it has also changed the trajectory of the century. Three-quarters of global emissions are now covered under a net-zero pledge, and projections for warming this century have fallen from around 3.7°C-4.8°C before Paris to 2.4°C-2.6°C under current climate promises.

CHEMISTRY | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A revolution in how we do chemistry: Best ideas of the century

From finding new antibiotic candidates to studying the insides of cells, snapping molecules together "like Lego" has completely overhauled chemistry, and biology too

By Joshua Howgego

Stephan Walter

Chemistry can be a messy, sluggish business, frequently involving cocktails of chemicals in round-bottomed flasks that must later be painstakingly separated. But in 2001, K. Barry Sharpless and his colleagues outlined an idea they called click chemistry that broke the mould. The snappy name, which was Sharpless’s wife Janet Dueser’s idea, summed it up well: a new set of reactions that worked quickly, cleanly and consistently.

If it seems like a simple idea, it is – and therein lies its brilliance. Sharpless and his colleagues Hartmuth C. Kolb and M. G. Finn described their new reactions as “spring-loaded”. The idea was that you could apply them to a plethora of different starting chemicals, snapping them together almost like Lego bricks, and so quickly build a huge range of new and useful molecules – it was medicines that Sharpless mostly had in mind.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

The unifying thought behind these reactions was that they shied away from forming carbon-carbon bonds, as was the orthodoxy among chemists at the time, and instead formed bonds between carbon and what chemists call “heteroatoms”, principally oxygen and nitrogen. The best-known click reaction snaps together two reactants to form a triazole, a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. This chemical motif tends to be good at sticking to large biological molecules like proteins, making it useful in creating drug molecules. Sharpless unveiled this particular reaction independently, but at the same time as chemist Morten Meldal at the University of Copenhagen, and it has since been used to make, among other things, the anticonvulsant drug rufinamide.

This reaction, says chemist Tom Brown at the University of Oxford, was easy, highly specific and worked in almost any solvent. “I think you can say this was just a great idea,” he says.

A few years later, chemist Carolyn Bertozzi at Stanford University in California developed a click-style reaction that works without any toxic catalysts, meaning it could be used inside cells without disrupting them.

For chemist Alison Hulme at the University of Edinburgh, UK, it was this work that elevated click chemistry from a good idea to a truly great one. It enabled biologists to peg together proteins and other bits of biological machinery at will, and to label them with fluorescent tags to investigate what happened. “It’s just so simple and straightforward,” says Hulme. “It brought small molecule chemistry to biologists in a way that doesn’t require a chemistry degree.”

Bertozzi, Meldal and Sharpless shared the 2022 Nobel prize in chemistry for their work – to the surprise of no one.

MIND | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

There’s no such thing as a normal brain: Best ideas of the century

Neurodiversity research has reshaped how we think about autism and ADHD, revealing that a “normal” brain doesn’t exist – and that unusual brains also come with unique strengths

By Caroline Williams

Stephan Walter

Once upon a time, science worked on the assumption that there was such a thing as a “normal” brain that neatly conformed to society. Those who were different might be diagnosed with an illness or mental health condition, and were treated as though something was wrong with them. Over the decades, scientists honed the concept that neurodevelopmental conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia and dyspraxia should be considered distinct and were reflective of sharply different brains.

Then, in the late 1990s, a new idea started to emerge. What if these “disorders” were better understood as natural variation in the way human brains can be wired? What if, instead of a hard line between normal and abnormal function, human traits and abilities existed on a spectrum along which we all fit somewhere? And while people towards the extremes experience challenges, their unusual brains also come with unique strengths. When seen this way, diverse brains aren’t a problem to be solved, but an asset that, if properly supported, could benefit everyone.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

The concept of neurodiversity grew out of discussions in online autism advocacy groups, but it wasn’t long before there was scientific evidence to support it. By 2013, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders did away with the diagnosis of Asperger’s as a “higher-functioning” form of autism, instead recognising one condition, autism spectrum disorder, on a scale from level one to level three, depending on the amount of support required. The notion of neurodivergence as a spectrum was firmly embedded in medical literature.

Studies from the early 2000s onwards have reported that autistic people are more likely to have above-average skills in mathematical reasoning and attention to detail. People with ADHD score higher on tests of creativity, as do people with dyslexia, who also excel at pattern recognition and big-picture thinking. People with dyspraxia have also been found to be more creative as they develop sophisticated coping methods.

These kinds of findings led many scientists to believe that neurodiverse conditions are no evolutionary accident. They exist because our ancestors benefitted from having a few visionary thinkers, creative types and detail-driven perfectionists in the group. With a handful of brains wired with different specialist skills, the group would be better able to explore, adapt and survive. Some researchers are beginning to rethink the autism spectrum along these lines, too, suggesting that there may be distinct subtypes of the condition with different clusters of challenges and abilities.

Some researchers warn that reframing neurodivergent conditions as “superpowers” may not always be helpful. “By being too positive, we risk undermining how serious it can be, particularly if unsupported,” says Jessica Eccles, a psychiatrist and neurodiversity researcher at Brighton and Sussex Medical School in the UK. Nevertheless, “now that we have a vocabulary for it, we have opened the door to understanding both its strengths and challenges so that people can move more easily through the world”, she says.

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The one innovation that supercharged AI: Best ideas of the century

The most powerful artificial intelligence tools all have one thing in common. Whether they are writing poetry or predicting protein structures, they rely on the "transformer" architecture

By Jacklin Kwan

Stephan Walter

Today’s most powerful AI tools – the ones that can summarise documents, generate artwork, write poetry or predict how incredibly complex proteins fold – all stand on the shoulders of the “transformer”. This neural network architecture, first announced in 2017 at an unassuming conference centre in California, enables machines to process information in a way that reflects how humans think.

Previously, most state-of-the-art AI models relied on a technique called a recurrent neural network. This worked by reading text in tight windows, left to right, remembering only what came just before. That set-up worked well enough for short phrases. But in longer, more tangled sentences, the models had to squeeze too much context into their limited memory, causing crucial details to be lost. The ambiguity stumped them.

Transformers threw out that approach and embraced something more radical: self-attention.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

It’s surprisingly intuitive. We humans certainly don’t read and interpret text by scanning word by word in a strict order. We skim, we double back, we make guesses and corrections by weighing up the context. This kind of mental agility has long been the holy grail of natural language processing: teaching machines not just how to process language, but also how to understand it.

Transformers mimic that mental leap. Their self-attention mechanism allows them to compare every word in a sentence with every other word, all at once, spotting patterns and building meaning from the relationships between them. “You could leverage all this data from the internet or Wikipedia and use it for your task,” says AI researcher Sasha Luccioni at Hugging Face. “And that was hugely powerful.”

This flexibility isn’t limited to text either. Transformers now underpin tools that generate music, render images and even model molecules. AlphaFold, for instance, treats proteins – long strings of amino acids – like sentences. A protein’s function depends on how it folds and that, in turn, depends on how its parts relate across long distances. Attention mechanisms let the model weigh those distant relationships with fine-grained precision.

In hindsight, the insight feels almost obvious: intelligence, whether human or artificial, depends on knowing what to focus on and when. The transformer didn’t just help machines grasp language. It gave them a way to navigate any structured data – much like humans navigating their own complex worlds.

MIND | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The immense interconnectivity of the brain: Best ideas of the century

How discovering that different parts of the brain work together as networks has transformed our understanding of everything from daydreaming and emotions to planning and memory

By Helen Thomson

Stephan Walter

You have probably heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant. One feels the trunk and says it’s a snake, another feels a leg and claims it’s a tree. It warns of how focusing on single parts can obscure the whole.

Neuroscience made the same mistake for decades, viewing the brain as a collection of specialised regions, each working on a distinct function. Our understanding of what each region did often stemmed from incredible accidents, like the case of Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railway worker who survived having an iron rod blown through his brain. His personality change was blamed on frontal lobe damage. More recently, we have gained insights from brain stimulation studies that tied the amygdala to emotions, the occipital lobe to vision, and so on.

Brain regions do specialise, but that isn’t the whole picture. Advances in imaging technologies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, notably functional MRI and PET, allowed scientists to observe the whole brain in action. What they discovered transformed neuroscience. Brain regions don’t operate alone – instead, complex behaviours emerge from synchronised activity across multiple, overlapping networks.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

“The mapping of brain networks has played a major role in shifting neuroscientific thinking,” says Luiz Pessoa at the University of Maryland.

The shift began in 2001 when Marcus Raichle, now at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, described the default mode network (DMN), a system of interconnected regions that lights up when your mind disengages from a task.

Two years later, Kristen McKiernan, then at the Medical College of Wisconsin, and her colleagues showed that the DMN increased in activity during easier and familiar tasks, such as daydreaming and self-reflection.

Suddenly, researchers had a “resting state” baseline against which to measure all brain activity. They also began to link the DMN with complex behaviours such as emotional intelligence and theory of mind. Meanwhile, the discovery of other networks – for attention, language, emotion, memory and planning – reshaped thinking about mental health and neurodiversity. Network differences are now associated with a plethora of neurological conditions, including Parkinson’s disease, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety. It is also linked to ADHD.

Network science has become a field in its own right, improving our understanding of everything from autism – which is increasingly being characterised as a difference within the social salience network, a brain system that detects and prioritises relevant social cues to help us produce appropriate responses – to Alzheimer’s disease, where new research suggests abnormal proteins may spread along network pathways. We even have it to thank for inspiring the development of artificial neural networks in AI systems like ChatGPT.

Neural networks have transformed how we understand the brain, as well as how we diagnose and treat the problems affecting it. We may not yet be viewing the whole elephant, but the picture is certainly coming into focus.

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

End-to-end encryption: Best ideas of the century

How end-to-end encryption is the wall that keeps our digital secrets safe – and why modern life would be unimaginable without it

By Matthew Sparkes

Stephan Walter

We all keep secrets. Whether you are trying to protect messages to loved ones, company accounts or vital state intelligence, the technology that allows you peace of mind in our increasingly online world is end-to-end encryption (ETEE).

ETEE means that whoever provides your internet connection, or runs your messenger or video-conference app, cannot see your communications. That’s because they are encrypted on your device, then decrypted on the recipient’s. During transmission, they are a meaningless string of impenetrable gibberish, so no police force, spy agency or criminally minded company insider could demand, blackmail or threaten their way in.

Digital encryption doesn’t depend on promises, but on immutable mathematics. The first useful form of encryption was made possible by the RSA algorithm, publicly described in 1977, which hinges on how difficult it is to find the two prime factors that must be multiplied to create a particular extremely large number. Since then, other algorithms have used all manner of obscure mathematics to create other hard-to-crack encryption codes.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

But ETEE’s power is less about exactly how it is implemented and more about how internet secrecy supports democracy and human rights around the world. “There are people in very dangerous parts of the world who literally rely on [encryption] to save their lives,” says Matthew Feeney at UK-based privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch. What’s more, even if you live somewhere you consider to be a liberal democracy, those liberties can be rolled back. “Those who say, ‘I’m a law-abiding citizen, I’ve done nothing wrong [and I’ve nothing to hide],’ should pick up a history book and proceed with caution,” says Feeney.

Some governments may well hate ETEE because it impedes them from snooping in the same way that postal services and telephone networks allow. Indeed, successive UK governments have sought to ban it, unsuccessfully – most recently, in August last year, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an embarrassing U-turn after his government’s demands for Apple to install a backdoor were leaked.

We can’t say for sure that nobody has a way to break through ETEE, because intelligence agencies aren’t in the business of boasting about their abilities, says Feeney. One looming threat is that quantum computers, which harness principles from quantum mechanics such as superposition to solve complex problems that classical computers struggle with, may soon crack the algorithms on which ETEE currently depends. Yet encryption has always been a game of cat-and-mouse, with new mathematical innovations cropping up as previous algorithms are weakened. “Governments are powerful institutions, but they have yet to outlaw the laws of mathematics,” says Feeney.

HUMANS | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Revealing the epic story of ancient humans: Best ideas of the century

Since the turn of the millennium, our understanding of our ancestors and extended cousins has shifted dramatically, thanks to a swathe of surprising archaeological discoveries

By Michael Marshall

Stephan Walter

What has happened in the field of human evolution over the past 25 years can be summed up in one word: “more”. Archaeologists have found many more fossils, species and artefacts, in more places – from diminutive “hobbits” who lived on an Indonesian island to the mysterious Homo naledi known only from a single deep cave in South Africa. In parallel, researchers have developed more and better techniques for analysing all these remains. There is, quite simply, a huge amount of information about our origins and extinct cousins.

Two major lessons have emerged from this blizzard of discoveries. First, since 2000, the hominin fossil record has been extended much further back in time. In the late 1990s, the oldest known hominin was the 4.4-million-year-old Ardipithecus. But in 2000 and 2001, researchers found an even older Ardipithecus, Orrorin tugenensis from 6 million years ago and Sahelanthropus tchadensis from 7 million years ago. A second Orrorin species, Orrorin praegens, was quietly described in 2022; it seems to be a little more recent than O. tugenensis.

The discovery of these early hominins was “one of the big revolutions”, says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

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Second, the story of our own species’ emergence from the hominin pack has become far richer. By 2000, genetic evidence had demonstrated that all non-African people are descended from African ancestors who lived about 60,000 years ago. The implication was that modern humans evolved in Africa and then expanded from there, replacing all the other hominin species.

However, in 2010, researchers sequenced the first Neanderthal genome, and DNA from many other ancient humans has followed. The DNA revealed that our species interbred with Neanderthals, Denisovans and possibly others – and that other groups were also sometimes mixing.

Researchers who study skeletons had long suspected interbreeding, because many fossils don’t neatly fit species categories, says Sheela Athreya at Texas A&M University in College Station. A jawbone from Peştera cu Oase in Romania was described by Erik Trinkaus and his colleagues in 2003 as a human-Neanderthal hybrid, based on its shape. “[Trinkaus] was called a crackpot,” says Athreya. Then, in 2015, genetics revealed that the Oase individual had a Neanderthal ancestor four to six generations previously.

Our species didn’t simply expand out of Africa, then. Instead, our population absorbed the genetic heritage of Neanderthals and Denisovans along the way. Genetically, we are a patchwork: the stitched-together remains of millions of years of diverse forms of humanity.

ENVIRONMENT | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The totemic 1.5°C climate target: Best ideas of the century

Although we’re on course to cross 1.5°C of warming, the alliance of small island nations nations that revised our goal down from the 2°C threshold transformed global climate policy

By Madeleine Cuff

Stephan Walter

In the first decade of the 21st century, most scientists and policy-makers were focused on 2°C as being the highest “safe” threshold for warming above pre-industrial levels. But emerging research was beginning to suggest that even this was too severe, threatening sea level rise that would wipe out low-lying islands. In response, some scientists began to investigate the benefits of keeping any temperature rise closer to 1.5°C.

Armed with this research, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), a United Nations negotiating bloc, called for the adoption of a global target to limit warming to 1.5°C, warning that a 2°C warming limit “would devastate many small island developing countries”.

James Fletcher, a UN negotiator for the AOSIS bloc at the 2015 UN COP climate summit in Paris, says it was an uphill battle to convince other countries to adopt this much tougher global goal. He recalls the head of a lower-income nation’s delegation cornering him at the end of a meeting in Paris: “He was wagging his finger in my face and saying, ‘You small island states will get 1.5°C over my dead body’. That’s how incensed they were about this.”

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With the help of pressure from the European Union, tacit support from the US and even an intervention from Pope Francis, 1.5°C made it into the hugely influential 2015 Paris Agreement. Yet, with no formal assessment of what 1.5°C of warming would really mean for the planet, the world’s climate scientists set to work.

In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published its report on the 1.5°C goal, confirming the relative advantages of holding warming to the lower level and crystallising a new global target to reach net-zero emissions by 2050, in line with a 1.5°C trajectory.

Both goals quickly became a rallying cry for governments and companies around the world, and some countries, including the UK, upgraded their national climate goals to be in line with the new, more stringent target.

Piers Forster at the University of Leeds, UK, credits the 1.5°C target for helping to push nations to commit to much tougher climate targets than they would have previously countenanced. “I think it has created a sense of urgency,” he says.

The target’s legacy is mixed. Despite the fanfare, global temperatures are still rising, and the world has delivered nothing like the emissions cuts needed to deliver on the 1.5°C promise. The best scientific assessments now assume the world will cross that warming threshold in just a few years’ time.

Nevertheless, 1.5°C remains the central climate goal against which global progress in reducing emissions is measured. The public and policy-makers are now much more focused on each fraction of a degree of temperature rise. “Overshooting” beyond 1.5°C is widely viewed as a risky future, and the idea that 2°C was ever seen as a “safe” threshold for warming seems laughable.

ENVIRONMENT | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How fear drastically shapes ecosystems: Best ideas of the century

Understanding the “landscape of fear” that predators create in their environments has helped us uncover just how drastically humans have upended the natural world

By Michael Le Page

Stephan Walter

When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995, the effects were dramatic. Among other things, elk numbers fell far more than expected.

It turns out that the mere fear of wolves was having a big impact. In places where elk thought wolves might be present, they spent much more time looking out for them, leaving less time to feed. In a paper published in 2001, biologist John Laundré, who died in 2021, used the term “landscape of fear” to describe this effect.

The idea wasn’t entirely new. Previous lab experiments had shown that fear of predators alone can affect prey. Yet the prevailing view at the time was that predators affect wild prey populations only through direct predation. Laundré and others’ observations suggested this was wrong, but they didn’t demonstrate causality.

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That’s what Liana Zanette at Western University in Ontario, Canada, has done through a series of experiments over the past two decades. In British Columbia, Zanette and her colleagues played recordings of predators near wild song sparrows. Fewer eggs were laid, fewer hatched and fewer hatchlings survived. Overall, less than half as many lived compared with those played non-predator sounds. In other words, fear can have an even bigger impact than direct predation.

It is all about food, says Zanette. In addition to spending more time looking out for predators, prey animals will just completely avoid some areas, she says, “even though it might be the best food in town”.

This landscape-of-fear concept is hugely important because of knock-on effects on ecosystems. In many places on the west coast of Canada, for instance, humans have eliminated the bears, cougars and wolves that prey on raccoons. These raccoons now spend a lot of time on the shore looking for food such as crabs.

When Zanette’s team visited and played recordings of dogs barking, the raccoons mostly avoided going to the seashore and, when they did, spent much more time looking for predators. This led to a dramatic rebound in the abundance of the shore animals the raccoons feed on. Where the team played recordings of seals barking, by contrast, these effects weren’t seen.

Landscape of fear is key to fully understanding humans’ impact on wildlife. In one study, Zanette and her team used camera traps to film how wildlife responded to sounds in the Kruger National Park in South Africa. “Fear of lions should be maximal there,” she says, “but we found that humans were two times more frightening.”

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The electrification of everything: Best ideas of the century

Transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable power is crucial. The opening of Tesla's first "gigafactory", which used economies of scale to electrify our transport and energy systems, marked a turning point in this endeavour

By Chris Stokel-Walker

Stephan Walter

Batteries and the harnessing of solar energy have been around in one form or another for centuries, but only in 2016 did these technologies, arguably, become world-changing. This was when Elon Musk, before his controversial political career began, opened the first “gigafactory” in Nevada, producing advanced battery technology, electric motors and solar cells on a massive scale – giga meaning 1 billion, or “giant”.

You could fairly describe the amount of renewable energy – in the form of solar, wind and hydropower – available to extract on Earth as gigantic too. In just a few days, the sun delivers more energy to our planet than is in all the reserves of fossil fuels we have ever discovered.

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Reliably harnessing that power is another matter. Even though the photovoltaic effect, where light energy produces electrical current, was discovered in 1839 by Edmond Becquerel, and the first practical solar panels were made in the 1950s, it wasn’t until the 2010s that technology had advanced enough for solar electricity to become competitive with fossil fuels. Parallel to this, the invention of lithium-ion batteries in the 1980s provided somewhere to store this energy.

The gigafactory certainly helped advance these solar cell and battery technologies too. Yet its impact was less down to any specific invention and more in how it brought all the parts of electric car production under one roof. This supply-chain integration reflects what Henry Ford did a century earlier – just populating the planet with Teslas instead of fossil fuel-powered Model Ts. “It gave us dispatchable solar thanks to batteries, and it gave us electric vehicles,” says Dave Jones at Ember, an energy think tank in the UK.

The economies of scale unleashed by the gigafactory had knock-on effects beyond electric cars, too. “That battery unlocks all kinds of new things: the phone, the computer and the ability to have relatively low-cost, high amounts of energy you carry around,” says Sara Hastings-Simon at the University of Calgary in Canada.

In fact, in recent years, the cost of these technologies has plummeted so much that many experts say electrification of our energy systems is inevitable. In California and Australia, solar energy is so plentiful that grid operators give it to people for free. Commensurate with that, batteries are getting closer to storing energy as densely as fossil fuels do, so we can start to build solar airplanes, ships and long-haul trucks – and completely detach our transport and energy systems from their centuries-long dependence on fossil fuels.

SPACE | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Our solar system is extremely weird: Best ideas of the century

Realising that our solar system isn’t like most others out there has helped astronomers rewrite the story of how it formed

By Alex Wilkins

Stephan Walter

The first few exoplanets were discovered in the early 1990s. But it wasn’t until the early 2000s, when astronomers began carrying out large-scale, long-term surveys of other stars, that we started to get the first hints that our solar system – with its neat arrangement of four rocky planets, then four gassy giants – might be unique.

For decades, the High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planetary Searcher in Chile and the California Legacy Survey watched for telltale orbital wobbles that exoplanets might induce in other stars. Though these surveys didn’t discover as many exoplanets as later telescopes like Kepler and TESS, they did find signs of just how unusual our solar system is.

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Our sun, for instance, is larger than 90 per cent of other stars. It is also alone, unlike other stars that have at least one or two close neighbours. Our planets, too, are rare: only around 1 in 10 stars have a Jupiter-sized planet, and when they do, these worlds are often on very different trajectories to Jupiter’s neat, round orbit. We are missing planets common to most other star systems – those known as super-Earths or sub-Neptunes, of between about 2 and 10 Earth masses. What’s more, even after finding thousands of exoplanets, we have yet to spot an Earth-like planet around a sun-like star, not to mention alien life.

“The weird things are both what we have and what we don’t have. Putting those together, we’re definitely weird,” says Sean Raymond at the University of Bordeaux in France. “It’s not clear yet whether we’re weird at the 1 per cent level, which is a little bit weird, or whether it’s really at the 1 in a million level.”

These discoveries also raised questions about how our solar system formed, such as why Jupiter is so far out, at around 700 million kilometres from the sun, rather than a fifth of that distance as we see for Jupter-sized planets in most other planetary systems. The strange orbits of certain exoplanets made astronomers rethink our system’s history, such as with the Nice model, first suggested in 2001, which posits that a dramatic rearrangement occurred not long after the solar system initially formed, kicking Jupiter out to the periphery and flinging many of the asteroids and moons we see today into new orbits.

“The idea that that could have happened at all came straight from exoplanets,” says Raymond. “Nine out of every 10 giant exoplanet systems underwent an instability, and what we see is the aftermath… People saw that and connected the dots and said, ‘Well, if it happened out there, could that have happened here?’”

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Crowdsourcing Wikipedia’s encyclopedia: Best ideas of the century

The internet is typically defined by conflict. Yet a crowdsourced encyclopedia, open for anyone to edit, has transformed into one of the world's most essential knowledge hubs

By Matthew Sparkes

Stephan Walter

Hostility and discord are hallmarks of the internet more so than collaboration and cooperation. So the fact that a public encyclopaedia, editable by anyone, has become one of the most useful repositories of knowledge in the world is, frankly, unbelievable. “Thank God it works in practice, because it would never work in theory,” says Anusha Alikhan at the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit that runs Wikipedia.

The website was set up in 2001 by Jimmy Wales, who remains involved today, and Larry Sanger, who left the project the following year – but continues to criticise it from afar. He recently wrote that the site had been “hijacked by ideologues”.

Needless to say, Sanger’s view isn’t shared by most. Every month, Wikipedia’s 64 million articles in more than 300 languages receive 15 billion visits. At the time of writing, it is the ninth-most visited website in the world. “The fact that it is now one of the most trusted resources on the web is not something that anyone could have contemplated, but we’re here,” says Alikhan.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

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Fostering trust on a mass scale is no mean feat. The internet may have given billions of people access to the sum total of human knowledge, but it has done so largely in ways that are fragmented, unverified, unreliable and limited in scope. Wikipedia bucks the trend by allowing anyone to create or edit entries on the site. There are now around 260,000 volunteers around the world, with 342 edits made every single minute. A clever system then grants wider editing powers to volunteers once they have built a history of responsible changes. Trust fosters engagement and commitment so that strangers on the internet are willing to work together.

In some cases, Wikipedia encourages special interest groups to create and edit pages. For instance, a group called Women in Red works to address gender imbalance. Other groups work to spread information on climate change and African history. These articles are held to the same standards of accuracy, but this hasn’t stopped critics, including Sanger, of accusing the site of bias.

Wikipedia is a deeply unusual website in that, to avoid influence and bias, it runs no advertising, has no shareholders and makes no profit. It is an outlier in the technology world, and things have gone surprisingly well for more than 20 years.

Yet artificial intelligence is poised to change all this: it can rapidly pump out misleading or harmful entries, consumes resources as bots scrape the site for training data and reduces the number of visitors – and therefore potential donors – by creating AI-generated search summaries.

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Smartphones (yes, really): Best ideas of the century

Some might say smartphones have caused more harm than good. Here’s why putting a powerful computer into every pocket was a good idea

By Chris Stokel-Walker

Stephan Walter

“Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” said Steve Jobs at an Apple launch in 2007. Tech executives aren’t exactly shy about hyping their products, but, for once, this wasn’t an exaggeration: the iPhone’s release brought apps into common parlance and placed tiny yet powerful PCs into people’s pockets.

Not all of the consequences have been desirable. At any moment, we can disappear inside our phones, like a snail retreating into its shell, raising fears of social disconnect. This, combined with safety concerns, has led many countries to ban phones in schools, while in December 2025, Australia imposed a blanket social media ban for under 16s. And depending on a single device for so much, which is always online, has other insidious effects, says data scientist Mar Hicks at the University of Virginia. “It’s a device that has accustomed users to have far less privacy – not only in public, but wherever we are, even in our own homes.”

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

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The smartphone clearly isn’t just a phone, says anthropologist Daniel Miller at University College London. “It’s provided an additional place within which we live,” he says. These portable digital homes can instantly transport us into the digital houses of our friends and family, too, so that we spend our lives switching between physical and digital realities, he says.

Yet we can’t ignore the broader impact of smartphones around the world. Seven in 10 people worldwide now own a smartphone, according to the GSMA, a mobile operator trade body. Smartphones are so ubiquitous that they have allowed people in many lower-income countries to bypass the desktop computer altogether. Smartphone-based fintech platforms now broker payments for 70 million users across more than 170 countries, removing the need for traditional, centralised banks. Other smartphone apps are used by farmers to monitor crops and by hospital doctors to circumvent the need for expensive machinery.

What’s more, the influence of smartphones extends far beyond the devices. Electrical components such as cameras, transistors and motion sensors were rapidly miniaturised to cram in more processing power and place new features at our fingertips. This helped kick-start several other 21st-century tech innovations: versatile drones, smart wearables, virtual-reality headsets and smaller medical implants.

HUMANS | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The 5 worst ideas of the 21st century – and how they went wrong

They offered so much promise, but ultimately turned sour. These are the most disappointing ideas since the turn of the millennium

By Michael Le Page, Leah Crane, Joshua Howgego and Matthew Sparkes

Stephan Walter

These are our selections for the worst fumbles of the 21st century: ideas that were great, but got twisted or misused and didn’t deliver on their original promise.

Bitcoin

As a currency, Bitcoin is basically useless

Ted Soqui/Corbis via Getty Images

For years, it was a constant refrain in the tech world: “Put it on the blockchain.” Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency that was invented in 2008 and went mainstream in the late 2010s, brought blockchain technology into the public eye, and it has exploded ever since.

On the face of it, bitcoin seems like a good idea – it is a currency that isn’t overseen by any government or banking regulator, but rather by a public ledger: the blockchain, in which all transactions are recorded. Copies of the ledger are distributed on a network of computers around the world, kept secure by a combination of sophisticated cryptography and the fact that each copy of the ledger can be checked against all the others to ensure its accuracy.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

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To get bitcoin, a person can either buy it like any other asset or “mine” it. Mining a bitcoin essentially consists of solving a cryptographic puzzle, and the more bitcoins that have already been mined, the harder it becomes to solve the puzzles necessary to acquire the remaining ones. That’s where the problems start to come in.

In the early days, anyone with a basic computer could mine bitcoin, but it now requires enormous computing power, so bitcoin miners tend to set up entire rooms or warehouses full of processors to crunch the numbers.

Obviously, warehouses full of constantly running computers guzzle energy, in a way that was unheard of until artificial intelligence became common. Researchers at the University of Cambridge calculated that in 2023, bitcoin alone used more than 120 terawatt-hours of energy. That’s more than some entire countries, and nearly half a per cent of global energy use for that year, even without taking into account the many other cryptocurrencies that have popped up since bitcoin’s rise.

“ If you look at recent history, you’re better off investing in Pokémon cards than bitcoin “

The main energy suck is bitcoin mining, but making a transaction, even a small one, eats up power, too. “The average carbon footprint of a person taking a flight from London to New York is smaller than a single bitcoin transaction,” says Alex de Vries at the Free University of Amsterdam. “It would be more environmentally friendly to just take a bag of cash and fly it there.”

While it is possible to reduce this energy consumption by changing the architecture behind bitcoin, as its closest competitor Ethereum and some other cryptocurrencies have done, its distributed nature means that this would require consensus across a majority of bitcoin owners. “There’s no other way we could reduce this much energy consumption overnight,” says de Vries. “It should be a no-brainer [to reach that consensus], but apparently it’s not.”

And all that is before even considering the difficulty of actually using bitcoin in day-to-day life. “If you want to use it as a currency, to actually pay for stuff, most of the time you can’t because the capacity of this network to process transactions is limited,” says de Vries. “It’s like a digital collectible, but there are plenty of other things you can collect – in fact, if you look at recent history, you’re better off investing in Pokémon cards than bitcoin.”

Bitcoin is, in effect, a huge betting pool that gobbles up unthinkable amounts of energy and resources and is best used for illicit transactions on the dark web. Better to bet on Pikachu.

Leah Crane

Social media

People who run social media companies are focused on profit

AFP via Getty Images

It used to consist of cat videos, genuine debate and connection, and citizen journalism on the biggest moments of the day, whether they were natural disasters or revolutions. And memes. Lots and lots of memes. Early-stage social media was both fun and functional. But as profit for its tech company creators soared, the user experience decomposed into a fetid yet addictive slop. Aside from asbestos, CFCs and single-use plastics, nothing has made such a pendulous swing from useful to harmful as social media.

Take Instagram. Once upon a time, it served up a chronological feed of images posted by a carefully curated list of people. We could keep up to date with friends, follow the output of artists we enjoyed and share our hobbies. Now, we’re force-fed a never-ending stream of influencers, adverts and lowest-common-denominator content that algorithms know will rile us into grudging engagement.

It is perhaps safe to say that social media was a very good idea indeed, but that unfettered capitalism isn’t – and we allowed the former to be monopolised by the latter.

At its best, social media allowed people with impossibly niche interests or problems to connect, forge friendships and create support networks. It spontaneously spawned protest groups like #MeToo, the Arab Spring and Black Lives Matter, which have shed light on inequality and fostered public debate.

At its worst, it has spread misogyny, hatred and extreme politics, allowed cyberbullying and created unique social problems we never foresaw and are yet to unpick. Ask a high-school teacher whether social media has created or solved more problems, and the answer will be brief and unequivocally negative.

“I don’t think we were ready for it as a society, to have the information overload,” says Andrew Kaung, who has worked at tech giants including Meta, Google and TikTok.

Kaung says social media wasn’t intentionally made awful. Rather, it was done methodically over time, the side effect of a process designed to maximise how long people stayed glued to apps – and therefore how much money could be extracted from them. As is often said, if you’re not paying for a product, you are the product.

“ For me, the solution was simple: delete the apps “

Engineers and data analysts found that negative posts reached a larger audience than positive posts, says Kaung. These squeezed more comments out of people and kept them engaged for longer. So it is easy to see how social media slid from reasonably sensible political discourse to polarised, vitriolic tribalism, and how it began to spread hateful content that deliberately enraged users. It is simply more profitable.

Perhaps the only way to solve the problem is to break the link between social media and profit. Remove the levers that allow the people who run these tools to worsen the experience for everyone else and ramp up their own profit, and we might have the beginnings of a path back to the early joy of social media. We would have to cut out the incentive for algorithms to maximise engagement while disregarding whether people are actually enjoying the service or getting practical benefits from it.

“The problem is not so much the technology, which I think still could be salvaged. It’s the business model,” says Graham Murdock at Loughborough University, UK. “If we don’t do something decisive, then I think we’re going to see more and more negative repercussions, and I don’t think they’re going to be controllable.”

What does that decisive action look like? Perhaps taking the power out of the hands of the few and giving it to a wider group. There certainly exist open-source social networks that run on distributed models just as cryptocurrencies do, but they have struggled to gain traction. Legislation to curb the worst instincts and motivations of technology companies has been introduced, but the vast wealth of these firms allows them to lobby the teeth out of it. For me, the solution was simple: delete the apps.

Matthew Sparkes

Carbon offsets

Offsetting things like flights is complicated and ineffective

Shutterstock / MaxZolotukhin

It sounds like such a simple idea. You take a flight that produces a lot of carbon dioxide, but pay to have some trees planted that will take up the same amount. Or a company whose activities produce lots of CO_2 can invest in projects to reduce or avoid other CO_2 emissions – or even to remove it from the atmosphere – so no more ends up in the atmosphere overall. It’s a win-win, right?

In practice, “offsetting” CO_2 emissions in this way gets really complicated, really fast. For starters, the success of offsetting projects must be assessed on the basis of what would have happened otherwise, but what’s assumed as the counterfactual can wildly change the outcome. Let’s imagine you buy some land and decide to reforest it, and to sell so-called carbon credits based on how much carbon the trees will take up from the atmosphere.

The assumption here is that no trees would grow without your actions. But maybe that land would have been reforested naturally, creating a more diverse forest than a planted one. And maybe that natural forest would have been more resistant to droughts and diseases than a planted monoculture forest. In this scenario, your actions could result in there being more CO_2 in the atmosphere, rather than less.

Offsetting projects are also supposed to have additionality – that is, they wouldn’t happen without carbon credits being sold – but this is easy to fake.

“With a good enough accountant, there seem to be unlimited ways of proving additionality,” says Myles Allen at the University of Oxford. For instance, renewable energy projects can be made to look as if they wouldn’t be financially viable without selling carbon credits.

Even where offsets do make a difference, the benefits may be hugely exaggerated. For instance, many offsets are based on emissions avoided by saving forests. But carbon credits may be sold based on an entire forested area even if only 1 per cent of a forest was at risk of being destroyed. And that can have real consequences. People might, say, take more flights because they think their emissions are being offset, when that is far from the case.

Yet another danger of offsetting is that it can be an alternative to investing in greener tech. It is much better to permanently lower your emissions by, say, buying an electric car than to offset a few long journeys to ease your conscience.

With nature-based offsets, even with the best of intentions, there is also no way to guarantee that they will remain offsets for as long as required. Going back to our example, let’s say the trees you plant thrive for a couple of decades, but then a wildfire, drought or disease kills most of them. Or maybe you die and your greedy kids sell the land to a developer. Whatever it is, the end result is that there is no less CO_2 in the atmosphere.

Allen argues that in the long term, the only way to permanently remove CO[2] from the atmosphere is to put it in some form of geological storage. This kind of offsetting is now becoming available, with a few companies trying to remove CO_2 directly from the atmosphere and store it underground. The trouble is that it is far more expensive than other forms of offsetting – and the price may not come down that much.

Supporters of offsets argue that some projects do deliver on their claims and that offsetting can have wider benefits, such as helping preserve biodiversity, as well as limiting emissions. But how can you tell? Allen and his colleagues have set out principles that “good” offsetting schemes should follow – but the first is that reducing emissions is always better than offsetting where possible.

Michael Le Page

Alternative fuels

Rainforests are often cleared for palm oil plantations, key to making alternative fuels

Richard Parsons/Alamy

Fossil fuels cause global warming. So, if we switch to alternative fuels, the problem is solved, right? If only. In fact, the push to switch to alternative fuels has so far been largely a disaster that is causing immense environmental damage and driving up hunger and poverty while failing to reduce emissions – with one massive exception.

In the broadest sense, the term “alternative fuels” refers to any fuel that isn’t derived from oil. There is a huge variety, but the main types are natural gases, hydrogen, biofuels and synthetic fuels.

The idea with synthetic fuels is to use renewable energy to turn CO[2] from the air into, say, jet fuel. It’s great in theory, but in practice it remains difficult and very expensive, so only tiny quantities are being produced. Scaling up production would also require huge amounts of renewable electricity that, for now at least, would be better used directly. It is way more efficient to use electricity to power cars and heat pumps, for example, than to convert electricity into a fuel and then use that.

And while swapping coal- or oil-based products for natural gas can reduce CO_2 emissions, natural gas is still a fossil fuel. If switching to gas delays the complete switch away from fossil fuels – the only way to limit further warming – it can be counterproductive.

Almost all hydrogen is made from natural gas at present, so while burning it produces only water, its production releases lots of carbon dioxide. Even if the production of green hydrogen from renewable energy could be scaled up, for most purposes it doesn’t make sense. Green hydrogen is just another synthetic fuel and, again, it is better to use the electricity directly.

Then we come to biofuels, such as bioethanol made from maize. To understand why they are such a bad idea, think about what has to happen to produce “sustainable” jet fuel from palm oil. It would require growing more palm oil, already a major driver of deforestation and habitat loss. That means clearing more rainforests and losing the rich wildlife they harbour.

In addition to the carbon in their trees, rainforests often have thick layers of peat that degrade when the land is drained. All this stored carbon ends up in the atmosphere. Then there’s the fact that farming is one of the biggest sources of greenhouse emissions. The end result is more CO[2] in the atmosphere, not less.

More demand for palm oil also means rising prices – the growing use of biofuels is one of the factors driving food inflation – which means more people struggling to afford food.

“If just a quarter of global aviation fuel by 2050 came from crop-based biofuels, massive amounts of additional farmland would be needed,” says Richard Waite at the World Resources Institute in Washington DC. “It would lead to large-scale deforestation and higher food prices, and would be a disaster for our efforts to fight climate change and prevent biodiversity loss.”

Biofuels made from waste products such as pig fat can be genuinely sustainable, but there is simply not enough unused waste for large-scale production. For instance, more than 80 per cent of the used cooking oil turned into biodiesel in the European Union is imported, and some of it has turned out to be fresh oil fraudulently sold as used.

But let’s end on a positive note. It might not be a liquid or a gas, but in some countries, electricity is officially an alternative fuel, and it really can be clean and green. The best way to slash emissions is to make electricity greener and cheaper, and electrify everything possible.

Michael Le Page

Effective altruism

Sam Bankman-Fried was a prominent figure in the effective altruism movement

ED JONES/AFP via Getty Images

Imagine that I could whisper in your ear a simple principle that would make you a better person. Follow it and you can help save multiple lives every week, simply by giving away the cost of a takeaway coffee.

This is the starting point of an idea called effective altruism (EA), which says we should rationalise our charitable giving by working out the most impactful ways of saving lives and supporting those causes. You are probably wondering what could be wrong with that – and the idea’s seemingly obvious appeal is precisely why it has been so damaging.

This concept has roots that twist back a long way, notably to philosopher Peter Singer, and in particular his 2009 book The Life You Can Save. There, Singer argued that if you saw a stranger drowning in a pond, you would wade in and save them – it would cost you next to nothing. By the same token, he argued, people from rich Western nations can and should help people living in poverty by donating small sums to fund effective interventions, such as vaccines or anti-mosquito bed nets that help stop the spread of malaria.

“ The idea’s seemingly obvious appeal is precisely why it has been so damaging “

The idea really crystallised in the public consciousness around 2012. It was then that philosophers Toby Ord and William MacAskill at the University of Oxford founded the Centre for Effective Altruism. The phrase stuck and the idea started to get traction, attracting vast sums from, among others, the billionaire couple Dustin Moskovitz and Carrie Tuna, who were interested in giving away the fortune Moskovitz had made as a founder of Facebook as effectively as possible. Organisations such as GiveWell also began to evaluate charities and assess which had the most positive impact per donated dollar.

So, what’s the problem? Few would argue EA has never done any good at all, but there are big concerns nonetheless. For example, one spawn of the EA movement is the idea of “earning to give”, meaning would-be altruists are sometimes better off taking a high-paying job than trying to directly address, say, poverty. The thinking is that these high earners can then give away much of their wealth to good causes.

That might sound good in principle, but it doesn’t always happen. The earning-to-give mindset became popular in Silicon Valley in the 2010s, and one of those who espoused it was Sam Bankman-Fried. Following the collapse of Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2022, the company tried to claw some of these charitable donations back.

And that gets us to perhaps the most problematic thing about EA. Moral philosopher Alice Crary, who has written extensively about EA, says the crux of her problem with the idea is that the concept of doing “the most good” needs an awful lot of unpacking – it isn’t something that can be boiled down to an efficiency calculation.

The idea that we can maximise the good we do based solely on scientific evidence simplifies morality in a way that can seem deeply attractive, and it is yet profoundly misleading. “The world that we engage in as moral beings needs to be understood, for instance, historically and culturally,” says Crary. “It can’t be understood through a purely abstract lens of the sort that allows for quantification.”

She points out that it is hard to put numbers on the impact of some obviously good things. Take the example of training doctors, she says. It is a far less cost-effective thing to do than simply give out vaccines. Yet if we don’t have doctors to build good relationships with poor communities, we can end up in a situation where one child’s bad reaction to a vaccine turns a whole community against life-saving treatments.

The idea of maximising the good we do can also take us to some bizarre and manifestly undesirable places. For example, one prominent idea is that the future existential risk to humanity from a superintelligent AI is so serious that research that might help avoid this is at least as important as work to curtail poverty today. Many Silicon Valley insiders bought into this idea and funnelled money to AI start-ups such as OpenAI and Anthropic. So, although earning to give may provide the sheen of being related to some higher moral purpose, we aren’t talking here about the antimalarial bed nets that Singer envisaged.

There are also plenty of stories of effective altruists who believe so strongly in their obligation to maximise the good they do that they end up neglecting simple things like doing the dishes or caring for family. Perhaps without realising it, these people have chosen a world in which philanthropic efficiency is prioritised more than close, loving relationships with other humans. “They have envisioned a world in which relationships are drained of meaning,” says Crary.

So do all the good you can, by all means – just don’t believe anyone who tells you there is an easy principle that can tell you how.

Joshua Howgego

News

- Our earliest vertebrate ancestors may have had four eyes (paid): 2026 Jan 21

- Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws: 2026 Jan 21

- Ape-like hominin Paranthropus was more adaptable than we thought (paid): 2026 Jan 21

- Bird retinas work without oxygen, and now scientists know how: 2026 Jan 21

- Octopuses prompt rethink of why animals evolve big brains (paid): 2026 Jan 21

- Chernobyl cooling systems have lost power but meltdown risk is low: 2026 Jan 20

- Bubble feeding trick spreads through humpback whale social groups: 2026 Jan 21

- Cross-training may be the key to a long life: 2026 Jan 20

- Scientists investigate ‘dark oxygen’ in deep-sea mining zone: 2026 Jan 20

- World is entering an era of 'water bankruptcy': 2026 Jan 20

- Satellites could use magnetic fields to avoid collisions (paid): 2026 Jan 20

- Mars once had a vast sea the size of the Arctic Ocean (paid): 2026 Jan 20

- Sunscreens made from ground-up wood reach an SPF of over 180 (paid): 2026 Jan 20

- Why a tool-using cow could change how we see farm animals (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Barnacle gloop could improve inflammatory bowel disease treatments (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Should Europe boycott US tech over Greenland, and is it even possible? (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Star appears to have vanished in a failed supernova (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Giving astronauts tardigrade toughness will be harder than we hoped (paid): 2026 Jan 19

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- Amateur mathematicians solve long-standing maths problems with AI (paid): 2026 Jan 16

LIFE | JAN 21, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Our earliest vertebrate ancestors may have had four eyes

Extraordinary fossils of 518-million-year-old jawless fish, among the earliest known vertebrates, appear to show that these animals had two pairs of eyes

By James Woodford

Illustration of Haikouichthys, a fish from the Cambrian period, with a second pair of eyes suggested by fossil evidence

Xiangtong Lei, Sihang Zhang

Over half a billion years ago, the world’s oldest known vertebrates seem to have sported an extra set of eyes – and humans may still carry a remnant of this ancient evolutionary innovation.

Extraordinary fossils of two species of jawless fish called myllokunmingids were found by Peiyun Cong at Yunnan University in China and his colleagues between 2019 and 2024, on the banks of Dianchi Lake in south-west China.

The ancient life forms found in this area, known as the Chengjiang biota, are preserved in exquisite detail. They date from around 518 million years ago, during a period known as the Cambrian, when life exploded in diversity, creating most of the major animal groups alive today.

Importantly, the vertebrate fossils found by Cong’s team included preserved soft body parts and the creatures’ eyes.

Complex eyes evolved independently in several groups of animals. Some invertebrates, such as insects, have compound eyes made up of hundreds or thousands of separate units, each with its own lens, cone and light receptors, together creating a mosaic image.

Vertebrates, such as humans and reptiles, have what scientists describe as camera-type eyes. Our eyes consist of a spherical lens, a retina, an iris and muscles that control their movement. They also contain pigmented structures called melanosomes, which among other things determine our eye colour.

Light is focused on the retina, creating signals that are transmitted to the brain through the optic nerve.

When Cong and his colleagues studied the fossils under an electron microscope, they could see a pair of eyes on the side of the head with preserved melanin-containing melanosomes, as well as two mysterious, much smaller, black smudges in between.

“More strikingly, there is also an impression of a lens in each of the lateral eyes and centrally-positioned eyes,” says team member Jakob Vinther at the University of Bristol in the UK.

Vinther says this evidence suggests that these animals had two pairs of camera-type eyes. “This would have enabled these 518-million-year-old vertebrates to form an image of their world much like we do,” he says. “But a key difference is that they used four eyes and not just two.”

A fossil of Haikouichthys showing the preserved melanosomes

Xiangtong Lei, Sihang Zhang

The team believes that this ancient, extra pair of eyes went on to evolve into a set of organs known as the pineal complex. Some vertebrates such as reptiles still have a light-sensitive organ at the top of the head called the parietal eye, but in mammals, the complex consists of only the pineal gland, which regulates our sleep cycle by secreting melatonin.

“We show [the pineal organs] had a more important function as eyes in the early vertebrates and could create somewhat of a decent image before they evolved into organs regulating our sleep cycle,” says Vinther.

The big eyes were probably better for seeing things in high resolution, he says, while the smaller eyes would have helped the animal to spot objects approaching it. This would have provided a slightly different field of view, important in Cambrian seas where these jawless fish would have been a desirable meal.

“They likely could see objects quite well, telling their shape and some degree of three-dimensionality,” says Vinther. “They likely also had a broad view of their surroundings, sort of IMAX-style, thanks to their four eyes.”

Tetsuto Miyashita at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa says he is “half believing and half recoiling from this new, fascinatingly original interpretation” of these fossils.

The structures visible between the lateral eyes of these fossils have long puzzled researchers and it is a “light bulb” moment to realise they may be another set of camera eyes, he says.

But if they are eyes, that would raise the question: where is the nose? “So much about early fish evolution revolves around the nose, so not having one preserved is unlikely from a developmental standpoint,” he says.

Miyashita predicts there will be substantial debate until experts can see “eye to eye”. “Does it really make so much sense to have so many prominent eyes on the head?” he says.

John Paterson at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says it makes sense that these prey species “developed that type of vision, just to avoid scary predators coming after them”.

“The Cambrian is a bit of a weird time when you see animals doing strange things for the first time in an evolutionary sense, where it’s not just always a pair of eyes looking to the side or looking forward – but you can actually have eyes on other parts of the head.”

Karma Nanglu at the University of California Riverside says he would like to see detailed mapping of the entire body of the fossils to see whether there are any other similar markings elsewhere, which may indicate that the second set of eyes is in fact just an artefact of the chemistry of fossilisation.

Journal reference:

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09966-0

Dinosaur hunting in the Gobi desert, Mongolia

Embark on an exhilarating and one-of-a-kind expedition to uncover dinosaur remains in the vast wilderness of the Gobi desert, one of the world’s most famous palaeontological hotspots.

Find out more

HUMANS | JAN 21, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws

Newly discovered rock art sites in Sulawesi, Indonesia, that date to nearly 68,000 years ago are thought to be the oldest rock art in the world, pre-dating Neanderthal hand stencils in Spain by 1100 years

By James Woodford

This hand stencil appears to have been modified to appear more claw-like

Ahdi Agus Oktaviana

A nearly 68,000-year-old hand stencil found on the wall of a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia, may be the oldest rock art ever discovered – and rather than a simple handprint, it appears to have been touched up by the artist, possibly to make the fingers look claw-like.

In recent decades it has become apparent that Sulawesi is a key location in the human story – home to numerous species of hominins from as long ago as 1.4 million years when an early human species, likely Homo erectus, made the first known sea voyages.

In 2024, Maxime Aubert at Griffith University, Gold Coast, Australia, and his colleagues reported that they had found the world’s oldest known “representational” art on the island – a pig depicted alongside human-like figures, that was at least 51,200 years old. Now, his team have announced the discovery of a further 44 rock art sites in south-eastern Sulawesi, and dated one partial hand stencil at a site called Liang Metanduno, on Muna Island, east Sulawesi, to 67,800 years ago.

Previously, the world’s oldest known rock art was a hand stencil at a Neanderthal site in northern Spain, dated to a minimum age of 66,700 years old – 1100 years younger than the new Sulawesi site.

The Sulawesi stencil shows signs of modification, says Aubert, as the tip of one finger appears to have been artificially narrowed. This was done either through the application of extra pigment or by moving the hand during pigment application, which is a type of hand stencil art so far known only in Sulawesi.

“It’s more than just a stencil of a hand,” says Aubert. “They are retouching it. We don’t know if they’re doing this by retouching it with a paintbrush or maybe if you spray it, and then as you do it, you move your hand, you can have the same effect.”

He says no one knows why they are using this method, “but it seems to me they want to make it look more like it’s an animal hand, possibly with claws.”

The team also identified animal figures inside a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia

Maxime Aubert

Aubert says it is impossible to know what species made the hand stencil, but based on the extra artistic intention of narrowing the fingers, it was most likely a modern human, implying that these people were close ancestors of the first humans to reach Australia.

There is evidence from a site called Madjedbebe in Arnhem Land, Australia, that Homo sapiens reached the continent at least 60,000 years ago. Evidence is also mounting that Sulawesi is one of the most important and earliest stepping stones between South-East Asia to New Guinea and onto the Australian continent.

“The implications of these discoveries go beyond just the history of the art,” says Aubert. “The people who made that art are probably the ancestors of the first Australians and now we know their ancestors were making rock art in Sulawesi at least 68,000 years ago.”

Team member Adam Brumm, also at Griffith University, says the Spanish Neanderthal hand stencil and the Sulawesi rock art were made essentially in the same way – someone spraying ochre over their hand.

A close-up of some of the rock art

Maxime Aubert

“But then the modern human did something different,” says Brumm. “They deliberately altered the outlined fingers of the stencil to artificially narrow the digits and make the tips more ‘pointy’, thus transforming this human hand mark into something else, perhaps a representation of an animal claw.

“This indicates a playfulness on the part of the modern human artist; altering an otherwise ‘ordinary’ hand stencil in this manner is a sign of creative imagination and abstract thinking that is not evident in the human hand mark left behind by the Neanderthal.”

Martin Porr at the University of Western Australia in Perth says the new find is the world’s oldest known rock art that can be attributed to our species. “I agree that the dates for the stencils are, in fact, in agreement with other current dates for the earliest presence of Homo sapiens in the region, both in Australia as well as mainland Asia and South-East Asia,” says Porr. However, he thinks much more work is needed before it can be confidently concluded which routes humans took to reach Australia.

Journal reference:

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09968-y

Ancient caves, human origins: Northern Spain

Discover some of the world’s oldest known cave paintings in this idyllic part of Northern Spain. Travel back 40,000 years to explore how our ancestors lived, played and worked. From ancient Paleolithic art to awe-inspiring geological formations, each cave tells a unique story that transcends time.

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HUMANS | JAN 21, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Ape-like hominin Paranthropus was more adaptable than we thought

A fossil discovery in northern Ethiopia expands the known range of Paranthropus, a genus of strong-jawed hominins that lived around 2 million years ago, and suggests they lived in a range of habitats

By Michael Marshall

Illustration of Paranthropus hominins, which lived between 2.7 and 1.4 million years ago

JOHN BAVARO FINE ART/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

For the first time, the remains of ancient humans called Paranthropus have been found in the remote Afar region of Ethiopia. The discovery dramatically expands the area over which Paranthropus roamed, and suggests they lived in a wide range of ecosystems.

Paranthropus remains are known from eastern and southern Africa, between 2.7 and 1.4 million years ago. They are thought to be closely related to Homo, the group that includes modern humans and Neanderthals. They may have evolved from earlier hominins called Australopithecus.

Zeresenay Alemseged at the University of Chicago in Illinois and his colleagues have been excavating a site called Mille-Logya, in the Afar depression in north-east Ethiopia, since 2012. The Afar is a treasure trove of hominin remains, including many Homo and Australopithecus remains. “Paranthropus had been eluding us,” he says. “We had pretty much concluded that it had never made it that far north.”

On 19 January 2019, Alemseged’s local assistant brought him a part of a lower jawbone, with no teeth. “The first thing that struck me was its size,” says Alemseged. That same day, the team also found the crown of a left lower molar tooth.

A CT scan confirmed telltale Paranthropus traits: not just the size of the jawbone but the proportion of width to height, and the complexity of the tooth roots hidden inside the jaw. The team couldn’t tell which of the three recognised species of Paranthropus the bones belong to, but based on the location it is likely to be Paranthropus aethiopicus or Paranthropus boisei.

The jawbone is about 2.6 million years old, the team says, based on multiple dating methods. That makes it one of the oldest Paranthropus known.

“There’s no question that it’s Paranthropus,” says Carrie Mongle at Stony Brook University, New York, who wasn’t involved in the research. “I don’t think there’s any question about the date.”

The fragments of the Paranthropus mandible after being assembled in the field

Alemseged Research Group/University of Chicago

Previously, the northernmost Paranthropus specimen was a skull from Konso in southern Ethiopia. The new specimen is over 1000 kilometres further north.

“The main point is that it expands the geographic range of Paranthropus,” says Mongle.

For Alemseged, the new specimen is also evidence of greater versatility. Paranthropus’s large jaws and teeth have long been interpreted as evidence of a tough, chewy diet. While we don’t yet know what the Mille-Logya Paranthropus ate, the area seems to have been relatively open, whereas other early specimens of Paranthropus were found in wooded areas.

“Yes, they were specialised,” says Alemseged, “[but] I think we might have inflated our understanding of that specialisation.” Their specialised bodies don’t seem to have stopped them living in both wooded and grassy areas. “Different Paranthropus populations were able to exploit different habitats based on where they lived, like Homo did, like Australopithecus did.”

Mongle says there was already evidence of Paranthropus succeeding in new environments, because they adapted to the expansion of grasslands across east Africa, opting to eat more grasses. The new Mille-Logya specimen adds to the evidence of their versatility.

In recent years, evidence has emerged that Paranthropus could use, and perhaps also make, simple stone tools. For instance, stone tools described in 2023 from Kenya were found associated with Paranthropus teeth and no other hominin remains. In 2025, Mongle helped describe the first Paranthropus hand, which proved to be highly dextrous.

That makes sense, says Alemseged, because there is growing evidence that Australopithecus could make and use tools, and they existed before Paranthropus. Tool use may well go back to the ancestor we share with chimpanzees, he says.

Journal reference:

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09826-x

Discovery Tours: Archaeology and palaeontology

New Scientist regularly reports on the many amazing sites worldwide, that have changed the way we think about the dawn of species and civilisations. Why not visit them yourself?

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LIFE | JAN 21, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Bird retinas work without oxygen, and now scientists know how

The light-sensitive tissue of birds’ eyes is not supplied with oxygen by blood vessels – instead, it powers itself with a flood of sugar, and this may have evolutionary benefits

By Jake Buehler

Researchers studied how zebra finches’ eyes work

Ger Bosma/Alamy

A crucial part of birds’ eyes is unlike any tissue known in vertebrate animals. Their retina – the light-sensitive layer at the back of the eye – sidesteps the near-universal need for oxygen by vacuuming up heaps of energy-rich sugar instead.

The discovery solves a 400-year-old mystery about the physiology of birds’ eyes. It is also a neurobiological paradigm shift, says Christian Damsgaard at Aarhus University in Denmark.

“We have the first evidence that some neurons can work without any oxygen, and they’re found in the birds that fly around in our gardens,” he says.

Retinas detect light and relay this information as nerve signals to the brain. The tissues require a lot of energy and are sustained by oxygen and nutrients coursing through a mesh of blood vessels. But bird retinas are extremely thick, and no vessels weave into the tissue. It was a mystery how their retinas received enough oxygen to keep the deep stacks of important nerve cells alive.

Damsgaard and his colleagues studied zebra finches (Taeniopygia guttata) in the lab to find an answer. The team put tiny oxygen sensors in the finches’ eyes and found that the inner layers of the retina weren’t getting oxygen at all.

“They get oxygen from the back of the eye, but it cannot diffuse all the way through the retina,” says Damsgaard.

The team measured the activity of metabolic genes in different parts of the retina. This showed that the oxygen-free areas were heavily using glycolysis, a process that can break down sugars without oxygen. However, it is a much less efficient option.

“You need 15 times more glucose to generate the same amount of energy,” says Damsgaard. So, how was the retina getting that much sugar?

Enter the pecten oculi, a rake-shaped collection of blood vessels found in birds’ eyes. The pecten was discovered centuries ago, and researchers had speculated that it piped in oxygen. But the team’s readings ruled that out. Instead, they discovered the pecten was practically soaking the retina in glucose – four times more than what brain cells suck up – to fuel its ravenous glycolysis engine.

Luke Tyrrell at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh is surprised that birds would evolve to rely on such an inefficient process for their vision. “The retina – especially a bird retina – is one of the most energy-needy tissues in all of the animal kingdom,” he says.

The thick, blood vessel-free retinas may have adapted to enhance birds’ visual acuity, making the pecten sugar pump worth the evolutionary hassle. The oxygen-free retina may have also set the stage for some birds to evolve high-altitude migration flights, with their vision unaffected by low oxygen levels.

For Pavel Němec at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic, the findings are a “clear case that reminds us that evolution brings very counterintuitive solutions” to physical hurdles.

Damsgaard and his team wonder if human cells could eventually be modified to be more tolerant of harmful oxygen-free conditions, such as in the aftermath of a stroke.

Journal reference:

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-09978-w

LIFE | JAN 21, 2026, 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Octopuses prompt rethink of why animals evolve big brains

A popular idea suggests a link between big brains and a rich social life, but octopuses don't fit the pattern, which suggests something else is going on

By Chris Simms

Octopuses that live in shallow water – like the common octopus – typically have big brains

Shutterstock

Octopuses may have big brains because of environmental – not social – factors.

Large brains in mammals are generally thought to be linked to social behaviour, an idea known as the social brain hypothesis. The more social connections that members of a species have, the bigger the brain needs to be to manage those connections, a pattern that holds for groups including primates, dolphins and members of the camel family.

But there are animals like cephalopods – octopuses, squid, cuttlefish and nautiluses – that have relatively large brains, show signs of intelligent behaviour and yet live largely solitary lives, with little in the way of parental care, complex group dynamics or social learning.

To investigate what might be behind these larger brains, Michael Muthukrishna at the London School of Economics and his colleagues have brought together data on 79 species of cephalopods for which brain information is available. They took brain size to be the total volume of the animals’ central nervous system. This was necessary because an octopus, for example, has nine brains, not merely one: a central one in the head that controls the nervous system, and a smaller, semi-independent brain in each of its eight limbs.

“What could be more different from humans than this kind of alien species on our planet, with its wacky multi-appendage brain with arms?” says Muthukrishna.

The data the team gathered showed no link between brain size and sociality, but did reveal that cephalopods generally have larger brains when they live in shallower and seafloor habitats, which have a greater range of things with which to interact, or objects to manipulate or even use as tools, and are richer in calories. Species that float in the featureless deep sea tend to have smaller brains.

“That relationship is quite robust,” says Muthukrishna. “But this is a cautious finding,” because there is brain data available for only about 10 per cent of the 800 species of cephalopod that live today.

“It’s interesting that there’s no social brain effect in octopuses, but it is not surprising,” says Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford, who proposed the social brain hypothesis some 30 years ago. As octopuses don’t live in coherent social groups, their brains don’t need to do the additional work that entails, he says.

Paul Katz at the University of Massachusetts Amherst says it is certainly possible that every time cephalopods evolved to live in deeper waters, their brain size reduced. “It’s like every time you see animal species that get stuck on islands, they get smaller. There’s an island phenomenon, so there could be a deep-sea phenomenon, too,” he says, but he adds that it could just be correlation.

Muthukrishna previously published a study of whales and dolphins, suggesting that brain size predicts the breadth of their social and cultural behaviours, as well as ecological factors like the diversity of prey. The fact that cephalopods, which diverged from vertebrates over 500 million years ago, display a similar pattern – which he has also modelled in humans – is evidence for an idea called the cultural brain hypothesis, developed by Muthukrishna and his colleagues, which describes how information and ecological selection pressures can also produce large, complex brains, he says.

“Big brains aren’t just down to sociality,” says Muthukrishna.

“I totally agree that the explanations for why humans have big brains are based on what we know about humans, so if you want to really understand the evolution of large brains, you should study distantly related species,” says Katz. But it is difficult to look at the behaviour of current species and make a statement about what was going on 500 million years ago, when cephalopod brains would have evolved in a very different sort of predator-prey environment before fish were widespread, he says.

Moreover, other evidence has indicated that cephalopod brains grew larger as a result of competition with fish, says Katz.

Dunbar says octopuses may generally need a lot of brain power because they have eight arms that they can use independently. “It’s a bit unclear what an octopus brain is, because it kind of has a bit of a brain in each arm, but a lot of what the brain does is manage the body and keep it doing what it needs to do to stay alive,” he says.

Bigger brains evolving where more calories can be found does make sense, though, says Dunbar. “You can’t increase the size of your brain unless you solve the energy problem. Once you’ve got the big brain in place, you can use it for many different things. Which is precisely why humans can read and write and do clever maths when that wasn’t in our evolutionary environment of selection.”

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/2024.05.01.592020v5

PHYSICS | JAN 20, 2026, 11:25 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Chernobyl cooling systems have lost power but meltdown risk is low

An electrical outage at Chernobyl nuclear power plant risks dangerous fuel overheating, but experts say that the chances are extremely slim due to the age of the reactors, which were shut down over two decades ago

By Matthew Sparkes

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has seen a number of attacks since the Russian invasion of Ukraine

AFP

An electrical outage at Ukraine’s Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant has taken spent fuel cooling systems offline, leading to a potential risk of overheating and the release of dangerous levels of radiation – but due to the age of the fuel, it should be safe until power is restored.

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) reports that several Ukrainian electrical substations have been hit by Russian military strikes, causing power outages at Chernobyl. “The IAEA is actively following developments in order to assess impact on nuclear safety,” wrote IAEA director general Rafael Grossi in a post on X.

Spent nuclear fuel from reactors continues to emit radiation for years, creating heat that must be shed, or else the fuel can melt and emit a spike of dangerous radiation. The fuel from Chernobyl’s former reactors is stored in a large cooling pond that is constantly replenished with fresh, cold water to keep its temperature down.

But without an electricity supply – which the IAEA says the site now lacks – this cooling has stopped, which will allow the water temperature to rise and increase the rate of evaporation.

“When the fuel comes out of a reactor, it will be hot for a while, because there will be fission products and there will be radioactive and giving off gammas and betas and alphas – just emitting energy, which needs to be removed, otherwise it will eventually melt,” says Paul Cosgrove at the University of Cambridge.

Working in Chernobyl’s favour, however, is that its stored fuel is older and therefore has already had time to emit much of its radioactive energy and cool down. The risk now is lower than the risk was in 2022, for example, when New Scientist reported on similar power outages at Chernobyl.

“It is always a worry when a nuclear site loses power, but worry about nuclear risks is often several orders of magnitude above the risks associated with other events with similar consequences,” says Ian Farnan, also at Cambridge.

Chernobyl’s reactor 4 exploded in 1986, but reactor 2 was shut down in 1991, reactor 1 ceased generating power in 1996 and reactor 3 – the final one at the site – was decommissioned in 2000.

The exact specifications of the storage pools that contain the fuel left over from those reactors at Chernobyl are kept classified, says Cosgrove. But he is aware of an inspection by regulators in 2022, which found that the risk of spent fuel overheating in the case of a power outage was low. “This fuel has been sat in there for 20 years, so it will have decayed. More and more of that energy will be gone,” he says.

Electrical supply to Chernobyl – and indeed much of Ukraine – has been up and down since Russia’s full-scale invasion. But in recent months, Russia has increased its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure.

The loss of power at Chernobyl is the latest in a string of Russian actions that have compromised nuclear safety, including occupying Chernobyl for several weeks and disrupting staff from maintaining it properly, taking over the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in a similar but long-running manner, and striking the New Safe Confinement building, which covers the ruins of Chernobyl’s reactor 4 disaster, with a drone in February last year.

LIFE | JAN 20, 2026, 7:01 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Bubble feeding trick spreads through humpback whale social groups

Humpback whales off the west coast of Canada have learned a cooperative hunting technique from whales migrating into the area, and this cultural knowledge may help the population cope as food becomes scarce

By Alessio Cozzolino

Humpback whales work together to trap fish by surrounding them with bubbles

Jenn Dickie/North Coast Cetatean society

An innovative feeding behaviour has spread rapidly through humpback whales in the fjords of western Canada, in a clear example of how cultural knowledge can help animal populations to survive.

Bubble-net feeding is a group hunting technique in which whales blow bubbles to corral fish, then surge upwards together to gulp them down.

“It’s an activity that’s done cooperatively, given the level of coordination and division of labour involved,” says Ellen Garland at the University of St Andrews, UK.

The behaviour has been documented for decades among humpbacks (Megaptera novaeangliae) in Alaskan waters, and researchers have started seeing it recently in the northeastern Pacific population off Canada.

But it is tricky for researchers to establish whether complex behaviours like this are transmitted through social learning — rather than being independently discovered by multiple individuals.

To tease apart the process, Éadin O’Mahony at the University of St Andrews and her colleagues analysed field observation data from 2004 to 2023, focusing on 526 individuals living in the Kitimat Fjord System in British Columbia, within Gitga’at First Nation territory.

The team identified the whales using images of their tail flukes, which are unique to each animal. The data shows that 254 individuals performed bubble-net feeding at least once, and about 90 per cent of these events occurred in a cooperative context.

The behaviour also appeared to take off after 2014, coinciding with a major marine heatwave in the north-east Pacific that reduced prey availability.

“With the heatwave, as prey availability went down, a whale’s ability to change feeding behaviour would help it maintain its daily calorie intake,” says O’Mahony.

Whales were more likely to adopt bubble-net feeding if they regularly associated with others that already used the technique. Bubble-net feeding was probably introduced in the region by whales migrating from elsewhere in the north-east Pacific, but the pattern points mainly to the behaviour spreading through local social networks, carried by stable groups and influential individuals.

“What we see from the heatwave years onward is an increase in whales already in the area who previously didn’t take part in bubble-net feeding,” says O’Mahony.

Humpback whales’ ability to pass on knowledge through social groups may be vital to their survival, and understanding their culture could help us protect them, the researchers say.

“It’s not just about how many animals are left, but about whether the social behaviours that make the population function are coming back too,” says Ted Cheeseman, co-founder of the citizen science platform Happywhale, who wasn’t involved in the study.

Journal reference:

Proceedings of the Royal Society B DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2025.2409

Arctic expedition cruise with Dr Russell Arnott: Svalbard, Norway

Embark on an unforgettable marine expedition to the Arctic, accompanied by marine biologist Russell Arnott.

Read more

HEALTH | JAN 20, 2026, 6:30 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Cross-training may be the key to a long life

People who combine different types of exercise - such as running, cycling and swimming - seem to live longer than those with less varied workouts

By Michael Le Page

Variety is the spice of life, perhaps particularly when it comes to working out

Lyndon Stratford / Alamy Stock Photo

Many sportspeople do a mixture of exercises to boost their performance. Now there’s evidence that this cross-training could extend their lives, too.

An analysis of two studies that followed people for more than 30 years has found that those who did a variety of activities were 19 per less likely to die of any cause during that time than those who were just as physically active but whose exercise was less varied.

“If the total amount of physical activity is kept constant, you will get additional benefits from doing a mix of physical activities,” says Han Han at Harvard University. But studies of this kind can’t establish cause and effect, she says, so the findings are suggestive rather than definitive.

Most exercise studies focus on the intensity or overall amount of physical activity, rather than the variety. Those that have looked at different exercise types tend to compare aerobic with strength exercises.

Han and her colleagues instead looked at nine kinds of mostly aerobic activities: walking; jogging (defined as a pace slower than 6.2 minutes per kilometre); running; cycling outside or on an exercise bike; climbing stairs; swimming laps; rowing or callisthenics (where you use your body weight as resistance, such as squats or pull-ups); tennis, squash or racquetball; and weight or resistance training.

The team got data on the activities of 70,000 women and 41,000 men between 1986 and 2018 from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study, both done in the US. Study participants were asked to fill in questionnaires every two years detailing their physical activities.

The researchers then looked for associations between people’s activities and their chance of dying from any cause during the study period. People with illnesses that would have affected their ability to exercise were excluded.

The team found that, with all these exercise types, people seemed to reach a point of diminishing returns, in terms of a lower risk of dying during the study period, if they did more than a few hours a week.

This could be why doing a variety of exercises has additional benefits: once someone gets to the point of diminishing returns, they might gain more by spending their time doing a different exercise rather than more of the same, says Han. Another explanation could be that different types of physical activities have distinct physiological effects whose combined benefits are greater.

“We think that future studies could examine the possible synergistic effects of different activities,” says Han. “This will help to identify the optimal mix of activities.” The optimal mix may also change over people’s lifespans, she says.

Few studies have investigated the effect of different types and combinations of exercise on mortality, says Duck-chul Lee at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. The findings should be interpreted cautiously because of the limitations of this kind of study, he says. These include the fact that people tend to report doing more exercise than they really do and that people who are healthier overall tend to be more active, which can bias the results.

“However, their findings are also somewhat supported by the current World Health Organization physical activity guidelines suggesting that doing both aerobic and resistance exercise provides a large and more comprehensive health and mortality benefit than doing either alone,” says Lee.

In the future, it should become possible to do this kind of study using data from wearable fitness trackers, rather than relying on self-reporting. “But for now, to get this length of time, you have to rely on the questionnaires,” says Han.

Journal reference:

BMJ Medicine DOI: 10.1136/bmjmed-2025-001513

ENVIRONMENT | JAN 20, 2026, 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Scientists investigate ‘dark oxygen’ in deep-sea mining zone

Startling findings in 2024 suggested that metallic nodules on the sea floor produce oxygen and might support life. Now researchers are planning an expedition to learn more and refute criticism from mining companies

By Alec Luhn

An experiment on oxygen production by deep-sea nodules

The Nippon Foundation

Scientists will lower instruments to the seafloor to figure out how metallic nodules are generating oxygen in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, an unexpected phenomenon that has fuelled controversy over deep-sea mining.

Researchers, to their surprise, found in 2024 that the potato-sized nodules in the darkness of the Pacific and Indian oceans, including the Pacific’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone, were a source of oxygen, even though it was thought that sunlight and photosynthesis were needed to produce this element on a large scale.

This so-called dark oxygen could be supporting life in the darkness at depths of thousands of metres, including microbes, sea cucumbers and carnivorous anemones. Its discovery raised questions about proposals by deep-sea mining companies to vacuum up the nodules from the seafloor and smelt them for cobalt, nickel and manganese. The finding has been disputed by deep-sea mining companies, and other scientists have also called for more evidence.

Now the researchers who discovered dark oxygen are going back to the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, the most promising area for deep-sea mining, to try to confirm the existence of this dark oxygen and understand how it is being produced.

“Where’s the oxygen coming from for these diverse animal communities to thrive?” Andrew Sweetman at the Scottish Association for Marine Science, who is leading the expedition, said at a press briefing. “This may be a pretty significant process, and that’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

The team has hypothesised that the layers of metals in the nodules are generating an electric current that can break down seawater into hydrogen and oxygen. They have measured up to 0.95 volts of electricity on the surface of nodules, slightly less than an AA battery.

That’s less than the 1.23 volts that would typically be required for this electrolysis, but the researchers think some individual nodules or several nodules grouped together could generate higher voltages.

The team will deploy landers – essentially metal frames with instruments inside – to depths of up to 10,000 metres to measure oxygen fluxes as well as pH, since electrolysis would cast out protons that increase the acidity of the water.

A lander carrying research equipment that will be lowered into the ocean

Scottish Association for Marine Science

The landers will also obtain sediment cores and nodules to analyse later in the lab, since microscopic organisms may also play a role. Each nodule contains up to 100 million microbes, and the researchers will try to identify microbes through DNA and RNA sequencing and fluorescence microscopy.

“The vast diversity of the microbes remains a moving target. We’re always discovering new species,” said team member Jeff Marlow at Boston University. “Are they active? Are they shaping their environment in interesting and important ways?”

They will also recreate the conditions of the deep sea in a high-pressure reactor and run the electrolysis reaction in it, since electrolysis hasn’t typically been seen at the intense pressures found on the seafloor.

“Four hundred atmospheres of pressure, that is the pressure at which the Titan submersible imploded,” said Franz Geiger at Northwestern University in Illinois, another team member. “We’re interested to see how water splitting may or may not be effective at high pressure.”

The ultimate goal is to try to run the electrochemical reaction under an electron microscope with microbes and bacteria present, all without killing the microscopic organisms, he added.

While the United Nations’ International Seabed Authority hasn’t made a decision on whether deep-sea mining should be allowed in international waters, US President Donald Trump has pushed for extraction to start. The Canadian firm The Metals Company has applied to the US government for a permit to begin deep-sea mining.

A paper published by scientists from The Metals Company argued that Sweetman and his colleagues did not find enough energy to power seawater electrolysis in 2024 and that the oxygen they observed was likely carried from the surface by the landers they deployed.

Sweetman says any bubbles of surface air are washed out as the landers descend, and they haven’t measured oxygen when deployed in other areas of the ocean, such as the seabed in the Arctic, at 4000 metres. Of 65 experiments done in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, 10 per cent have found oxygen consumption and the rest have found oxygen production, according to Sweetman.

He and his colleagues have also found that the water oxidation part of the electrolysis process can take place at the lower voltage found on the nodules. A rebuttal including this data has been submitted to Nature Geosciences and is currently going through peer review.

“In terms of the commercial interest, there’s definitely an interest to try to silence this area of work,” Sweetman said of The Metals Company’s objections to his findings.

“Regardless of the source and motivation of the comments, they need to be addressed,” said Marlow. “That’s what we’re in [the] process of doing.”

ENVIRONMENT | JAN 20, 2026, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

World is entering an era of 'water bankruptcy'

Countries have spent beyond their sustainable water budgets for so long that critical assets are depleted and the world faces huge economic, social and environmental costs

By Alec Luhn

Drought in Iran has left little water in the Latyan Dam near Tehran

BAHRAM/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

Earth has entered an “era of water bankruptcy” due to over-consumption and global warming, with 3 in 4 people living in countries that face water shortages, water contamination or drought.

That’s the conclusion of a United Nations report that has found most regions are overdrawing their annual income of rainwater and snowmelt and dipping into their savings of groundwater, which can take thousands of years to replenish. Seventy per cent of major aquifers are declining. Many of these changes are irreversible.

Two key drivers are agriculture and cities expanding into arid areas, which are getting even drier due to climate change. Almost 700 sinkholes have appeared in Turkey due to groundwater pumping, while dust storms from desertification have killed hundreds in Beijing.

“Our checking account, the surface water… is now empty,” says the report’s author, Kaveh Madani at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “The savings account that we inherited from our ancestors, the groundwater, glaciers and so on … they’re also drained now. We are seeing symptoms around the world … of water bankruptcy.”

About 4 billion people experience water scarcity at least one month a year, fuelling migration, conflicts and unrest. Madani, who was formerly deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment, says water shortages contributed to the recent bloody protests there, although a currency collapse was the immediate trigger.

Iran had its driest autumn in 50 years, while a rash of dams and wells for farming have almost completely dried up Lake Urmia – once the largest lake in the Middle East – and depleted most of the country’s groundwater. The government has mooted evacuating Tehran and is trying to induce rainfall through cloud seeding.

In the US, the flow of the Colorado river, which provides water to much of the West, has decreased by an estimated 20 per cent over 20 years, due largely to lower precipitation and increased evaporation. But it is also being overly diverted to grow feed for beef and dairy cattle, all while cities like Los Angeles rely on it for drinking water. As with a rising number of rivers, it no longer reaches the sea.

The river’s two major reservoirs are at about 30 per cent capacity and could reach “dead pool” levels at 10 to 15 per cent of capacity as soon as 2027, according to Bradley Udall at Colorado State University. Talks over how much each state would reduce consumption broke down last year.

Increasing agricultural water efficiency has been shown to only increase water use, since drip or sprinkler irrigation allows water to be gradually absorbed by plants, whereas the flooding of fields results in more water running back into the river. So it needs to be coupled with cuts in water consumption, according to Udall.

“The solution is going to have to come from agriculture primarily because they use 70 per cent of the water,” he says. “Ag cutbacks, that’s what we’re talking about, and that’s true worldwide.”

Half of all food production is in areas with declining water storage. But reducing agriculture’s water use will also require economic diversification, since it is the livelihood of more than 1 billion people. Most of them are in lower-income countries, which often export food to the service economies of higher-income nations.

“Water plays a major role in economies… because it puts people [in] jobs,” says Madani. “If they lose their jobs, what happens is what you see in Iran today.”

Even in rainy places, more water is being sucked up by data centres or polluted by industry, sewage, fertilisers or manure. Wetlands covering an area the size of the European Union have been lost, mostly due to conversion to agriculture, costing the world an estimated $5.1 trillion in ecosystem services like flood buffering, food production and carbon storage.

In Bangladesh, about half the country has well water that is contaminated by arsenic due to sea level rise and saltwater intrusion. Meanwhile, the tap water and the “dead river” in the capital Dhaka have been poisoned by chemicals from the production of fast fashion for sale in Europe and North America.

“Every person knows that the rivers are being polluted because of the garment industry,” says Sonia Hoque at the University of Oxford. “But they know that stringent regulation, if applied, would… scare away the buyers.”

In many cases, rivers, lakes, wetlands and aquifers will never return to their previous state. Moreover, many glaciers have melted, shrinking water supplies to hundreds of millions of people.

Humanity will have to learn to live with less water, according to Madani. With better water management, that’s possible. First, however, most countries need to simply start accounting for their water sources and consumption, starting with water meters in homes, wells and diversion canals.

“You’re thinking about launching a [cloud-seeding] rocket to get water, but you don’t even know how much water you have in your system,” says Madani. “We cannot manage what we do not measure.”

Journal reference:

Water Resources Management DOI: 10.1007/s11269-025-04484-0

SPACE | JAN 20, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Satellites could use magnetic fields to avoid collisions

Two or more satellites could communicate and manoeuvre around one another using magnetic fields, although getting the technique to work at scale in space might be tricky

By Chris Stokel-Walker

There may be a new way to control satellites in space

Mike_shots/Shutterstock

It may be possible to keep space exploration missions running longer and avoid spacecraft colliding with each other using a technique that harnesses magnetic fields to move satellites.

Currently, most space missions and satellites have a finite lifespan because the objects are moved around in space using propellant fuel, which often runs out. One alternative method called Electromagnetic Formation Flying (EMFF) relies on renewable power sources, such as solar panels, to power electromagnetic coils on board the satellites. These generate a magnetic field which, through interaction with similar magnetic fields generated on any nearby satellite, can theoretically be used to manoeuvre the spacecraft.

But researchers have encountered difficulties in using EMFF to move objects in space because of an issue called magnetic coupling. The magnetic field generated by a satellite doesn’t interfere with just one nearby satellite but with all the satellites around it, making it tricky to move more than two nearby satellites in a controlled way.

A team of researchers at the University of Kentucky has found a potential solution through the use of a different approach, called Alternating Magnetic Field Forces (AMFF).

This approach allows two satellites to communicate and control their movement relative to each other without interfering with a third nearby satellite. To do this, the researchers used unique interaction frequencies, which means that two satellites can communicate and coordinate their movement on one frequency while simultaneously communicating with other nearby satellites on different frequencies.

The AMFF concept was tested on Earth rather than in space. Three satellites were placed on special linear rails that use high-pressure air to create a low-friction environment. The satellites successfully managed to interact with each other, moving to precise distances the researchers had defined with the help of in-built laser ranging modules.

The team behind the project did not respond to interview requests. But Alvar Saenz Otero at the University of Washington says that the paper is a step forward in a long-running area of research. “The complexity of formation flying systems takes a big jump from two units to three units,” he explains.

But Otero is less certain whether we’re likely to see this driving satellites in low Earth orbit, including in the mega constellations of satellites like those powering Starlink. “Everything we ever did for EMFF was always about deep space operations,” he says.

Earth’s atmosphere, as well as the moon and sun, can create interference at the frequencies used for either EMFF or AMFF, he says.

And while three units can now fly in unison and be moved using magnetic fields, scaling that up to control the movement of thousands of satellites is a different task entirely. “It’s not something that applies at a constellation level,” says Ray Sedwick at the University of Maryland.

“The range that EMFF can work over increases significantly if you employ superconducting magnetic coils, but there are technical challenges here,” explains Sedwick – suggesting that magnetic movement at a grand scale is a while off yet.

Reference:

arxiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.05408

SPACE | JAN 20, 2026, 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Mars once had a vast sea the size of the Arctic Ocean

Spacecraft orbiting the Red Planet have helped researchers map out an ancient coastline that surrounded a large ocean billions of years ago

By Taylor Mitchell Brown

Mars was once much wetter

NASA/USGS

Geological features on Mars suggest the planet once boasted rivers and broad coastlines around a vast ocean. The discovery provides the most direct evidence yet for the Red Planet’s former blue vistas.

“The presence of liquid water [on Mars] is a broad topic that includes rains, rivers, lakes, as well as oceans,” says Ezat Heydari, a geochemist at Jackson State University in Mississippi who wasn’t involved in the research. “In my opinion, this paper addresses the most important one: the ocean.”

A research team including planetary geologist Ignatius Indi and geoscientist Fritz Schlunegger, both at the University of Bern in Switzerland, made the discovery by analysing data gathered from different probes orbiting Mars, including NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express and ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. The ExoMars vessel is equipped with a specialised camera, the Bernese Mars, which can take high-resolution colour images. It was instrumental to the new work.

“These images allow us to distinguish subtle differences in surface materials that are invisible in black-and-white images,” says Indi. When combined with topographic data from the other probes, these tools become “geological time machines” that paint a clearer picture of how the Martian landscape formed, he says.

To apply the imagery to the question of putative past water sources on Mars, the researchers focused on Valles Marineris, a channel more than 4000 kilometres long that cuts along the Martian equator. They paid particular attention to a south-eastern region of the channel called Coprates Chasma. Its deep features are around 3.3 billion years old.

By combining the new imagery with geomorphological analyses, the researchers identified many structures comparable to those that form on Earth where rivers pour into oceans or where alpine lakes materialise at the base of mountains.

“The Nile delta is a classic example,” says Schlunegger. If you removed the Mediterranean waters just beyond the terminus of the Nile, he says, you would see structures very similar to those detected on Mars.

Silty deposits left by ancient water on Mars

Argadestya et al. 2026, CaSSIS

The new data also enabled the researchers to trace ancient coastlines around a former ocean, allowing them to measure its approximate size. They concluded that it was about as large as Earth’s Arctic Ocean. This would have been the largest ocean on Mars.

“Our research suggests that around 3 billion years ago, Mars may have hosted long-lasting bodies of surface water inside Valles Marineris, the largest canyon in the Solar System,” says Indi. “Even more exciting, these water bodies may have been connected to a much larger ocean that once covered parts of Mars’ northern lowlands.”

Previous research has given many scholars reason to believe Mars once held water, but this work has primarily been indirect. One study found Martian minerals that appear to have interacted with water in the distant past. Another found signs that ancient asteroid impacts triggered massive Martian tsunamis. While much evidence has hinted at a past humid world, definitive data is difficult to come by.

“The idea that Mars once had large oceans remains controversial – in part because, if they existed, their record is not fresh because they are so old,” says Michael Manga, a geoscientist at the University of California, Berkeley who wasn’t involved in the research.

The discovery has tantalising implications for the search for extraterrestrial life, but also offers a cautionary tale that Earth’s most indispensable resource might one day similarly disappear.

“The paper… addresses an issue that is in the mind of anyone who conducts research on the evolution of the planet Mars,” says Heydari. “Oceans on Mars would have acted just like oceans on Earth, and they are vital to the health of the planet.”

Journal reference:

Paper: npj Space Exploration DOI: 10.1038/s44453-025-00015-8

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.

Find out more

HEALTH | JAN 20, 2026, 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Sunscreens made from ground-up wood reach an SPF of over 180

Concerns around common sunscreen chemicals have prompted the search for natural alternatives, with lignin from wood being one of the most promising candidates

By Alice Klein

The hunt for more natural sunscreens is on

Amparo Garcia/Shutterstock

Sunscreens enhanced with lignin, a component of wood, can have sun protection factors (SPFs) that exceed 180. They also seem to last longer and penetrate less into the skin than existing products, potentially making them safer.

Sunscreens are an important defence against skin cancer, but, in recent years, there has been growing unease and confusion regarding their safety. A recent US survey found that 14 per cent of young adults think that daily sunscreen use is more harmful than direct sun exposure.

This has arisen since the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published research showing that several common sunscreen ingredients can get through the skin into the bloodstream. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are harmful, and long-term studies haven’t found risks associated with daily sunscreen use, but the FDA has called for more research to investigate.

In the meantime, scientists are searching for natural alternatives to existing sunscreen chemicals that may be safer for human health, while also being less harmful to coral and other marine life when they wash off into the oceans.

One of the most promising sun-protective substances from nature is lignin, which glues plant cell walls together and gives tree trunks strength. It also protects plants from ultraviolet (UV) radiation from the sun.

A major challenge to utilising lignin has been extracting it from wood. Traditional methods have used harsh chemicals that turn lignin from a light colour to almost black, making it unsuitable for use in sunscreens.

Now, two groups at South China University of Technology have found ways to extract lignin from wood without darkening it and then used it to make sunscreens.

One group, led by Jun Li, extracted pale yellow lignin from poplar wood by milling and sieving it into a fine powder. Lignin was then dislodged from the powder using ultrasonic waves. The other group, led by Yong Qian, extracted pale pink lignin from birch wood using a similarly mild procedure.

Both groups then processed the lignin to turn it into nanoparticles, which they mixed with plain white creams to make sunscreens.

Subsequent testing showed that the pale yellow lignin sunscreen had an SPF of 20, while the pale pink one had an SPF of 19, making them both moderately effective. They were also broad-spectrum, meaning they protected against the two types of UV radiation that damage the skin, UVA and UVB. When rubbed on the skin, they blended with light skin tones and had a pleasantly smooth feel.

Since these lignin sunscreens aren’t as protective as many sunscreens on the market, which have SPF values of 50+, Qian and his colleagues tried combining them with existing ingredients. When the team encapsulated two common sunscreen ingredients, avobenzone and octinoxate, inside lignin nanoparticles, their SPF jumped up to more than 180. It should be noted, however, that sunscreens can’t be marketed as more than SPF 50+ because SPF values above 50 don’t provide much more protection, because of the way the scale works.

Putting existing sunscreens inside lignin nanoparticles also made them more resistant to breakdown, allowing them to last longer in the sun. It also stopped them from penetrating the skin, potentially making them safer.

Qian says he and his colleagues are now further testing one of their lignin nanoparticle sunscreens on people. So far, “it is safe and has good sunscreen performance,” he says.

Aside from lignin, other sun-protective substances from nature that are being investigated include components of seaweed, ferns, squid and human hair.

Journal reference:

International Journal of Biological Macromolecules DOI: 10.1016/j.ijbiomac.2025.149790

COMMENT LIFE | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why a tool-using cow could change how we see farm animals

A pet cow has learned to scratch herself with a broom, showing creative problem-solving skills that make it harder to ignore the fact that these animals have minds, says Marta Halina

By Marta Halina

Veronika the cow is the first recorded non-primate mammal to demonstrate flexible, multi-purpose tool use

Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró

A few years ago, during a taxi ride, the driver described to me how a pig had transformed his life. A childhood with dogs taught him what to expect from animals, yet he was unprepared for the pig he had taken in as a favour.

The man told me how he had rigged a string-and-bell system by the door so the animals could signal when they wanted to go outside. Both the dogs and pig learned to do this, but the pig took it a step further: she began ringing the bell to alert the man when a dog was outside waiting to get back in. He had many examples like this, told with pride and affection. At the end of our conversation, I asked whether these experiences had changed his food preferences. They had: he no longer eats pork.

The taxi driver’s experience mirrors a growing trend in how we study the mental lives of other species. For a long time, when scientists looked for cognitive traits comparable to our own, they focused almost exclusively on non-human primates or the “feathered apes” – clever birds such as parrots and crows. More recently, researchers have expanded their focus to include a much more diverse array of species, such as bees, octopuses and crocodiles.

In line with this trend, a new study by Antonio Osuna-Mascaró and Alice Auersperg, both at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna in Austria, examines the cognitive capacities of an animal we often overlook: the cow. Veronika, a pet cow (Bos taurus), expertly wields a broom to scratch herself. She uses the bristled end to scratch her back but then flips the tool to use the smoother stick end for her more sensitive underside.

The researchers describe this as the first recorded instance of flexible, multi-purpose tool use in a non-primate mammal. What does this tool use reveal about the minds of cows, and will it change how we treat them?

Broadly defined, tool use is the act of manipulating an object so that its motion directly achieves a goal. This definition excludes behaviours such as nest building or seeking cover underground; while materials are moved to construct a nest, the objects function as a static structure once in place. In tool use, the movement itself is the mechanism of success – whether this involves using a rock to crack a nut or wiggling a twig to fish termites from a mound.

Scholars once thought tool use was a uniquely human trait. Jane Goodall changed this in the 1960s when she first observed a chimpanzee she had named David Greybeard fashioning and using a tool for termite fishing. Decades later, tool use has been discovered in unexpected corners of the animal kingdom.

Doodlebugs, the larvae of antlions, throw sand at prey, while certain digger wasps use pebbles to tamp down their burrows. However, these are highly specialised behaviours that emerged through millions of years of evolution. The cognition underlying these stereotyped actions is different from the flexible tool use that emerges spontaneously in some animals to solve a problem. Veronika’s use of the broom falls into this latter category.

Veronika uses different ends of the broom to scratch different parts of her body

Antonio J. Osuna Mascaró

Veronika was never taught to use tools. This behaviour emerged spontaneously, starting with the use of small twigs when she was young and progressing to the flexible deployment of a multi-purpose broom.

Her behaviour suggests that she has what the psychologist Josep Call identifies as the three ingredients of a creative tool user. First, she gathers information by learning the physical properties of objects. Second, she combines this knowledge to solve problems, recognising that a rigid object can reach an itch that is otherwise inaccessible. Finally, she has a propensity to manipulate objects. This trait is important because physical capacity alone is not enough. While squirrel monkeys and capuchin monkeys have similar hands, only the latter is disposed to manipulate objects.

Will learning more about the minds of cows and other livestock change how we treat them? Research by psychologists suggests that it could. In one study, when asked to rate the mental capacities and edibility of various animals, participants tended to rate those with less of a mind as more edible and those with more of a mind as less edible. In another study, participants were introduced to a species called Bennett’s tree kangaroo. Those who were told the animal was a food source viewed it as being less capable of suffering and less worthy of moral concern than those who were told the animal lived in the wild.

The way we treat animals is strongly correlated to the minds we believe they possess. Veronika’s story is likely the first of many to challenge our perception of “simple-minded” livestock. Yet, for this knowledge to be transformative, we must address our own cognitive dissonance. Denying that animals have minds protects us from the reality of how we treat them. It’s easier to ignore a mind than it is to respect one.

Marta Halina is a professor of philosophy of science at the University of Cambridge

HEALTH | JAN 19, 2026, 10:32 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Barnacle gloop could improve inflammatory bowel disease treatments

A "living glue" used by barnacles to attach to underwater surfaces could also seal gut wounds caused by inflammatory bowel disease

By Carissa Wong

Inflammatory bowel disease can cause wounds that bleed

SPRINGER MEDIZIN/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Scientists looking to provide relief for people with inflammatory bowel disease have turned to an unusual source for inspiration: barnacles.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, seems to occur when someone’s immune system attacks their bowel, leaving it inflamed. Its main symptoms are diarrhoea, severe abdominal pain, weight loss and bleeding from the gut into faeces.

Anti-inflammatory drugs, such as steroids, can ease symptoms. But if bleeding persists, doctors may use small metal clips, passed into the gut via the anus, to close wounds caused by the inflammation. However, this carries the risk of infections and can even worsen the wounds.

Searching for a gentler approach, scientists previously genetically engineered bacteria to produce substances that help heal wounds. However, such microbes are typically cleared from the gut within a couple of days, and must be manually activated using drugs, says Bolin An at the Shenzhen Institute of Synthetic Biology in China.

Now, An and his colleagues have genetically engineered a harmless strain of Escherichia coli bacteria to produce a protein fragment that promotes wound healing upon sensing blood. Crucially, the bacteria also make certain types of “cement proteins”, which barnacles use to attach to underwater surfaces. Based on tests in lab dishes, the team hoped these proteins would act like an anti-inflammatory seal against bleeding wounds, calling it a “living glue”.

To put it to the test, the researchers used a toxic chemical to induce IBD-like issues – including inflammation and gut wounds, which led to weight loss – in mice. Each mouse then received either a single dose of a harmless strain of non-engineered E.coli, the genetically engineered E.coli or a saline solution, all of which were delivered to the gut via a tube through the anus.

Ten days later, the mice that received the engineered bacteria, which were still present in their guts, regained most of the weight they had lost. Unlike the other two groups, their guts even resembled those of healthy mice. None of the mice showed signs of experiencing side effects.

The team also saw similar effects when the mice were given a pill containing the bacteria, suggesting that this approach could one day be administered orally in people. “It’s definitely promising and it’s a novel approach,” says Shaji Sebastian at Hull University in the UK. Gut wound healing and inflammation in mice is fairly similar to that in humans, although tests in people are needed, he says.

The researchers now plan to test the approach in larger animals, including pigs, partly to determine how long the engineered bacteria can be retained within the gut, says An. But it could be up to 10 years before it reaches clinics, because so much testing is needed to show that it not only works, but also provides benefits over existing treatments in people, says Sebastian.

Journal reference:

Nature Biotechnology DOI: 10.1038/s41587-025-02970-9

ANALYSIS: SOCIETY | JAN 19, 2026, 9:05 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Should Europe boycott US tech over Greenland, and is it even possible?

As tensions over Greenland rise, some Europeans are asking whether it is time to disentangle themselves from US tech dominance – but from smartphones to cloud services, rejecting US tech is easier said than done

By Chris Stokel-Walker

A protest at the US consulate in Nuuk, Greenland, on 17 January

Evgeniy Maloletka/AP/Alamy

With US President Donald Trump continuing to demand that Greenland be placed under his country’s control, European nations are pursuing a range of responses, from stepping up their military presence on the Danish-owned territory to imposing economic sanctions on the US. The extraordinary threat to world order also has Europeans wondering whether it is time to wean themselves off the global dominance of US technology – but is that even possible?

Individuals who want to boycott US tech are in for a difficult time. For example, if you ditch your iPhone in favour of a South Korean-made Samsung, you will still be engaged in the Android ecosystem, which is linked to the US-based Google. Some Chinese phone manufacturers like Huawei have developed their own operating systems, but this would involve swapping one geopolitical giant for another.

And it’s not just hardware. The major social networks, from Facebook and Instagram to Snapchat and X, are based in the US, as are video streaming services like Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video. Even the rare platform not run from the US, TikTok, is being drawn into its control, thanks to a Trump-backed deal. Perhaps the only major non-US platform that people use daily is Spotify, which was founded in Sweden.

Europe does have some alternatives for major tech products: for instance, French firms have developed a search engine called Qwant and a ChatGPT replacement called Mistral. For smartphones, your options are more limited and far outside the mainstream: Liberux Nexx is a Spanish smartphone running the Linux operating system, while German company Volla sells a phone running its own operating system. Neither is commonly used. But beyond the individual, can governments and companies do anything to move away from US tech dominance – and should they?

“It’s crazy that almost all of Europe’s public services run on US platforms like Microsoft or Google,” says Tommaso Valletti at Imperial College London, UK. The current arguments over the future of Greenland ought to clarify thoughts, he says. “You obviously cannot replace that overnight, but that’s exactly why Europe must start building alternatives.

Some European countries were already considering their options before the latest Greenland crisis. In November, key figures at a summit in Berlin agreed on seven points to reduce dependency on non-European tech firms, while bolstering the region’s companies. One initiative, known as EuroStack, argues Europe should “buy, sell and fund” homegrown cloud computing, artificial intelligence and connectivity services, in part because just 1 per cent of the European Commission’s own cloud stack – the hardware and software underlying its digital services – currently runs on a homegrown provider.

Advocates say building a sovereign digital stack will be costly – potentially running into the trillions of euros – but is essential to avoid a future in which a hostile US administration could effectively flip a digital kill switch on European infrastructure. Simply basing our tech choices on costs and the past open market, without considering other aspects like national security, is “becoming increasingly naïve”, says Kristina Irion at the University of Amsterdam.

Change will be difficult, though, given many corporate and public sector IT systems rely on companies like Microsoft and Google for their day-to-day operations, says Chloe Teevan at the European Centre for Development Policy Management, a think tank in the Netherlands. “People are already in their ecosystems, so offering an alternative that is attractive to people is not simple, and the policies of the past 20 years have not helped with that,” she says.

Building up major infrastructure takes time, too, especially in a fragmented, slow-moving market like Europe. Because of that, some European decision-makers may wonder whether cutting ties is worth the effort, given Trump should be out of office by 2029. “I actually think nothing will be fast enough to really make any impact,” says Irion.

But that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t happen, in large part because, setting aside politics, relying on companies in other countries in such a geopolitically turbulent world isn’t the smartest idea, says Teevan.

“It’s not going to be easy, but doing nothing is abdication,” says Valletti. “Starting now is the only way to have real options in the future.”

SPACE | JAN 19, 2026, 9:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Star appears to have vanished in a failed supernova

It is theoretically possible for a particularly massive star to collapse in on itself to form a black hole rather than exploding in a supernova, and we might now have seen the process in action

By Alex Wilkins

An illustration of a failed supernova forming a black hole

NASA, ESA, and P. Jeffries (STScI)

A massive star in a nearby galaxy that reached the end of its life appears to have vanished rather than blown up, forming a black hole in what astronomers think is a rare way.

The most common black holes in our galaxy begin as stars. When these stars explode in a supernova, they can leave behind a black hole. But it is thought that black holes can also form from stars that fail to go supernova, instead simply collapsing under their own mass and producing a black hole directly.

In 2024, Kishalay De at Columbia University in New York and his colleagues observed an unusually bright star called M31-2014-DS1 in the nearby galaxy Andromeda that was around 20 times as massive as our sun. The star appeared to grow briefly brighter in 2014, before becoming dramatically dimmer between 2017 and 2020. De and his colleagues thought this pattern of brightening and then fading matched predictions for a failed supernova producing a black hole, but there was no sign of the black hole itself, such as tell-tale X-ray radiation.

Now, De and his team have observed M31-2014-DS1 with the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and the Chandra X-ray Observatory, finding a faint, red object where the star once was that is only around 8 per cent as bright as the original star and is shrouded in a cocoon of dust moving rapidly outwards. This fits with what astronomers think a failed supernova making a black hole would look like. De and his team declined to comment for this story because their research hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.

In a separate study analysing the same JWST data, Emma Beasor at Liverpool John Moores University, UK, and her colleagues found that the case for M31-2014-DS1 undergoing a failed supernova that produced a black hole was murkier, and that the observations could just as easily be the result of two stars merging, which would also produce a small outburst followed by a dimming and lots of dust.

“The predictions for what a failed supernova looks like overlap quite significantly with what we might expect from two stars colliding and producing loads of dust,” says Beasor.

However, both scenarios would still be exotic phenomena, she says. “We don’t see stars that fade this significantly very often.”

“In either explanation, this is exciting. The visible star really has gone away,” says Gerard Gilmore at the University of Cambridge. “For many years, searches for disappearing massive stars led to ambiguous results. Now, the full power of multi-wavelength time-domain astronomy is on show and making progress.”

The only surefire way to say whether a black hole has been formed is to identify X-ray radiation, says Gilmore, which can’t currently be seen at the location of M31-2014-DS1. However, being able to study the aftermath of a dimmed star with a powerful telescope like JWST will allow us to find out what happened, he says. “We are on the verge of discovering at least one of the final fates of massive stars, an amusingly Cheshire cat way to go.”

References: arXiv, DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.0577 and DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.05317

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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LIFE | JAN 19, 2026, 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Giving astronauts tardigrade toughness will be harder than we hoped

The protein that protects tardigrade DNA from radiation and mutagenic chemicals was thought to be harmless, but can in fact have major downsides

By Michael Le Page

Tardigrades can withstand exceptionally harsh conditions

How can we protect space explorers from cosmic radiation without encasing spaceships in massive layers of lead? Some have suggested dosing them with the DNA-protecting protein from tardigrades – but it’s not going to be that easy.

Corey Nislow and his colleagues at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver have shown that a tardigrade-produced protein called Dsup, short for damage suppressor, can protect against an even wider range of mutation-inducing chemicals than we knew, in addition to radiation. But it also has a trade-off: it reduces the fitness of cells and can even kill them.

“There’s a cost for every benefit that we’ve seen,” says Nislow.

Tardigrades are tiny animals famed for their ability to survive stresses, including being exposed to extreme temperatures, dried out, blasted with radiation, and even exposed to the vacuum of space. In 2016, it was shown that Dsup is one of the keys to their toughness. When human cells were genetically engineered to produce Dsup, they became more resistant to radiation without any reported downsides.

This led to the idea that people could be protected against radiation and mutagenic chemicals by giving them Dsup. One way to do this would be inject them with Dsup-encoding mRNAs encased in lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) – the same technology used in the mRNA covid vaccines.

“Two to three years ago, I was fully on board with the idea that, let’s deliver Dsup mRNA in an LNP to crew members on space missions and you won’t have modified their genomes, but you will have delivered to them a very effective DNA damage countermeasure,” says Nislow.

But his team has now carried out extensive studies of yeast cells modified to produce Dsup. They found that very high levels were fatal, and even lower levels impaired the growth of cells.

Dsup appears to protect DNA by physically surrounding it, says Nislow, but this also makes it harder for proteins to access DNA to make RNA or to replicate the DNA before cell division. It is also harder for DNA repair proteins to access DNA – the team found that in cells with low levels of repair proteins, Dsup could be fatal, likely because crucial repairs didn’t take place.

It may be possible to use Dsup to protect space-travelling people, animals and plants, says Nislow, but it will be crucial to ensure that Dsup in produced only in the cells where it is needed and at the right levels.

“I completely agree,” says James Byrne at the University of Iowa, whose team is looking at whether Dsup can help protect healthy cells during radiation therapy for cancer.

If Dsup were continuously produced in all cells in the human body, it would likely have a significant cost to health, says Byne, but if it is produced only temporarily when needed, it may be beneficial.

“It is absolutely true that above a certain dose, Dsup can have toxic effects,” says Simon Galas at the University of Montpellier in France. However, his team has shown that low levels of the protein can extend the lifespan of nematode worms by protecting them against oxidative stress. Much remains to be discovered about how Dsup works, he says.

Jessica Tyler at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York state has also modified yeast to produce Dsup. At lower levels than those tested by Nislow, it seemed to have beneficial effects with no effect on growth, she says.

“So I do not agree that the protection provided by Dsup comes at a significant cost,” says Tyler. But she does agree that ensuring Dsup is produced at the right levels is crucial.

Getting the right cells in the body to produce the right levels of Dsup cannot be done with existing technology, but Nislow is confident that it will become possible. “There’s so much money and attention on delivery systems,” he says. “It’s a problem that so many people in pharma are motivated to solve.”

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2025.12.24.696340

EARTH | JAN 19, 2026, 5:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Volcanoes had lower greenhouse gas emissions in Earth's past

Eruptions from volcanic arcs, found where tectonic plates converge, are one of the major drivers of natural carbon emissions, but a model of Earth’s ancient carbon cycle suggests this is a relatively recent phenomenon

By James Woodford

Arc volcanoes like Sakurajima in Japan release carbon dioxide from Earth’s interior

The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images

The power of volcanoes to change Earth’s climate may not be as ancient as previously thought.

Throughout our planet’s history, the climate has fluctuated between “icehouse” and “greenhouse” conditions, largely determined by the levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, in the atmosphere.

Volcanic arcs, the giant chains of erupting peaks in places like Japan, can play a part in this by releasing CO2 from Earth’s interior. But modelling research led by Ben Mather at the University of Melbourne, Australia, suggests they only became the dominant source of carbon emissions towards the end of the age of the dinosaurs, around 100 million years ago.

This is because around 150 million years ago, phytoplankton with calcium carbonate scales emerged in the oceans. When these plankton die, they leave immense deposits of calcium carbonate on the deep-sea floor, says Mather.

As tectonic plates move and are recycled into Earth’s molten interior by slipping under each other, a process known as subduction, these huge reservoirs of stored carbon end up being pushed into the mantle.

“Most of the carbon from the plankton that leaves the subducting oceanic plate will get mixed into the molten interior, but a portion of that will get emitted via volcanic-arc volcanoes,” says Mather.

However, before 150 million years ago, the material being released by volcanic arcs was relatively low in CO2 because of the absence of these scaly plankton, says Mather.

He and his colleagues have modelled the past half-billion years of plate tectonics and its role in the carbon cycle. They found that through most of Earth’s history, much of the carbon locked inside the planet was released along fissures in Earth’s crust in a process called rifting, not by volcanic arcs.

Rifting is the process by which continents are torn apart on geological timescales and can happen on land, such as at the East African Rift, or along mid-ocean ridges.

“When tectonic plates are being spread apart, essentially, what you’re doing is ‘unroofing’ some of the molten interior of the Earth,” says Mather. “When that happens, you get new crust being formed at mid-ocean ridges and emission of carbon.”

The amount of carbon released into the atmosphere from continental rifts and mid-ocean ridges is a product of the length of the rift and how fast they pull apart, says Mather, but the proportion of carbon released previously stayed comparatively steady. “But the emissions from volcanic arcs have significantly increased in the last 100 million years thanks to this new reservoir of carbon on the seafloor from these plankton calcium carbonate suppliers,” he says. “Compared to 150 million years ago, volcanic arcs now emit two-thirds more carbon.”

Earth is currently in a short, warm period known as an interglacial within a much longer ice age that began 34 million years ago. One factor contributing to the ongoing cool spell is that these phytoplankton take so much carbon out of the ocean and lock it into the sea floor. While the amount of carbon in volcanic arc eruptions has increased, it is still less than what the phytoplankton store on the sea floor and what gets pulled into Earth’s interior by tectonic movement.

Alan Collins at the University of Adelaide, Australia, says modelling work such as this study is vital to understanding how the impact of volcanism and tectonic activity on the climate has changed through time.

“The composition of ocean sediments has changed as different creatures evolve that use different elements in their composition, such as the evolution and progressive dominance of calcium carbonate zooplankton,” says Collins.

Journal reference: Nature Communications Earth and Environment, DOI TK

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MATHEMATICS | JAN 16, 2026, 10:24 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Amateur mathematicians solve long-standing maths problems with AI

Professional mathematicians have been stunned by the progress amateurs have made in solving long-standing problems with the assistance of AI tools, and say it could lead to a new way of doing mathematics

By Alex Wilkins

AI tools are helping to decipher long-standing maths problems

andresr/Getty Images

Amateur mathematicians are using artificial intelligence chatbots to solve long-standing problems, in a move that has taken professionals by surprise. While the problems in question aren’t the most advanced in the mathematical canon, the success of AI models in tackling them shows that their mathematical performance has passed a significant threshold, say researchers, and could fundamentally change the way we do mathematics.

The questions being solved by AI originate from Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős, who was famous for his ability to pose useful but difficult questions during a career that spanned over six decades. “The questions tended to be very simple, but very hard,” says Thomas Bloom at the University of Manchester, UK.

By his death in 1996, there were more than 1000 of these unsolved Erdős problems, spanning a wide range of mathematical disciplines, from combinatorics (the study of combinations) to number theory. Today, they are seen as signposts for progress in these fields, says Bloom, who runs a website that catalogues the problems and tracks mathematicians’ progress in solving them.

Because Erdős problems are often simple to state, mathematicians began experimenting with feeding them to AI tools like ChatGPT. Bloom says that in October last year, he began seeing people use AI models to find relevant references in the mathematical literature that helped with their solutions.

Soon after, AI tools began finding partial improvements to results, some of which had been found in past papers, while others appeared new.

“I was surprised then,” says Bloom. “Before, when I tried ChatGPT, it just made up papers, completely hallucinating, and so I had given up using it. But clearly, there was some sort of change around October. I actually found genuine papers because it had read them all, and often in a non-trivial way.”

Inspired by this progress, Kevin Barreto, an undergraduate mathematics student at Cambridge University, and Liam Price, an amateur mathematician, began looking for simple and understudied Erdős problems that they might solve with AI. After finding one such problem, number 728, a conjecture in number theory, they fed it to ChatGPT-5.2 Pro to solve it.

“I looked at the statement, and thought, ‘This one might be able to get solved by ChatGPT, so let’s try it,’” says Barreto. “Sure enough, it comes back with an argument that’s quite nice and that a lot of people would actually agree was rather sophisticated.”

After ChatGPT produced a proof, Barreto and Price used another AI tool called Aristotle, created by the AI company Harmonic, to verify their work. Aristotle converts the conventional language proof into one written in Lean, a mathematical programming language. It can then be instantly checked by a computer for correctness. This is an important step, says Bloom, as it saves the limited time that researchers have to check whether a result is correct or not.

As of mid-January, six Erdős problems have been fully solved by AI tools, though subsequent scrutiny by professional mathematicians revealed that five of these problems had previously been solved in the mathematical literature. Only one problem, number 205, has been fully solved by Barreto and Price with no pre-existing solution. AI tools have also enabled small improvements and partial solutions to seven other problems that don’t appear to be pre-existing in the literature.

As a result, there is an ongoing debate about whether these tools are really proving new ideas, or merely digging out old and forgotten solutions. Bloom points out that the AI models often have to translate the problems into new forms, and are discovering papers that make no mention of Erdős. “A lot of these papers, I wouldn’t have found, and maybe nobody would have found for a lot longer without this sort of [use of] the AI tool,” he says.

Another question is just how far this approach can go. All of these problems aren’t the most demanding in mathematics, and could perhaps be accomplished by a first-year PhD student, but that is still impressive, says Bloom. “To me, it’s incredible that AI is capable of that, because this takes non-trivial effort.”

Barreto also says that the problems being solved are relatively straightforward, even when compared with more difficult Erdős problems, which current AI models fall short of solving. “Once [AI] gets through the low-hanging fruit problems, a lot of them are going to need more capable models,” he says. Some of the hardest problems have prize money set aside for anyone who can solve them, but Barreto thinks that is unlikely to happen soon: “Some people are trying to do bounty problems, and to me that’s kind of nuts. I don’t think the models are there yet.”

Solving Erdős problems using AI is promising progress, says Kevin Buzzard at Imperial College London, but because most of the problems it is solving are either relatively straightforward or have had little attention, it makes it hard to gauge whether it is a significant achievement – or something that should concern professionals. “That is progress, but mathematicians aren’t going to be looking over their shoulders just yet,” says Buzzard. “It’s green shoots.”

But even if the models’ capability stays static, their ability to handle relatively complex mathematics could fundamentally change how researchers research and write proofs, says Bloom, because it will allow mathematicians who have limited knowledge of areas outside their particular discipline to draw on other fields.

“Almost nobody knows every part of math, and that means that we’re quite limited in the sets of tools that we can use,” says Bloom. “The fact that you can just get an answer instantly, without having to bother another human, without having to waste months learning potentially useless knowledge, opens up so many connections. That’s going to be a huge change that we’ll see, just increasing the breadth of research that’s done.”

This could also allow mathematicians to practice an entirely new way of working, says Terence Tao at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has helped validate some of the AI-assisted Erdős problem solutions.

Mathematicians often focus on a small number of difficult problems because of limited time, while many less difficult but still important problems don’t get much attention. If AI tools can be applied to them all at once, it could lead to a more empirical, scientific way of doing mathematics, says Tao, where different ways of solving a problem could be tested on a large scale.

“We are just so resource-limited by how much expert attention we have, that we don’t look at 99 per cent of all the problems that we could be studying,” says Tao. “So we don’t do things like survey hundreds of problems, trying to find one or two really interesting ones, or do statistical studies like, we have two different methods, which one is better?

“This is a type of mathematics that just isn’t done,” he says. “We don’t do large-scale mathematics because we don’t have the intellectual resources, but AI is showing that you can.”

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COLUMNIST TECHNOLOGY | JAN 16, 2026, 10:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How to finally get a grasp on quantum computing

If your New Year’s resolution is to understand quantum computing this year, take a cue from a 9-year-old podcaster talking to some of the biggest minds in the field, says quantum columnist Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

IBM’s Quantum System Two on display at a data centre in Germany

Quantum computing seems to pop up in the news pretty often these days. You’ve probably seen quantum chips gracing your feeds and their odd, steampunk-ish cooling systems in the pages of magazines and newspapers. Politicians and business leaders are peppering their announcements with the word “quantum” more frequently, too. If you’re feeling a little confused about it all, it’s a good year for a New Year’s resolution to finally figure out what quantum computing is all about.

This is an ambitious goal, and the timing certainly makes sense. The quantum computing industry has seen many scientific achievements this past year, and the field is now worth more than $1 billion – a figure projected to double within the next two years. But wherever there is money and growing interest, there is also bound to be lots of hype.

Plenty of questions remain about when or how a quantum computer may be able to outdo conventional computers. Mathematicians and theorists may be able to answer some of them, but our best bet might be to just build better quantum computers and, well, mess around with them. Even that isn’t easy, though: there’s no broad consensus on how to build a better quantum computer.

Making matters worse for the quantum-computing-curious, quantum mechanics is genuinely hard to grasp. Physicists still disagree on how exactly we should make sense of the strange quantum phenomena like superpositions or entanglement. Yet it is exactly these odd properties that are the crucial ingredients of quantum computing.

If that sounds overwhelming, you are not alone. But I believe these barriers are not insurmountable. Just look to the kids.

I used to be a high school teacher and there were always a few students in my classes that would hang back after lectures to ask me surprisingly technical questions about quantum computing. They were curious, and that was sufficient for them to learn enough to ask great questions, even when their mastery of mathematics and physics was not exceptionally advanced. One year, a student approached me after completing an online quantum computing course over the summer just for fun, and they effectively knew more about writing quantum computer code than I did! We spent the following year working through lessons that I would have otherwise only taught to college students.

A few months ago, I found another quantum-knowledge-seeker who was starting young. A 9-year-old YouTuber called Kai co-hosts a podcast called The Quantum Kid, in which he asks questions about quantum computers to some of the world’s leading experts while more than 88,000 subscribers watch and learn alongside him.

Kai’s co-host is his mother, Katia Moskvitch, a physicist with a long career in science writing. Moskvitch works at Quantum Machines, a company that builds conventional computing devices that help quantum computers actually work, so she is no stranger to the industry. Kai brings lots of curiosity and excitement to the podcast, and he has the great privilege to pose questions to people who have played huge roles in shaping our modern ideas about quantum computing.

Peter Shor formulated the most famous quantum computing algorithm, and he joined the podcast to talk to Kai about what quantum computers may have to do with improving sustainability and combating climate change. Nobel laureate and former US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu makes an appearance in the same episode. Computer scientist Scott Aaronson, an influential expert on quantum computing algorithms, chats with Kai about whether quantum mechanics allows time travel and whether even such a fanciful idea may, in theory, have some ties to quantum computing. John Preskill, another physicist whose work impacted how we measure quantum computers’ success today, comes on to chat about quantum computing and robotics alongside roboticist Ken Goldberg.

Kai and his co-host (and mother) Katia Moskvitch

To be clear, The Quantum Kid will not necessarily provide you with rigorous mathematical knowledge about quantum computing, but it’s a great start and a charming way to hear from some of the field’s biggest names. Most episodes do touch on the basics of quantum mechanics, like superposition states or the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but to truly understand them in detail, I would recommend reading further, perhaps in a publication like New Scientist.

The value and charm of The Quantum Kid lie in the fact that Kai asks exactly the questions you may have if all you know about quantum computers is that they’re somehow special and potentially very powerful. In other words, if you have resolved to finally understand quantum computers but feel like you know nothing, Kai is here to tell you to be curious and ask questions anyway. (I’d also be happy to help guide you through the thorny world of everything quantum.)

Can quantum computers help us explore space or travel to the past? Can they help us make smarter robots and fight climate change? Will we ever use them to make airplane navigation better or create materials that currently seem like a fantasy? The answers to these questions are complex and nuanced and full of uncertainty. Explaining that to an excited 9-year-old requires clarity and kindness, something that the viewers of The Quantum Kid also benefit from. I loved hearing Peter Shor repeatedly say that existing quantum computers are, by and large, not powerful enough to change the world without completely dampening Kai’s enthusiasm.

In the first episode, physicists Renato Renner tells Kai that “you will grow up with a new machine that can potentially do new things, and you have to think about how to use it,” which sets up an optimistic, future-facing tone for the podcast that is echoed by many of its guests.

This is also just the right attitude to take into any quantum learning project you may embark on this year – a mix of Kai’s enthusiasm, imagination and curiosity and his guests’ grounded and nuanced expertise. Quantum computing is complicated and full of caveats, but that speaks to the utter newness of it, and what could be more exciting? And if a 9-year-old can handle a taste of that, you can certainly give it a shot too.

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 16, 2026, 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A leading use for quantum computers might not need them after all

Understanding a molecule that plays a key role in nitrogen fixing – a chemical process that enables life on Earth – has long been thought of as problem for quantum computers, but now a classical computer may have solved it

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Do quantum computers offer a way to vastly improve agriculture?

As quantum computers continue to advance, identifying problems they can solve faster than the world’s best conventional computers is becoming increasingly important – but it turns out that a key task held up as a future goal by quantum proponents may not need a quantum computer at all.

The task in question involves a molecule called FeMoco, which plays a vital role in making life on Earth possible. That is because it is part of the process of nitrogen fixation, in which microbes convert atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia, making it biologically accessible to most other living organisms. How exactly FeMoco works during this process is complicated and not fully understood, but if we could crack it and replicate it on an industrial scale, it could drastically cut the energy involved in producing fertilisers, potentially leading to a boost in crop yields.

One key aspect of understanding FeMoco is determining its lowest, or “ground-state”, energy, which involves accounting for the behaviour of its many electrons. But electrons are quantum particles that can behave in wave-like ways and occupy many different regions called orbitals. This level of complexity – with many electrons in many orbitals – is why computing lots of FeMoco’s properties has, so far, been intractable with conventional computers.

Researchers have had some success using approximation methods, but the accuracy of their energy estimates remained limited. On the other hand, mathematical investigations have rigorously proven that quantum computers, which encode this complexity in a fundamentally different manner, could solve the problem without approximations – a well-established example of so-called quantum advantage.

But now, Garnet Kin-Lic Chan at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues have found a conventional computing method that seems to be able to reach the same accuracy as a quantum one. The key metric has been the idea of “chemical accuracy”, or the minimal accuracy required to make realistic predictions for chemical processes. Based on their computations, Chan and his colleagues argue that conventional supercomputers can calculate FeMoco’s ground-state energy to that accuracy too.

FeMoco has many quantum states, each of which has its own energy, and they are arranged on something like a ladder with the ground state at the very bottom. To make reaching that bottom rung more amenable to classical computer algorithms, the researchers focused on what we know about states that sit on nearby rungs and what their properties imply about what can exist a step or two below. This included, for example, insights about symmetries of electrons’ quantum states.

Ultimately, the simplification allowed the researchers to use classical algorithms to calculate upper bounds for FeMoco’s ground-state energy, then mathematically extrapolate them to an energy value with an uncertainty that matches chemical accuracy. In other words, their final answer for what the molecule’s lowest energy can be ought to be precise enough to use in future studies.

The researchers also estimated that the supercomputer method may even be faster than quantum ones, performing calculations in less than a minute that would take 8 hours on a quantum device – although this estimate assumes an ideal supercomputer performance.

So, does that mean we will soon understand FeMoco well enough to boost agriculture? Not quite – there are still many unanswered questions about, for instance, which parts of the molecule interact with nitrogen the most or what molecules may be produced as intermediate steps in the nitrogen-fixation process.

“The work doesn’t really tell us much about the FeMoco system in terms of its function, but as a model to show quantum advantage, it does place the bar even higher for quantum approaches,” says David Reichmann at Columbia University in New York.

Dominic Berry at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, points out that while the team’s work shows that classical computers can attack the FeMoco problem, they are still only capable of approximation, while quantum methods guarantee that the problem can be solved in full.

“This does challenge the argument for using quantum computers for problems like this, but for more complicated systems, it is expected that the computation time for classical methods will increase much faster than that for quantum algorithms,” he says.

Another issue is that quantum computers are still improving. Existing quantum computers are all too small and error-prone to tackle problems like FeMoco’s ground-state energy, but a new generation of fault-tolerant quantum computers, which are able to correct their own errors, is expected soon. In practical terms, they may still be the best way to understand FeMoco and related molecules, says Berry. “Quantum computing should enable these systems to be solved far more generally, making it a routine calculation when fault-tolerant quantum computers are available.”

Reference

arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.04621

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 15, 2026, 3:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Lithium-ion batteries could last longer with chemical tweak

It's difficult to form a protective coating that prolongs battery life at the battery's cathode, but there may be a low-cost chemical solution

By Victoria Corless

Lithium-ion batteries could eventually last longer

It may be possible to extend the life of lithium-ion batteries using standard, low-cost chemistry.

Lithium-ion batteries consist of a negative anode and a positive cathode with a porous separator between the two. This is immersed in an electrolyte that enables lithium ions to shuttle between the electrodes during charge and discharge.

At the negative electrode, the electrolyte breaks down to form a thin protective coating that keeps the battery stable and prolongs its lifespan.

Chunsheng Wang at the University of Maryland says that creating a similar protective layer on the cathode has always been considered much more difficult because the electrical conditions there are different, creating a more reactive environment and causing conventional electrolytes to break down before a stable coating can form.

Wang and his colleagues overcame this hurdle using a simple reaction borrowed from organic chemistry, which makes the electrolyte more “willing” to accept electrons and steers its breakdown into a controlled process that builds a stable protective coating at the cathode.

“By guiding how the electrolyte breaks down at the molecular level, we were able to precisely control the protective layer that forms on the cathode,” says Xiyue Zhang, a postdoctoral research associate in Wang’s group.

The chemistry is also flexible. The resulting cathode-electrolyte layer can be tuned to be either more protective, strongly shielding the cathode, or less protective, offering weaker protection but allowing faster electrochemical reactions and providing additional energy. This means batteries can be optimised to give maximum power and energy or longer lifespan and stability.

“If one can ensure the formation of the [cathode-electrolyte layer], this will be a step forward in ensuring longer cycling of the battery,” says Michel Armand at CIC energiGUNE, an energy storage research centre in Spain. Given that Wang and his colleagues used well-established chemical procedures to modify the battery design, such batteries should be safe and easy to manufacture, says Armand.

It is currently unclear by exactly how much the new approach could boost the longevity of lithium-ion batteries, but this should become clearer later in the technology’s development.

“It is a relatively straightforward tweak to existing batteries,” says Wang. “After safety and long-cycle tests, this approach [could] realistically reach consumers.”

Journal reference:

Nature Chemistry DOI: 10.1038/s41557-025-02009-1

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 15, 2026, 5:36 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

All major AI models risk encouraging dangerous science experiments

Researchers risk fire, explosion or poisoning by allowing AI to design experiments, warn scientists. Some 19 different AI models were tested on hundreds of questions to assess their ability to spot and avoid hazards and none recognised all issues – with some doing little better than random guessing

By Matthew Sparkes

Scientific laboratories can be dangerous places

PeopleImages/Shutterstock

The use of AI models in scientific laboratories risks enabling dangerous experiments that could cause fires or explosions, researchers have warned. Such models offer a convincing illusion of understanding but are susceptible to missing basic and vital safety precautions. In tests of 19 cutting-edge AI models, every single one made potentially deadly mistakes.

Serious accidents in university labs are rare but certainly not unheard of. In 1997, chemist Karen Wetterhahn was killed by dimethylmercury that seeped through her protective gloves; in 2016, an explosion cost one researcher her arm; and in 2014, a scientist was partially blinded.

Now, AI models are being pressed into service in a variety of industries and fields, including research laboratories where they can be used to design experiments and procedures. AI models designed for niche tasks have been used successfully in a number of scientific fields, such as biology, meteorology and mathematics. But large general-purpose models are prone to making things up and answering questions even when they have no access to data necessary to form a correct response. This can be a nuisance if researching holiday destinations or recipes, but potentially fatal if designing a chemistry experiment.

To investigate the risks, Xiangliang Zhang at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and her colleagues created a test called LabSafety Bench that can measure whether an AI model identifies potential hazards and harmful consequences. It includes 765 multiple-choice questions and 404 pictorial laboratory scenarios that may include safety problems.

In multiple-choice tests, some AI models, such as Vicuna, scored almost as low as would be seen with random guesses, while GPT-4o reached as high as 86.55 per cent accuracy and DeepSeek-R1 as high as 84.49 per cent accuracy. When tested with images, some models, such as InstructBlip-7B, scored below 30 per cent accuracy. The team tested 19 cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) and vision language models on LabSafety Bench and found that none scored more than 70 per cent accuracy overall.

Zhang is optimistic about the future of AI in science, even in so-called self-driving laboratories where robots work alone, but says models are not yet ready to design experiments. “Now? In a lab? I don’t think so. They were very often trained for general-purpose tasks: rewriting an email, polishing some paper or summarising a paper. They do very well for these kinds of tasks. [But] they don’t have the domain knowledge about these [laboratory] hazards.”

“We welcome research that helps make AI in science safe and reliable, especially in high-stakes laboratory settings,” says an OpenAI spokesperson, pointing out that the researchers did not test its leading model. “GPT-5.2 is our most capable science model to date, with significantly stronger reasoning, planning, and error-detection than the model discussed in this paper to better support researchers. It’s designed to accelerate scientific work while humans and existing safety systems remain responsible for safety-critical decisions.”

Google, DeepSeek, Meta, Mistral and Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

Allan Tucker at Brunel University of London says AI models can be invaluable when used to assist humans in designing novel experiments, but that there are risks and humans must remain in the loop. “The behaviour of these [LLMs] are certainly not well understood in any typical scientific sense,” he says. “I think that the new class of LLMs that mimic language – and not much else – are clearly being used in inappropriate settings because people trust them too much. There is already evidence that humans start to sit back and switch off, letting AI do the hard work but without proper scrutiny.”

Craig Merlic at the University of California, Los Angeles, says he has run a simple test in recent years, asking AI models what to do if you spill sulphuric acid on yourself. The correct answer is to rinse with water, but Merlic says he has found AIs always warn against this, incorrectly adopting unrelated advice about not adding water to acid in experiments because of heat build-up. However, he says, in recent months models have begun to give the correct answer.

Merlic says that instilling good safety practices in universities is vital, because there is a constant stream of new students with little experience. But he’s less pessimistic about the place of AI in designing experiments than other researchers.

“Is it worse than humans? It’s one thing to criticise all these large language models, but they haven’t tested it against a representative group of humans,” says Merlic. “There are humans that are very careful and there are humans that are not. It’s possible that large language models are going to be better than some percentage of beginning graduates, or even experienced researchers. Another factor is that the large language models are improving every month, so the numbers within this paper are probably going to be completely invalid in another six months.”

Journal reference:

Nature Machine Intelligence DOI: 10.1038/s42256-025-01152-1

TECHNOLOGY | JAN 16, 2026, 3:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Cheating just three times massively ups the chance of winning at chess

Using a chess computer to advise you on just three moves during a game dramatically increases your chances of winning in a way that is difficult for others to spot

By Chris Stokel-Walker

It isn’t always easy to detect cheating in chess

SimpleImages/Getty

Just three judiciously deployed cheats can turn an otherwise equal chess game into a near-certain victory, a new analysis shows – and systems designed to crack down on cheating might not notice the foul play.

Daniel Keren at the University of Haifa in Israel simulated 100,000 matches using the powerful Stockfish chess engine – a computer system that, at its maximum power, is better at playing chess than any human world champion. The matches were played between two computer engines competing at the level of an average chess player – 1500 on the Elo rating scale typically used to calculate skill level in chess. Half the games were logged without any further intervention, while the other half allowed occasional intervention by a stronger computer chess “player” with an Elo score of 3190 – a higher rating than any human player has ever achieved.

Competitors usually have a slim advantage when playing white, with a 51 per cent chance of winning, on average, tied to the fact that they make the game’s first move. But Keren found this advantage could be boosted to a 66 per cent chance of winning on average if the player used a computer chess-playing system like Stockfish for advice on just one move in the game. If the player cheats and asks for advice three times, their chance of victory increases to 84 per cent on average, Keren discovered.

“I thought that one cheat would increase the ratio to 55 per cent and another one to maybe 60 per cent,” he says. “Cheating three times and you reach 84 per cent – to me, that was astounding.”

When you cheat matters, says Keren. One well-timed intervention – for instance, about 30 moves into the game – from a powerful chess-playing engine could improve the chance of victory by 15 percentage points, compared with the 7.5 percentage point improvement seen if five cheats were deployed at random throughout the game.

The study used a system that decided to intervene only when the stronger player’s suggested move improved the win probability substantially compared with the move that the less skilful player was going to select. The criteria for cheating also became more stringent as each match progressed. “It’s kind of lenient in the first cheats, but as you advance, it demands a bigger advantage in order to cheat,” says Keren.

Such a system provides what Keren calls “a measure of camouflage” that could avoid someone being spotted and banned by the automated systems that online chess platforms use to crack down on cheating. Keren says those automated systems could plausibly fail to spot that an unusually good move actually came from a computer because it might conclude that the move was simply the human player having a “brilliant moment of inspiration”.

“A single engine ‘hint’ in the right position can be game-deciding, and because humans can sometimes find the same best move, that kind of selective cheating is unusually difficult to prove from move analysis alone,” says Kim Schu at the University of Mainz in Germany, who says the paper is interesting.

Keren says his work isn’t designed to help people cheat, but to assist chess platforms in understanding the risk from a small amount of carefully deployed deception. “The idea is to see what cheating can do,” he says. “Know thy enemy, right?”

The chess community, which is increasingly playing online, needs to work harder to identify instances of cheating, says Schu. “A strong anti-cheating approach needs to combine multiple signals,” he says, recommending it include analysis of behavioural patterns, timing of moves and the broader history of any online chess accounts.

Reference:

arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2601.05386

Space

- The most important second in the entire history of the universe (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Earliest ever supernova sheds light on the first stars (paid): 2026 Jan 16

- Distant 'little red dot' galaxies may contain baby black holes (paid): 2026 Jan 15

COLUMNIST SPACE | JAN 19, 2026, 8:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The most important second in the entire history of the universe

In the 13.8 billion years that our universe has been around, some moments stand out over others – for the most exciting and impactful one, we have to go back to the very beginning, says cosmology columnist Leah Crane

By Leah Crane

Artist’s interpretation of the universe in its first moments

ALFRED PASIEKA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY/Alamy Stock Photo

The first second of the universe was, without a doubt, the most eventful in all of history. The universe started small. Infinitely small, in fact, if you subscribe to big bang cosmology, which most cosmologists do. In the first second of the universe, though, it went from being an infinitely tiny, infinitely dense point to a complex cosmos spanning light years.

It all began with inflation. We’re not exactly sure why the universe immediately began to expand exponentially, but about every 10^37th of a second, the distance between any two points in space doubled. This carried on until the cosmos had multiplied in size one billion billion billion billion times. That is, it grew by at least a factor of 10^26 – that’s more than 100,000 times the number of grains of sand on all the beaches on Earth. It’s more than 1000 times the total number of stars in the known universe.

During the inflationary period, the cosmos laid the bricks that would later become the largest structures we know of. As everything spread out, inhomogeneities that were extremely minuscule in the beginning became bigger too, spreading across the new expanse of space-time. These tiny fluctuations are inevitable because of the innate randomness of quantum mechanics, and as they made waves throughout our young universe, they created subtle differences in the density of the sizzling hot plasma that filled all of space.

It is debated exactly how long the inflationary epoch lasted and exactly what size the universe was at the end of it – ask a cosmologist and they will probably compare it to a fruit, but whether it’s a blueberry or a grapefruit or a melon will be a surprise, and all of them are equally valid estimates. But everyone agrees that it lasted a tiny fraction of a second, and at that point the entire universe would have been somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a few metres across, despite its astonishingly rapid expansion. At that point, the entire universe was, essentially, a hot, opaque ball of plasma, the first few particles and antiparticles mixed in with raw energy.

As that hot ball expanded, it started to cool and things got increasingly complex. The particles lost enough heat to begin combining with one another, forming the first hadrons, among them the protons and neutrons that make up so much of matter today. These were also the first baryons that formed – before this event, called baryogenesis, there were only fundamental particles, such as the sub-subatomic quarks that make up subatomic baryons. For some as-yet-unknown reason, there was more matter than antimatter, so most of the antimatter collided with matter and annihilated while the matter persisted.

As the particles were evolving, our small universe went through a series of what cosmologists call “phase transitions”, in which the state of all matter in the entire cosmos changed all at once. That was the last time this kind of synchronicity existed across the whole universe. From there, paths split. The four forces – gravity, the strong force, the weak force and the electromagnetic force – were unified at the big bang, but through a series of phase transitions within the first billionth of a second, they separated out and began behaving differently from one another, as they do today.

Those phase transitions heralded a series of changes. The universe stopped being opaque, and radiation flowed freely, lighting up the cosmos. Newborn matter particles gained mass by interacting with the Higgs field, which was itself newly separated from the other fields. Before this moment, a trillionth of a second after the big bang, they had all been massless. The universe, at a size of less than a light year across, was beginning to become recognisable as the one we live in.

It was also beginning to get clumpy, thanks to those quantum fluctuations that began when everything else banged into existence. The subtle clumping they caused would turn out to be one of the most important things that ever happened, allowing denser areas of space to eventually collapse into stars, which made up galaxies and clusters to form the large-scale structure of the universe – but that took aeons, not seconds.

Around a second after the big bang, the frenzy of cosmic evolution started to slow down. The diameter of the whole universe was still far less than the current distance between the sun and Alpha Centauri, our nearest stellar neighbour, so everything was still extraordinarily hot and dense compared to today, but most of the particles and forces that shaped the later universe had already taken the forms in which we see them now.

Atomic nuclei didn’t come around until a few minutes later, and they didn’t start holding onto the electrons that they needed to become neutral atoms for hundreds of thousands of years. Stars and galaxies didn’t start to form until at least tens of millions of years after that. But the foundations were laid, and all that foundation-laying, the baking of bricks and the pouring of the concrete, took only a single second. The specific details are still somewhat fuzzy, because an awful lot of seconds have happened since then, and cosmologists are wading through everything that arose between then and now to try to untangle it.

But however it played out in that one second, that’s all it took: just a single second to push the universe from a point in a sea of nothingness to the cosmological primordial soup from which everything would emerge.

SPACE | JAN 16, 2026, 7:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Earliest ever supernova sheds light on the first stars

The James Webb Space Telescope has picked up the light from a massive star that exploded about a billion years after the birth of the universe

By Alex Wilkins

James Webb Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster containing the SN Eos supernova

Astronomers have caught a massive star exploding just moments after the universe emerged from the cosmic dark ages, shedding light on how the first stars were born and how they die.

When stars run out of fuel and explode, they produce a burst of powerful light called a supernova. Supernovae can look extremely bright in our local universe, but the light from a star exploding in the early universe can take billions of years to reach Earth, by which time it has dimmed and become too faint to see.

Because of this, astronomers can typically only see very distant supernovae in special cases, such as for type Ic supernovae, which are stellar cores that have lost their outer gas and produce an exceptionally bright burst of gamma rays. But the more typical type II supernovae, which are the most common stellar explosions we see in our galaxy and occur when a massive star runs out of fuel, are normally too faint to see.

Now, David Coulter at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues have spotted a type II supernova called SN Eos from when the universe was just a billion years old, using the James Webb Space Telescope.

The stellar explosion was fortunately placed behind a massive cluster of galaxies, whose powerful gravity magnified its light and made it tens of times brighter than it would normally appear, and so easier to study in detail.

The researchers analysed the spectrum of light coming from SN Eos, making it the earliest supernova that has been confirmed using spectroscopy. The results clearly show it is a type II supernova, which means it must have come from a massive star.

It also shows that the star that produced it had very low amounts of elements other than hydrogen or helium – less than 10 per cent of the amounts in our sun. This is how astronomers think the early universe looked, because there hadn’t been much time for multiple generations of stars to form and die and produce heavier elements.

“That tells us immediately about what kind of stellar population [the star] exploded in,” says Or Graur at the University of Portsmouth, UK. “High-mass stars explode very, very quickly after birth. In cosmological terms, a million years or so, that’s nothing. So they tell you about the ongoing star formation in that galaxy.”

When we see light at these distances, it’s typically from small galaxies, where you can infer average properties of what stars might be in those galaxies. But studying individual stars at these distances is typically not possible, says Matt Nicholl at Queen’s University Belfast, UK.

“We can see this individual star, with beautiful data, at a [distance] where we’ve never seen an isolated supernova, and the data are good enough to see that the stars are different from most of the stars in the local universe,” he says.

This would have been just a few hundred million years after a period in the universe’s history known as the epoch of reionisation, says Graur. That was when light from the first stars began to strip electrons from neutral hydrogen gas, which blocks most forms of radiation, and turned it into ionised hydrogen, which is transparent. Before this, the universe was opaque, so SN Eos is effectively as distant a supernova as we might hope to see.

“This is very, very close to that period of reionisation when the universe exited its short, dark period and photons could stream freely again and we could see things,” says Graur.

Reference:

arXiv DOI: arXiv:2601.04156

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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SPACE | JAN 15, 2026, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Distant 'little red dot' galaxies may contain baby black holes

Since launching in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has found hundreds of distant and apparently bright galaxies dubbed "little red dots", and now it seems they may each carry a baby black hole

By Alex Wilkins

A collection of “little red dots” spotted by the James Webb Space Telescope

NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, and D. Kocevski (Colby U.)/Space Telescope Science Institute Office of Public Outreach

Impossibly bright galaxies discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) may not be so bright after all. These galaxies once threatened to upend our understanding of the cosmos by suggesting it contained monstrous black holes or far more stars than we had anticipated, but astronomers now think the galaxies might actually contain “baby” black holes instead.

In its first few years scanning the early universe, JWST unexpectedly discovered hundreds of very red and extremely bright galaxies, which astronomers called “little red dots” (LRDs).

The amount of light coming from these galaxies suggested that they contained either a density of stars that was far greater than any galaxy we know of, and which would be difficult to square with the mass of the universe that we expect, or black holes that were far more massive than astronomers thought possible given the size of their host galaxies.

Both of these scenarios would have required significant adjustments to our models of galaxy formation and black hole growth in the early universe.

But these conclusions also rested on the assumption that the LRDs’ red colour was due to an abundance of dust, either around the black hole itself or surrounding the stars, because that is what is typically found in the very red galaxies of our local universe. Recently, that idea has been questioned, after researchers found a lack of evidence that LRDs contain dust after all.

Jenny Greene at Princeton University and her colleagues think that this finding means we need to reconceive what LRDs are. “We were sure that we could detect the dust emission, if indeed they were red because of dust, and then we did not find that emission at all,” says Greene. “That was the big clue that our assumption that they’re dusty is just wrong, that’s not why they’re red.”

Previous observations had inferred the total brightness of LRDs by measuring a specific single frequency of light, associated with the element hydrogen, which can then be used to calculate the total brightness, based on typical models of how dust affects this light.

In a new analysis, Greene and her team directly measured the total light emissions from two LRD galaxies by looking at many different frequencies of light, including X-rays and infrared. They found that for most frequencies, apart from visible light, there was much less light being emitted than for typical galaxies, suggesting that the LRDs were at least ten times dimmer than initial estimates suggested. This finding has implications for the black holes inside the LRDs.

“If there’s actually not as much light there as we thought, the black hole masses are probably much more modest,” says Greene. “Then they don’t have to be that over-massive, and we don’t have to have too much mass in black holes at early times, so it really alleviates a lot of the tension that was perplexing us.”

Because the light emissions suggest the black holes contain relatively little mass compared to standard black holes, team member Rohan Naidu at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology says we can think of them as “baby black holes.” He adds that this also fits with an emerging picture that the black holes in the LRDs are actually black hole stars – a special class of black hole surrounded by gas.

“In ordinary black holes, what you actually see with your eyes is the tip of the iceberg of the total energy that is coming out of the system, but the little red dots we now understand should really be thought of as these puffed-up black hole stars,” says Naidu. “It seems that most of their energy is coming out at these wavelengths that we see with our eyes, so what you see is what you get.”

But Roberto Maiolino at the University of Cambridge says that we can’t be sure about the masses of black holes in the LRDs, because the light being emitted from a black hole tells us about its rate of growth, not about its total mass.

Greene argues that the baby black hole idea is valid. “If there’s far fewer photons [being emitted], it means that the whole mass scale shifts down,” says Greene. “On average, they are lower mass than we thought when we incorrectly assumed that it was a normal accreting black hole buried by dust.”

Journal reference:

Astrophysical Journal DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae1836

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.

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Humans

- Cancelling plans may be more socially acceptable than you think (paid): 2026 Jan 16

HUMANS | JAN 16, 2026, 9:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Cancelling plans may be more socially acceptable than you think

Volunteers consider it relatively unacceptable to cancel social plans – but they are more forgiving if it's someone else cancelling the plans

By Carissa Wong

People can be surprisingly forgiving when someone cancels social plans

sturti/Getty Images

Many of us feel bad about cancelling social plans, but it turns out that those on the receiving end of a cancellation may be more accepting than we think.

“It suggests people shouldn’t get so stressed about cancelling,” says Esra Aslan at the Norwegian School of Economics in Bergen.

Prior studies have explored how people react when someone cancels a social plan, but there has been little research exploring how accurately we predict those reactions when we are doing the cancelling – something that Aslan realised when she scrapped a planned meet-up.

“I was supposed to meet a friend after work, and I told my colleague I didn’t really feel like going anymore. His immediate reaction was it wasn’t OK to cancel because I should keep my promises,” says Aslan.

“Shortly after, we told Raj [another colleague] the story and asked for his take – he got very excited and suggested we should test this,” she says.

The researchers asked about 400 adults, aged 42 on average, in the US to judge a scenario where two best friends had arranged to meet up for dinner, but then one of them had to cancel at the last minute due to an urgent work issue, leaving the other to eat at home alone.

The participants had to imagine themselves in the shoes of the person making the cancellation or receiving it, and judge the acceptability of the action on a scale from 1 (completely unacceptable) to 7 (mostly acceptable).

Those who were asked to imagine making the cancellation typically thought the friend in the scenario would be unimpressed by their actions. They estimated that the friend would give the cancellation an acceptability score of just 4.96, on average. But those who were asked to imagine receiving the cancellation felt differently. They gave the cancellation an acceptability score of 6.22, on average.

The same perception gap appeared in further experimental scenarios exploring various relationships and social activities.

“We didn’t find much difference if you cancel a dinner plan with your neighbour or with your best friend or with your work colleague,” says Rajarshi Majumder at the GEM Alpine Business School in France. The perception gap remained when the plan was a more public event like a concert, rather than a dinner, and even when a vaguer excuse for cancelling was given – catching up on a work project, he says.

The team hopes the findings will make people less anxious about cancelling plans, and speculate that this could even make them more social. “If we have these kind of concerns and stress and anxiety about cancelling, we might not make so many plans [in the first place],” speculates Aslan.

But the findings may differ in other countries, such as parts of Asia, where people are known to judge cancellations more harshly, says Majumder.

It’s also still important to show care when you cancel, says Aslan. “If people reschedule things and make a small gesture [of goodwill] beforehand, I think it will keep the relationships strong,” she says.

Reference:

PsyArXiv DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/st6a5_v1

Life

- Fossil may solve mystery of what one of the weirdest-ever animals ate (paid): 2026 Jan 15

LIFE | JAN 15, 2026, 10:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Fossil may solve mystery of what one of the weirdest-ever animals ate

Hallucigenia was such an odd animal that palaeontologists reconstructed it upside-down when they first analysed its fossils - and now we may know what it ate

By Michael Marshall

Hallucigenia, one of the strangest animals of all time

Alamy

One of the weirdest animals that ever lived may have been a scavenger. A re-examination of fossils first described in the 1970s seems to show a swarm of Hallucigenia feeding on the corpse of a comb jelly.

Hallucigenia was a small animal, up to 5 centimetres long. It had a worm-like body with multiple legs, as well as long, sharp spines on its back. Because of its peculiar appearance, palaeontologists at first reconstructed the animal upside-down, supposing the spines to be legs.

It lived in the deep seas during the Cambrian period (about 539 million to 487 million years ago), when many major animal groups emerged. Hallucigenia was first identified in rocks from the Burgess Shale deposits in British Columbia, Canada. It is related to velvet worms, tardigrades and arthropods (the group that includes insects and spiders).

Little is known about the ancient animal’s lifestyle. For instance, none of the Hallucigenia fossils found to date have preserved gut contents, so we don’t know what they ate.

Javier Ortega-Hernández at Harvard University re-examined a fossil from the Burgess Shale that was used in the original description of Hallucigenia in 1977, but which hadn’t been looked at since.

It is the remains of a soft-bodied, gelatinous organism, 3.5 cm by 1.9 cm, which has been severely damaged. Ortega-Hernández identified it as a comb jelly, or ctenophore.

Scattered over the comb jelly, Ortega-Hernández identified Hallucigenia spines, representing seven individuals. He suggests the comb jelly died and sank to the sea bed, where the Hallucigenia swarmed on it and fed, probably by suction feeding. While they were doing this, they were all buried in mud and eventually fossilised.

Ortega-Hernández declined to be interviewed by New Scientist because the paper hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed.

“I think it’s a convincing ecological interaction,” says palaeontologist Allison Daley at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. She calls it a “snapshot”, representing “a moment in time that maybe only lasted some minutes or hours that happened to be caught in the fossil record”.

Hallucigenia is known to have lived in deep water, says Daley, and nutrients are scarce in the depths. It makes sense that the species survived by quickly finding and eating rich food sources like a dead comb jelly. “Suction feeding would be very effective on such a soft animal,” she says.

Jean-Bernard Caron at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto is less convinced. Just because the Hallucigenia and ctenophore fossils are found together, he says, doesn’t necessarily mean they were interacting in real life. It could be that undersea mudslides carried them to the same resting place.

Because most of the known Hallucigenia fossils are just spines, Caron suggests an alternative interpretation: the animals may have moulted, shedding their skins to grow.

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2025.12.28.696761

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Health

- Realising the importance of our microbiome: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- We can rewrite our genetic code: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- The hidden power of epigenetics: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

- Meat may play an unexpected role in helping people reach 100: 2026 Jan 16

- Body fat supports your health in surprisingly complex ways: 2026 Jan 15

- 6 ways to help your children have a healthy relationship with food (paid): 2026 Jan 15

HEALTH | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Realising the importance of our microbiome: Best ideas of the century

Humans have been inadvertently using microbes to influence our health for thousands of years. But only recently has the microbiome rocketed to the forefront of healthcare

By Helen Thomson

Stephan Walter

“The gut microbiome has transformed our understanding of human health,” says Tim Spector at King’s College London, co-founder of the Zoe nutrition app. “We now know our microbes influence everything from metabolism and immunity to mental well-being.”

While this understanding has accelerated over the past 25 years, humans have long used microbes to influence health. While they didn’t realise what they were doing, the Romans used bacterial-derived remedies to “guard the stomach”, for instance.

In the 17th century, microbiologist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek first described the parasite Giardia, from his own stool. Yet it took another two centuries for scientists to validate his findings, and until the 21st century to appreciate how deeply the microbes that line our guts and skin affect our well-being.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

By the 1970s, researchers were making headway, realising that gut microbes could influence how drugs are broken down, altering their efficacy. Experiments with faecal transplants hinted at how microbial communities might restore health. But it was only in the 2000s, with rapid advances in genetic sequencing and computing, that the field was truly transformed. Early genome sequencing revealed that each person carries a unique microbial “fingerprint”, which includes viruses, fungi and archaea.

In the early 2000s, several landmark studies showed that our microbiome and immune system communicate directly. This symbiotic relationship reframed the microbiome as an active participant in our wellness, and it was soon found to influence numerous systems, from the pancreas to the brain.

Striking discoveries followed: faecal transplants could cure Clostridium difficile infections; microbes from mice with obesity could make lean mice gain weight; specific populations of bacteria could reverse autism-like symptoms in mice. More recently, there have even been signs that microbial dysfunction can trigger diabetes and Parkinson’s disease. “Recent discoveries about the human microbiome reveal its influence far beyond the gut,” says Lindsay Hall at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Today, researchers are getting a clearer picture of how microbial diversity underpins good health and how boosting it can help treat conditions like irritable bowel syndrome, depression and even some cancers. Studies are also exploring how to seed a healthy microbiome early in life, which Hall says could have “profound, lasting impacts on health”.

In just a few decades, the microbiome has gone from obscurity to being considered in all areas of medicine. Now, we enter a time where careful trials are needed to separate overhyped products from those that have the potential to reshape how we diagnose, prevent and treat disease.

HEALTH | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

We can rewrite our genetic code: Best ideas of the century

Our genomes are filled with errors that were once impossible to correct. But in CRISPR, we finally found an extraordinarily powerful tool for treating genetic disease – and perhaps making better versions of ourselves

By Michael Le Page

Stephan Walter

“The pain was like being struck by lightning and hit by a freight train all at the same time,” Victoria Gray told New Scientist in 2023. “Now everything is different for me.”

Gray used to experience severe episodes of sickle cell disease, but in 2019 she was effectively cured by a revolutionary technique that enables changes to be made to specific bits of our DNA: CRISPR gene editing. In 2023, that experimental treatment became the first approved CRISPR therapy.

There are hundreds of clinical trials of CRISPR-based treatments now under way, and this is just the start. CRISPR could help treat all kinds of diseases, not just genetic conditions. For instance, a single dose of CRISPR could reduce your risk of heart attacks and strokes by permanently lowering your cholesterol levels.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

And while it isn’t yet safe enough to attempt, it does seem likely that in the future, CRISPR will be routinely used to alter our children’s genomes to reduce their risk of common diseases.

CRISPR is also starting to transform farming by making it much easier to develop crops and livestock that are disease-resistant, adapted to warmer conditions or better for eating.

Given all this, there is no doubt that CRISPR is one of the very best ideas of the 21st century. Its power lies in its ability to correct “spelling mistakes” in DNA. There are two parts to this: first, you have to get your gene-editing tool to the right place in the genome, like moving your cursor to the right spot in a long document on a computer. Next, you make the change.

Microbes use this mechanism in their battle with other microbes and, prior to 2012, biologists had discovered many natural gene-editing proteins. However, each one targeted just one location, or sequence, in the genome. To edit a different spot, the only option was to redesign the part of the protein that binds to DNA to target another sequence, a laborious process that took years.

But it turns out that bacteria have evolved a big family of gene-editing proteins that don’t bind to DNA directly. Instead, they hook up with a piece of RNA – a cousin of DNA – and search for sequences that match the RNA. And making RNA takes days, not years.

In 2012, Jennifer Doudna at the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleague Emmanuelle Charpentier at the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin showed how one of these gene-editing proteins, called CRISPR Cas9, could be made to target any desired sequence by adding the right form of “guide RNA”.

There are now thousands of variants of CRISPR being used for many purposes, but all rely on guide-RNA targeting. It is a world-changing technology, for which Doudna and Charpentier were awarded a Nobel prize in 2020.

HEALTH | JAN 19, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The hidden power of epigenetics: Best ideas of the century

Following the surprising discovery that our genetic blueprint is much simpler than expected, we’ve rapidly learned that we have epigenetics to thank for our extraordinary complexity

By Colin Barras

Stephan Walter

At the dawn of the millennium, the number of genes in our genome was still up for discussion. When we finally got our first official estimate, the number was so far below expectations that it helped turbocharge a movement to rethink the evolutionary process.

In 2001, the Human Genome Project announced we have no more than 40,000 protein-coding genes – a figure that has since been revised down to about 20,000. We needed other mechanisms to explain the complexity of our biology and evolution. It was epigenetics’ time to shine.

Epigenetics is a catch-all term to describe how a wide variety of molecules interact with DNA or RNA to influence the activity of genes without changing the underlying genetic code. Two cells with identical genomes but different epigenetic markers can look and behave very differently.

This article is part of our special issue on the 21 best ideas of the 21st century.

Browse the full line-up here

Epigenetics offers a way to squeeze more complexity out of the genome, through things like environmental factors. And some biologists are convinced it can do much more, potentially even influencing the evolutionary process.

We know how this might happen. In a 2019 study in which yeast was exposed to a toxic chemical, the toxin killed the yeast by interacting with a protein produced by one of its genes. But yeast cells with the capacity to silence that gene, through an epigenetic pathway, survived. After several generations, some yeast cells in the thriving population developed genetic mutations that reinforced the silencing of the vulnerable gene. The yeast had evolved, its genetic code had changed – but those genetic changes began with epigenetic modifications.

Epigenetics has become a cornerstone of a drive to extend and expand evolutionary theory. But despite evidence that epigenetics can influence the evolution of plants and microbes, there isn’t universal acceptance that this applies more broadly.

“I am sceptical,” says Adrian Bird, who researches genetics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. In a paper last year, he argued there is no obvious way for environmental factors, such as drought and famine, to influence the mammalian genome. What’s more, epigenetic markers can be passed from parent to offspring, but many are removed early in mammalian embryo development.

Others brush off these concerns. “Epigenetic inheritance is common in both plants and animals,” says Kevin Lala, an evolutionary biologist at the University of St Andrews, UK. In a book published last year, Lala and his colleagues offered a long list of studies that suggest epigenetics affects evolution across life’s tree.

Why are opinions so strongly divided? Perhaps it’s a question of timing. “Epigenetic inheritance is a very fast-moving field,” says Lala. Although it has been on the biological radar for 80 years, it is only within the past 25 years that epigenetics has become a central focus of evolutionary research – and big ideas take time to process and assess.

HEALTH | JAN 16, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Meat may play an unexpected role in helping people reach 100

Longevity diets often focus on going plant-based, but a study in China has linked eating meat to a long lifespan, particularly among older people who are underweight

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

You might not have to ring in your 100th birthday with a dairy-free, egg-free cake

Xinhua/Shutterstock

Longevity pioneers like Bryan Johnson are going to extreme lengths in the quest for immortality, but for those of us who hope to reach 100 with less commitment, dietary tweaks are typically the first port of call. Going plant-based is often recommended, but now a study in China has revealed that most centenarians there eat meat, which may be particularly helpful for those who are underweight.

Meat is a rich source of certain amino acids that seem to affect a signalling molecule called mTOR, which contributes to the ageing process. Multiple studies suggest that cutting back on meat, or eliminating it, can promote longevity, as well as reduce the risk of conditions like heart disease. On the other hand, plant-based diets have been linked to an increased incidence of fractures and malnutrition.

Such issues could be especially problematic for older people, who tend to have weaker bones and recover poorly after surgery, says Kaiyue Wang at Fudan University in Shanghai. To better understand the link between diet and longevity, Wang and her colleagues gathered data from a centralised Chinese health database on people older than 65.

Pulling from the profiles, the researchers investigated the database’s 5203 participants, who were at least 80 years old in 1998 and were free of cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Of these, about 80 per cent said they were meat-eaters, while the others said they ate plant-based diets of mostly vegetables and grains, but also sometimes non-meat animal products.

The researchers observed that the meat eaters were more likely to reach 100 than their vegetarian, pescatarian and vegan counterparts. However, this was only statistically significant when they took body weight into account.

Of the vegetarians who had a body mass index below 18.5 (defined as being underweight) in 1998, 24 per cent reached 100, compared with nearly 30 per cent of the underweight meat eaters, with the odds seeming to rise further if they reported eating meat every day. The same trend wasn’t found for people of a heavier weight.

A meat-rich diet has been linked to obesity, but research also supports animal proteins for building stronger muscles and bones, which may be particularly helpful for people who are underweight, says Wang.

Still, eating plenty of vegetables is very important, with the researchers also finding that longevity was generally higher among the participants who reported consuming any amount every day.

“Older adults may face distinct nutritional challenges,” says Wang. “Our study suggests that dietary recommendations for the oldest-old should emphasise balance and nutritional adequacy, rather than strict avoidance of animal foods, especially for underweight older adults.”

The results may not apply to other parts of the world where people have different diets. However, “the underlying biological mechanisms related to nutrition and ageing are likely universal”, says Wang.

James Webster at the University of Oxford says the findings “shouldn’t alone change the way people eat”. His team’s previous work associating vegetarianism with an increased risk of hip fracture led to some assumptions that such diets might be unhealthy. But Webster points out that multiple papers have stressed the benefits of a vegetarian diet, particularly when it comes to health.

Both vegetarian and meat-based diets can be healthy or unhealthy, depending on their nutritional quality, says Webster. “It is important to understand what nutrients are needed for a balanced, healthy lifestyle,” he says. This includes eating plenty of whole grains, fruits and vegetables, while minimising salt, sugar and saturated fats.

“Ultimately, more evidence is needed before we can be confident in saying which diet is better for living longer, but we should look at the bigger picture when thinking about dietary patterns,” says Webster.

Journal reference:

The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition DOI: 10.1016/j.ajcnut.2025.101136

HEALTH | JAN 15, 2026, 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Body fat supports your health in surprisingly complex ways

Evidence is mounting that our body fat supports everything from our bone health to our mood, and now, research suggests it also regulates blood pressure and immunity

By Linda Geddes

Too much body fat isn’t healthy, but some kinds can be beneficial

happyfoto/Getty Images

If you thought body fat was just a passive storage depot for calories, think again. Research increasingly suggests that it plays an important role in our overall health, with two studies shedding new light on its complexity.

Fat exists in several forms. For instance, there’s white fat, which stores energy and releases hormones that influence metabolism; brown fat, which generates heat; and beige fat, which sits somewhere in between, switching on heat production under certain conditions. Even within these categories, location matters: fat under the skin is generally less harmful, while fat deep inside the abdomen – known as visceral fat – is strongly linked to inflammation, type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

The latest research adds further flesh to this picture, suggesting that fat, or adipose tissue, actively helps to regulate blood pressure and coordinate immune responses at key locations.

In one of the studies, Jutta Jalkanen at Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, Sweden, and her colleagues mapped the cellular architecture of visceral fat from multiple locations within the abdomen. They found that epiploic fat, which wraps around the large intestine, is unusually rich in immune cells, as well as specialised fat cells that produce inflammatory proteins associated with immune activation. Further experiments showed that microbial products originating in the gut trigger these fat cells to activate nearby immune cells.

“Our work shows that fat depots appear to be specialised according to their anatomical location, and those that sit right next to the intestine seem particularly adapted for immune interaction,” says Jalkanen.

Although the study involved people with obesity, Jalkanen suspects that epiploic fat serves similar core functions in people of all body weights, since everyone has some fat surrounding their intestine.

“The intestine is constantly exposed to nutrients, microbial products and substances coming from our environment,” says Jalkanen. “Having fat tissue nearby that can sense, respond to, and help coordinate immune reactions could provide an additional layer of protection.”

In obesity, however, this system may become chronically overactivated. Eating too much, or too much of certain foods, and having particular bacterial compositions within the gut microbiome could potentially drive persistent immune signalling in intestinal fat, contributing to the low-grade inflammation linked to a range of metabolic conditions, such as type 2 diabetes and obesity.

The second study reveals another unexpected role for fat: controlling blood pressure. Mascha Koenen at The Rockefeller University in New York and her colleagues set out to understand why obesity, characterised by excess white fat, is linked to high blood pressure, while brown and beige fat appear to be protective.

They focused on perivascular adipose tissue, a fatty layer rich in beige fat calls that surrounds blood vessels. In mice genetically engineered to lose their beige fat, blood vessels became stiffer and overreacted to everyday hormonal signals that constrict arteries, leading to elevated blood pressure.

The team traced this effect to an enzyme called QSOX1, released by dysfunctional fat cells. Blocking it prevented blood vessel damage and normalised blood pressure in mice, regardless of their body weight. “What this nicely shows is that the communication between different organ systems is critical to understand complex diseases such as hypertension and blood pressure regulation,” says Koenen.

“This study reveals an under-appreciated role for brown or beige fat,” says Kristy Townsend at The Ohio State University in Columbus. While deposits of perivascular adipose tissue are proportionately smaller in people than they are in mice, they are still probably physiologically relevant in us, she says. “[The study] emphasises a need for nuanced understanding of adipose impacts on health, independent of fat mass or body mass index (BMI) overall.”

The findings point to future therapies that focus less on simply reducing fat and more on preserving or restoring its beneficial functions by targeting specific fat depots, modulating immune-fat communication or maintaining healthy beige fat activity. However, any clinical applications would require further research.

Together, the studies highlight fat as an active, functionally diverse tissue involved in multiple aspects of human physiology. “When I started working in this field in the late 1990s, the prevailing view was that fat was just a simple bag of cells that stored excess nutrients,” says Paul Cohen, also at The Rockefeller University, who was involved with the second study. “These studies illustrate a growing shift in the field: recognising fat not as a single cell type, but as a complex tissue with many different types of cells with different roles and diverse processes, extending well beyond just nutrient storage and mobilisation.”

Journal reference:

Cell Metabolism DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2025.12.008

Journal reference:

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.ady8644

HEALTH | JAN 15, 2026, 6:56 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

6 ways to help your children have a healthy relationship with food

Getting kids to eat well can be a minefield and a source of tension. Nancy Bostock, a consultant paediatrician, says these are the six things she recommends when dealing with fussy eaters and the way we talk about food with kids.

By Nancy Bostock

Parents can take steps to encourage their children to develop positive eating habits

plainpicture/artwall

Nancy Bostock is increasingly worried about the messaging children and parents are receiving around food. A paediatrician at Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust, Bostock has worked in a children’s weight-management clinic and a children’s inpatient mental health unit, and co-led the development of a food strategy for the new Cambridge Children’s Hospital, making her uniquely positioned at the intersection of paediatric physical and mental health.

“I worry that parents are overwhelmed with advice from so many different places and so may end up doing things that aren’t necessarily helpful for their child,” she says. Bostock spoke to New Scientist to share six simple, science-backed approaches to help children develop a healthy relationship with food.

1. Notice the social and emotional aspects of food

Food, parenting and anxiety have an interlinked relationship. Sometimes this can develop early on. In some families I’ve met, the first few weeks after birth have contributed to anxiety around food. Parents feel pressured to breastfeed. I mean, breastfeeding is really good for your baby, but a mum being able to cope is also very important. Common difficulties that babies have in their early days and weeks – low blood sugar, jaundice and weight loss (which is normal to a certain degree in the first few days of life) – may feed into parental guilt about their ability to provide nourishment for their baby.

This anxiety may result in an over-focus on food for some parents, where they become very anxious about their children eating enough. This can lead to parents focusing much more on what and how much their children are eating than on the relationship they have with food. Remember that the vast majority of children will eat when they are hungry and drink when they are thirsty.

I have met many parents that worry their children don’t drink enough. However, if your child is well, you don’t need to check their water bottle or nag them to drink – their body will do that for them.

Being mindful about the social aspects of eating in your own family is also important. Just reflecting on what the experience of mealtimes is like for your child can be helpful. Do you all eat together? Are mealtimes relaxed, or joyful? Is there happy conversation? Try to see food as a social and joyful thing.

2. Don’t say, “You can’t have pudding until you’ve finished your food”

Allowing your child to manage their own appetite will help them get attuned to their bodies and manage their intake better as adults. Try to limit parental intervention. Instead, sell the concept that food is nourishing for your body and gives you energy, your body knows what it needs – try to take out the noise around it.

Behavioural approaches, such as saying, “You can’t have pudding until you’ve finished dinner”, teach your child to potentially eat beyond what they need to get the sweet food. And if you offer them a very sweet, filling pudding every day, they may learn to eat less of the nutritious food to leave space for the less-nutritious food. It also gives the message that they aren’t expected to enjoy the savoury food. Our desire for sweet, highly calorific food made sense in our evolutionary history, but now that we are surrounded by high-calorie foods, it is difficult to override those tendencies. Fat and sugar are so rewarding for us that even if your child isn’t hungry, they may well eat it.

Instead, offer dinner and then, if they want it, some fruit.

3. Avoid restricting your child’s diet unnecessarily

There is a lot of advice about what we should and shouldn’t be feeding our children. Some parents may seek advice from nutritionists or behavioural experts to support them with managing their child’s behaviour, or for other perceived health benefits.

They may receive recommendations about restricting certain foods without a medical basis – for example, implementing a gluten-free diet when the child does not have coeliac disease. Much of this advice can ultimately be unhelpful, or even unsafe. A 2019 review showed that a gluten-free diet in children who don’t have coeliac disease is associated with detrimental effects, such as a loss of dietary fibre and mineral and vitamin deficiencies, for example. And from a psychological perspective, for children to have certain foods completely “banned” will give them the experience that some foods are “unsafe”.

Research suggests that to improve health and life expectancy, it is more important to think about what we are not eating than what we are, and focusing on ensuring that children are offered food that includes plenty of fibre, fruit and vegetables, nuts and seeds and whole grains is more important than cutting out certain food groups entirely.

4. Don’t let your children use food as a way of managing their environment

Parents worry their children aren’t eating enough or may be anxious about how their child may behave if they are perceived to have not eaten enough. Children very quickly learn whether their parents really care about whether they have eaten or not, and so may try to use food as a bargaining chip.

They may try emotional blackmail: “If you don’t let me have ice cream now, I will be really sad, and it means you don’t love me.” Or maybe they’ll cry or stamp their feet. This behaviour can quickly escalate, and if the parent gives in, the child learns that this particular behaviour works and will repeat it next time. But it is possible to take the power out of the behaviour, and out of food, by saying, “Eating is for you, for your body, to give you energy, and this is what is on offer today. If you’re not hungry, you don’t have to eat it. If you really don’t like it, there’s fruit and yoghurt.”

5. Understand that picky eating is normal

It is developmentally normal for children to go through a very picky-eating phase and restrict their eating. Studies estimate that between 8 and 54 per cent of children are identified as picky eaters during their preschool years. The theory around this is that it is important for children to learn what is and isn’t safe to eat, and so, for example, some 2-year-olds may prefer to eat food off their parents’ plate, as they know it’s safe.

This is the age when it would be easy to start only giving them their safe foods, but you need to make sure that it isn’t you who is restricting their food. A good approach is to offer something that you know they are comfortable with, and a new food with no expectation or pressure to eat it. Research shows that children need to have around 15 positive experiences with a food before they accept it into the range of food they will eat.

Of course, there are certain foods that people can have a sensitivity to, like cow’s milk or raw tomatoes, so they might choose not to have it. But what’s been lost in our attempts to give children more autonomy is an understanding that children are not small adults. They are developing and learning to live in our society. So they also need to learn to eat things they don’t love because that’s necessary for health, for environmental sustainability, functioning in society and expanding their range of experiences in life. Just keep offering varied foods and understand that a child doesn’t have to love a food to be able to tolerate it and eat it.

6. Think about what behaviour you’re modelling – consciously or unconsciously

Children take their cues about what they think about the world, their attitudes and beliefs, from parents. So do consider carefully what you’re modelling around food. If you look at your tummy and say (or even think) that “this is disgusting”, talk about losing weight or make derogatory comments about people being overweight – children will take all this in. There is evidence that children’s views align with parental unconscious bias rather than with parents’ articulated views. So one of the most important things you can do to support your children developing a positive relationship with food – and their bodies – is to model it yourself.

As told to Helen Thomson

If your child’s diet has become extremely restrictive, or if they are not growing or gaining weight appropriately, please consult your general practitioner.

Table of Contents

New Scientist: 2026 Jan 21

Features

We can block the spread of HIV: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The one diet that’s good for everything: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Embracing quantum spookiness: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Pinning extreme weather on climate change: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Filming the universe’s biggest dramas: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The invention of net zero: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

A revolution in how we do chemistry: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

There’s no such thing as a normal brain: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The one innovation that supercharged AI: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The immense interconnectivity of the brain: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

End-to-end encryption: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Revealing the epic story of ancient humans: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The totemic 1.5°C climate target: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

How fear drastically shapes ecosystems: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The electrification of everything: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Our solar system is extremely weird: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Crowdsourcing Wikipedia’s encyclopedia: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Smartphones (yes, really): Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

The 5 worst ideas of the 21st century – and how they went wrong (paid): 2026 Jan 19

News

Our earliest vertebrate ancestors may have had four eyes (paid): 2026 Jan 21

Oldest known rock art is a 68,000-year-old hand stencil with claws: 2026 Jan 21

Ape-like hominin Paranthropus was more adaptable than we thought (paid): 2026 Jan 21

Bird retinas work without oxygen, and now scientists know how: 2026 Jan 21

Octopuses prompt rethink of why animals evolve big brains (paid): 2026 Jan 21

Chernobyl cooling systems have lost power but meltdown risk is low: 2026 Jan 20

Bubble feeding trick spreads through humpback whale social groups: 2026 Jan 21

Cross-training may be the key to a long life: 2026 Jan 20

Scientists investigate ‘dark oxygen’ in deep-sea mining zone: 2026 Jan 20

World is entering an era of 'water bankruptcy': 2026 Jan 20

Satellites could use magnetic fields to avoid collisions (paid): 2026 Jan 20

Mars once had a vast sea the size of the Arctic Ocean (paid): 2026 Jan 20

Sunscreens made from ground-up wood reach an SPF of over 180 (paid): 2026 Jan 20

Why a tool-using cow could change how we see farm animals (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Barnacle gloop could improve inflammatory bowel disease treatments (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Should Europe boycott US tech over Greenland, and is it even possible? (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Star appears to have vanished in a failed supernova (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Giving astronauts tardigrade toughness will be harder than we hoped (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Volcanoes had lower greenhouse gas emissions in Earth's past: 2026 Jan 19

Amateur mathematicians solve long-standing maths problems with AI (paid): 2026 Jan 16

Technology

How to finally get a grasp on quantum computing (paid): 2026 Jan 16

A leading use for quantum computers might not need them after all (paid): 2026 Jan 16

Lithium-ion batteries could last longer with chemical tweak (paid): 2026 Jan 15

All major AI models risk encouraging dangerous science experiments (paid): 2026 Jan 15

Cheating just three times massively ups the chance of winning at chess (paid): 2026 Jan 16

Space

The most important second in the entire history of the universe (paid): 2026 Jan 19

Earliest ever supernova sheds light on the first stars (paid): 2026 Jan 16

Distant 'little red dot' galaxies may contain baby black holes (paid): 2026 Jan 15

Humans

Cancelling plans may be more socially acceptable than you think (paid): 2026 Jan 16

Life

Fossil may solve mystery of what one of the weirdest-ever animals ate (paid): 2026 Jan 15

Health

Realising the importance of our microbiome: Best ideas of the century (paid): 2026 Jan 19

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