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- Putting a price tag on nature failed. Can radical tactics save it? (paid): 2026 Feb 11

- How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' really is (paid): 2026 Feb 10

- Your BMI can't tell you much about your health – here's what can (paid): 2026 Feb 9

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

Putting a price tag on nature failed. Can radical tactics save it?

Biologists have long thought that speaking to nature’s economic value would persuade boardrooms it was worth saving. It hasn’t worked – so what, if anything, will?

By Thomas Lewton

Ryan Wills for New Scientist

Richard Branson, Jane Goodall and Edward Norton might seem like strange bedfellows. But in 2012, at the Earth Summit in Brazil, they stood together on stage making the case that putting a price tag on nature was the only sensible way to prevent its destruction. Goodall, who spent decades studying chimps in Tanzania, took the microphone and wavered a bit: “It’s a bit shocking to me that we have to do that. I know why we have to do that. It makes perfectly good sense… But we mustn’t forget, for the sake of our children and great-grandchildren, to keep alive that reverence for the natural world.”

Her words held an ambivalence that many biologists felt towards the idea of recasting coral reefs, tundra and tropical forests in terms of dollar bills, says environmental scientist and anthropologist Daniel Suarez at Middlebury College in Vermont. But they hoped that by speaking the same language as financial markets and the boardroom executives who live by them, they could help plummeting wildlife populations to flourish.

Needless to say, that largely hasn’t happened, leading many of the biologists who rallied around this concept of “ecosystem services” to ask: what now? In his new book, Biologists Unite, Suarez traces the meteoric rise and fall of this pragmatic but ultimately doomed approach to conservation. New Scientist spoke with Suarez about why so much hope was pinned on framing nature in terms of monetary value, how it was never fully embraced by governments and businesses, and how biologists are now trying to save what’s left of the planet’s biodiversity by grappling with the root causes of environmental destruction.

Thomas Lewton: What are ecosystem services?

Daniel Suarez:

Ecosystem services can be simply defined as the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. Take the forests where I grew up, on the west coast of Canada, where the idea was brought into debates over whether to cut forests down and use them for timber and logging or to conserve them and leave them standing.

The lens of ecosystem services lets you consider the wider range of benefits these forests are providing: people are going in there and harvesting mushrooms and other non-timber forest products, these ecosystems are filtering water, the land is sequestering carbon and people are using forests for lots of recreational activities, too – in other words, their only value isn’t just producing two-by-fours. So, a basic rationale for embracing this framework was how it could tip the cost-benefit scales of these sorts of decisions, perhaps toward conservation. When you can quantify the value of all these different ecosystem services, you might find that they far exceed the benefits of cutting that forest down.

And when you add them all up at a global scale, you can end up with some pretty impressive numbers. In 1997, a team of researchers infamously tried to calculate the total monetary value of the world’s ecosystems using this approach. They came up with $33 trillion, a colossal figure, roughly double gross global economic output at the time. It was a controversial but attention-grabbing finding that put ecosystem services on the map.

When did the concept of ecosystem services become popular among conservationists and biologists?

The idea that societies depend on the living processes around them is an ancient one. But the term “ecosystem services” really burst onto the scene in the late 90s. Intensive efforts started being put into the science of systematically measuring different services, and then trying to put that knowledge into the hands of decision-makers. The production of scientific papers on ecosystem services exploded. And these ideas began to get disseminated across lots of different contexts, from national governments and big conservation groups to major corporations and international environmental agreements.

Biologists around the world really did unite behind the idea, at least for a while. It was everywhere. You would go to summits and conferences and you’d hear monarchs, heads of state, Fortune 500 business leaders, big-name celebrities, all talking about ecosystem services – this nerdy and arcane topic. Key players in global biodiversity politics were coalescing around the notion and presenting it as the way forward for conservation. I remember this one scientist who once jokingly tried to convince me that ecosystem services were now more popular than Michael Jackson – at least, when you compare numbers of citations in books.

Why was this seen as the only course of action?

In the absence of these kinds of estimates, so the reasoning went, decision-makers were simply going to continue giving nature a default economic value of zero. With a more complete understanding of what was at stake, the people in power would respond by doing the right thing – which was also the smart and sustainable thing.

Appealing to influential decision-makers is major facet of the concept of ecosystem services

Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images

One revealing moment I discuss in my book was at the 2016 World Conservation Congress. Inger Anderson, then the director-general of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, declared that what conservationists most urgently needed to do at this moment was learn how to “better resonate in the halls of power”. Her argument reflected a pervasive view about how to properly address these disastrous worldwide declines in biodiversity: by appealing to powerful decision-makers and helping them make better-informed, more rational choices.

There’s some critical context to this story. The rise of ecosystem services took shape in parallel with the much broader rise of neoliberalism – the ideology of “letting the market decide” an array of important questions in society, including those related to environmental policy and management. Deeply troubled and justifiably alarmed by the destruction of nature they were witnessing, biologists agreed to play along and reframe their work in terms they hoped might appeal to the powerful interests who followed this way of thinking.

Was there any unease among conservationists about treating nature in these terms?

I was struck, after spending so much time with ecosystem service scientists, by how many of them harboured serious doubts toward the concept. These hesitations grew more pronounced as I followed this story over the years, but from the outset, there was already some discomfort with what it meant to reduce the living world to such human-centred and monetary terms. What does it mean to put a dollar value on tigers, or onto any other living being?

Biologists told me they were embracing these ideas not because they really liked them, but because they didn’t feel there was another choice. They were simply trying to be pragmatic. They’d come to accept these dominant political and economic structures that got entrenched during the neoliberal era as settled facts. So, biologists were left with the impossible task of having to figure out how to optimise within those fixed constraints. I think this dynamic – people consenting to play along with solutions they recognised don’t go nearly far enough and might even be a bad idea – is fairly widespread in everyday life.

Looking around, it doesn’t seem like this approach revolutionised conservation…

No, I’m afraid it didn’t, especially when compared with its sweeping promises as a “game-changer” for conservation. Across most indicators, the decimation of life on Earth continues largely on schedule. A recent WWF report revealed that between 1970 and 2020, global wildlife populations declined by 73 per cent, on average. According to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a million species are currently at risk of extinction. The torrents of private investment and vast new environmental markets that ecosystem service valuations were supposed to unlock simply haven’t materialised at scale, and the funding shortfall in conservation remains as wide as ever. In 2020, the international community failed to meet a single one of its agreed 10-year targets aimed at halting biodiversity loss for the second consecutive decade. I could go on.

Why hasn’t the ecosystem services idea been able to harness market forces?

The reasons why ecosystem services failed to deliver are complex, and usually very contextual, but I would really stress the role of power relations. Take a mangrove forest: you can weigh up the short-term economic benefits of building a shrimp farm over the mangroves against all the other kinds of values that mangroves provide, such as serving as a fish nursery that supports local livelihoods or as storm protection for nearby settlements, and so on. Let’s assume we can develop very detailed, very rigorous calculations of those services, and we might find that it mathematically makes a ton of sense to keep the mangroves, since the overall benefits are much higher for society. But whether the mangroves are going to get demolished or not has less to do with correct arithmetic and a lot more to do with power relations: who stands to benefit from what happens with the land, and who controls the decision-making around who wins and who loses? What is so often lacking in ecosystem services is a deeper analysis of these core power relations driving environmental degradation.

Mangroves, such as those in Everglades National Park in Florida, can serve as fish nurseries and protection against storms

Juan Carlos Muñoz/Nature Picture Library/Alamy

Should we think more about saving nature for its own sake – that is, for its intrinsic value?

I’m not sure that focusing on these tensions between what is called the “intrinsic” value of nature and the more “instrumental” value represented by ecosystem services necessarily gets us that far. I don’t have any objection to people who bring this sort of deep, abiding, ethical set of commitments to nature and who wish to advocate for nature having inherent rights. But whatever your view, what seems more important is whether you are intelligently answering these questions of power and political economy.

How are biologists challenging those in power?

Biologists could take more of a “biodiversity justice” approach and unite with other groups, from social movements and critical scholars to Indigenous peoples, rural peoples, farmers, workers and more. You don’t necessarily have to align yourself with such a narrow set of conventionally powerful actors in business or government.

While researching my book I did start to see mainstream environmental scientists starting to engage with critical scholars who brought with them much more radical and systemic analyses of what was driving the global biodiversity crisis. In turn, I saw biologists learning how to think more rigorously about the larger historical contexts and social struggles surrounding their research. And in certain spaces like those around IPBES, I saw these critical analyses begin to resonate.

Another striking example where conservationists had to look beyond ecosystem services is from back home in British Columbia, around those debates about whether to log the forests. For a while, most of the big environmental groups accepted the need to protect forests by using market language and advocating for market mechanisms. But eventually they ditched ecosystem services and switched their strategies to much more of a “climate justice” framing. Instead of trying to convince decision-makers through lobbying and scientific reports, they formed alliances with other groups, particularly First Nations, and took on these huge fights against energy infrastructure projects, particularly a couple of proposed oil pipelines.

This approach brought a more rigorous account of power, movement building and popular mobilisation at its core. And it was an effective pivot: as they let go of ecosystem services, they succeeded in fending off the pipelines, although those battles are ongoing. My point is there’s a big difference between asking powerful decision-makers for change and building alliances strong enough to force those decision-makers to change.

How would you sum up how you feel about ecosystem services now, having spent so long thinking about it?

There are so many other traditions beyond mainstream conservation with alternative ideas about the means and ends and future of conservation, about what it could be, and who it must involve. There’s nothing inherently stopping biologists from bringing their expertise, including with things like ecosystem services, and realigning their work with other sets of interests and more plausibly transformative plans for confronting the global biodiversity crisis. The potential is there. But biologists first have to try to reach for it.

What can everyday people who love nature do to support this biodiversity justice approach?

Zooming out from these esoteric debates about ecosystem services, what really stayed with me were all these biologists I met who basically shrugged their shoulders, gave me these sad sighs of resignation, and conceded that they didn’t actually believe these strategies were going to work. Yet they still embraced the framework. However disappointing, these decades of failure can also function as an urgent invitation to break from routine but ultimately self-defeating political assumptions, and to reach for more convincing (and yes, more realistic and pragmatic) alternatives.

MIND | FEB 10, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' really is

Networks of molecules in our body behave as though they have goals and desires. Understanding this phenomenon could solve the origins of life and mind in one fell swoop

By Conor Feehly

Tom Gauld

We all struggle with self-control sometimes. We tell ourselves only one more piece of chocolate, one more glass of wine, one more episode of a binge-worthy series before bed, but then carry on regardless. But who, or what, even is this “self” engaging in this push and pull, before giving in to temptation? The cells in our gut somehow collaborate with those in our brain and hands to reach for the chocolate bar, the wine bottle or the “next episode” button. And, with ever-increasing complexity, at some point a line is crossed, and the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts. That is to say, a self – the entity which acts in the world in ways that serve your goals and desires – emerges.

What if, though, “selves” are present in those very cells, ahead of the point at which they merge to form a greater whole? It might sound outlandish, but biological simulations are indicating that those minuscule units of life, which we usually think about as passive machines – cogs blindly governed by the laws of physics – have their own goals and display agency. Surprisingly, even simple networks of biomolecules appear to display some degree of a self, a revelation that could lead to novel ways of treating health conditions with far fewer side effects.

What’s more, some biologists say this new grasp of selfhood can reveal what is special about life and how it began in the first place. “The origins of agency coincide with the origins of life,” says cognitive scientist Tom Froese at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology in Japan.

Intelligent agents

Selves are more technically defined by biologists and neuroscientists as “agents” that have goals and act in ways that achieve those goals. Agents aren’t simply pushed around by their environment, but alter themselves and their environment in purposeful ways. In other words, they have causal power over themselves and their environment.

To behave with agency, you need to absorb information, use that information to solve problems and then learn by remembering how those actions turned out. Neuroscientists broadly call this “cognition” and use brain scanners and behavioural experiments to study this constellation of processes. Indeed, we traditionally ascribe cognition only to things with brains. “It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that brains are our first example of cognition, and a lot of people therefore think that brains must be special [in this respect],” says theoretical biologist Emily Dolson at Michigan State University.

But a growing number of researchers have been investigating where else these abilities show up, applying similar methods to much simpler organisms that lack brains in any conventional sense. In the past few years, studies of the behaviour and electrical and chemical signalling of slime moulds, plants and even single-celled organisms have revealed surprising abilities such as learning, forming memories and adjusting decisions as new information arrives. They have even extended the scope of cognition to smaller systems within the human body: the immune system, for instance, constructs its own memory of which proteins will help it ward off harmful invaders, and groups of cells collaborate to grow and repair the body of their own volition. In other words, both the immune system and these cell collectives are acting with degrees of agency in their own right.

Slime moulds challenge our understanding of intelligence and what it means to have agency

Sinclair Stammers/naturepl.com

So, how far down the ladder of complexity can we take this idea? Theoretical biologist Michael Levin and his colleagues at Tufts University in Massachusetts recently applied cognitive tools to systems far simpler than even basic, single-celled organisms – systems that most of us would consider to be inanimate. “You can’t just assume things have a certain level of agency,” says Levin. “You have to do experiments and then you get surprises.”

The team studied the gene regulatory networks (GRNs) found inside every cell that do the vital job of determining when, where and how strongly genes are expressed. They are composed of networks of genes, proteins, RNA and other biomolecules interacting with one another across many “nodes”. In the human body, if a GRN has a fault – perhaps it isn’t regulating the production of an essential protein properly – we might try to intervene with gene therapy to modify the GRN’s structure, which is a bit like adding a new transistor to a defunct electrical circuit. This approach treats these networks as if they are passive machines that must be rewired to change their function.

Pavlov’s dogs

Levin and his collaborators wondered if they could alter a GRN’s behaviour in a different way: by seeing if it could actively “learn” features of its environment. They took inspiration from a now-famous cognitive experiment pioneered by physiologist Ivan Pavlov in the 1890s. In it, Pavlov used stimuli, including a ticking metronome, just before presenting dogs with food. After a few repetitions, the dogs learned to associate the ticking with imminent food and began salivating at the sound of the metronome alone. It showed that dogs process information from their environment and use it to make predictions – known as associative learning.

Instead of dogs and metronomes, Levin and his colleagues modelled 29 different GRNs derived from biological data in a set of computer simulations. They trained each GRN to associate the presence of a neutral drug, which doesn’t trigger a response, with a functional drug that does affect it by repeatedly stimulating nodes in the network simultaneously.

In this way, they eventually achieved the desired behavioural change in each GRN without the presence of the functional drug – like getting a dog to salivate with a ticking metronome and no food. In other words, their experiment showed that GRNs can learn: adapting their behaviour in a way that requires a kind of memory. “These are examples of cognition, for sure,” says Levin. “You’re not going to have a scintillating conversation with a GRN, but it’s something, it’s not zero.”

The findings could allow us to reduce the harmful side effects caused by many medicines, says Levin. For example, opioids like morphine provide effective relief from chronic pain, but people quickly develop tolerance to such drugs and the only option is to increase the dose, which can lead to addiction and, later on, withdrawal risks. However, manipulating the memory of biomolecular pathways, as Levin and his team did for GRNs, could slow or prevent the build-up of tolerance. It may even be possible to trigger the effects of powerful medicines that have harmful side effects, such as chemotherapy drugs, using an innocuous biomolecule instead, says Levin. Still, no one has applied these findings from computer models to real-world medical treatments so far.

Aside from healthcare applications, the finding that computer models of GRNs can learn like Pavlov’s dogs may have profound implications for how we think about the agency of molecular networks. Each GRN seems to be behaving as an agent that controls the behaviour of its chemical components to achieve its collective goals.

Levin and his team wondered whether this induced associative learning in a GRN would affect the degree to which it is acting more than the sum of its parts – to essentially measure its level of “selfhood”. To test this idea further, they turned to a mathematical tool called causal emergence.

Similar methods used to study cognition in humans can also reveal the capacities of other kinds of minds

plainpicture/Angela Franke

Causal emergence was originally developed by neuroscientist Erik Hoel, also at Tufts University, in relation to the integrated information theory (IIT) of consciousness. IIT says that the extent to which the brain is functioning as a holistic whole can be measured by a quantity called phi, which is also a measure of conscious awareness. If researchers can better predict future brain states by considering the brain from a more zoomed-out perspective, rather than making predictions based on its individual components, then they say that the brain has greater phi and that it displays greater causal emergence.

Putting consciousness aside, causal emergence has become a general way of measuring when any complex system is acting as an agent rather than a distributed set of cogs. Roughly speaking, if the parts are doing their own thing, phi is low. If they lock into collective patterns, then phi is higher. Applying the measure of causal emergence to GRNs, Levin and his team found that after a GRN successfully learned to associate a neutral drug with a functional one, it too had higher phi – and the more the GRN learned, the greater these phi gains were, all of which suggests that a new level of agency had taken shape. “A lot of people will say, ‘Ah, you’ve taken these tools past their domain of applicability,’” says Levin. “But if you like the tools, let the science tell you where they work. If the tools are crap, you will find out pretty quickly.”

Evolution and the origins of life

Kevin Mitchell, a geneticist and neuroscientist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, says that results like these are interesting because agency is “a defining characteristic of life”. If a group of cells fuse together and gain some new type of cognition, then that new skill allows them to influence their parts from the top down, forcing individual cells to forsake their own interests to work towards collective goals. He describes this as a kind of “meta-control”, which enables agents to actively respond to their environments.

Not only do these findings have implications for who or what we think of as agents – but they also suggest that agency itself could drive evolution. “In the history of life, there are these major evolutionary transitions where what it means to be an individual changes,” says Dolson. For instance, simple prokaryotic cells engulfed one another to form more complex eukaryotes, then eukaryotes combined to form multicellular organisms. This tendency for parts to come together to form new levels of agency, says Dolson, could be an important mechanism that helps explain why life tends to evolve towards more complex forms.

“ We need to think about these chemical systems as agents acting with some degree of purpose “

This idea is bolstered by a follow-up study in which Levin and his colleagues trained GRNs to learn and then “unlearn” a behaviour by forcing new Pavlovian associations on them. It is like initially teaching dogs to associate a metronome with food and then teaching them to associate a bright light with food until they forget about the metronome. The expectation was that, once a learned behaviour became redundant, the agent would “let go” of that information and the increase in causal emergence that arose from that behaviour would disappear. But when Levin and his team measured each GRN’s causal emergence, they found that it kept rising – even though the original behaviour had been forgotten. “If you are forced to lose that memory, you don’t lose your phi gains, which is astounding because it means there is an asymmetry to this, it becomes an intelligence ratchet,” says Levin.

Instead of simply getting rid of information to forget a behaviour, it seems that the GRNs forget by learning the opposite of the original concept. “Now, instead of knowing nothing, you know that concept and its inverse,” says Richard Watson, a complexity researcher at the University of Southampton in the UK. Somewhat counterintuitively, teaching a GRN to forget gives it a more elaborate cognitive model and its levels of agency and causal emergence continue to increase.

Mitochondria (yellow) evolved when a host cell engulfed another cell to form a eukaryote over 1.5 billion years ago

Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR/Science Photo Library

Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin at New York University cautions that we shouldn’t overstate the results from computer models of biological systems. “You can prove that something is possible in silico, but you can’t prove that is how it works [in real-world cells],” he says. Yet he finds the results intriguing and, even though the simulations are more simplistic than cells, he says we can still take some valuable lessons from them.

In addition, there are simulations of even more basic systems that more precisely reflect the real world and also align with Levin’s thinking about agency and evolution. In 2022, complexity scientist Stuart Bartlett at the California Institute of Technology and David Louapre at Ubisoft Entertainment in Paris, France, found that simple “autocatalytic” chemical systems, which react together to replicate themselves, could also learn by association. In autocatalysis, one chemical is fed into the system as fuel, while another chemical is produced by consuming that fuel. The pair found that the reaction rate between these two chemicals is influenced by previous patterns in the concentration of available fuel – a behaviour that Bartlett describes as a “primitive form of learning”. This suggests that cognitive abilities can be found even further down the scale of molecular complexity than GRNs.

Bartlett chose to study autocatalysis because these simple chemical reactions mimic behaviours like self-replication in living systems. Self-replication and evolution are widely regarded as the essential features of life and so some researchers think that autocatalysis could even help explain the origin of life. But to fully understand how that might happen, we also need to think about these chemical systems as agents acting with some degree of purpose, rather than as collections of inanimate particles, says Froese.

In this view, agency and cognition are best thought of as a continuum, rather than as something that only very complex life forms have. Simple agents, at one end of the continuum, learn from their environments and so gradually gain more elaborate forms of agency – along with the power to control themselves, their components and the world around them.

But Watson says that even though GRNs and autocatalytic chemicals seem to have goals and display a rudimentary ability to “think”, it is a step too far to conclude that they have any kind of inner mental world. “You don’t necessarily need to describe the parts as having beliefs, intentions or desires,” he says. Levin, meanwhile, says we shouldn’t be put off just because it feels strange to imbue simple systems with characteristics we usually ascribe to complex life forms like ourselves.

“All I’m saying is here is this bag of tools [from cognitive and behavioural science] I’m going to bring,” says Levin. “I’m not interested in arguing with philosophers about this stuff. If you’ve got a better worldview that gets you to better discoveries, great, let’s roll.”

HEALTH | FEB 9, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Your BMI can't tell you much about your health – here's what can

People classed as “overweight” according to BMI can be perfectly healthy. But there are better measures of fat, and physicians are finally using them

By Starre Vartan

Martin Leon Barreto

I was so excited for my first job after university that even the physical assessment – required for my work as a field geologist – came with a certain thrill. That was until the doctor glanced at my chart and told me to lose 10 to 15 pounds. The proof, he said, was my body mass index (BMI), which placed me smack in the middle of the “overweight” category. Though this was supposedly a health concern, he then said I had passed every other test: my heart was strong, my blood markers were pristine, my risk of disease was comfortably below average. I stayed behind when he left the room, suspended between shame and disbelief. I had gone in feeling good about my body, but the doctor was telling me to think differently. I followed his advice through my 20s, chasing a “healthy” BMI through disordered eating. Only later did I find out the doctor was wrong. He had read my chart correctly, but BMI had failed to capture my health.

I’m not the only one who has been mislabelled as unhealthy. BMI, which is calculated by dividing a person’s weight by their height squared to estimate levels of body fat, is deeply embedded in healthcare. Yet this measure distorts health for many, with serious consequences.

BMI cut-offs determine access to knee surgeries, GLP-1 medications, infertility treatment, gender-affirming care, bariatric procedures and more. People outside the “acceptable” range may be denied care, while high-risk patients with “normal” BMIs may be overlooked. After 30 years as the status quo, a consensus is finally emerging that BMI is not appropriate. “There is no logic, no medical coherence to using BMI to define a disease. It’s just not suitable,” says Francesco Rubino at King’s College London.

Alongside that, the hunt is on for better measures. Even more importantly, this shift is forcing us to question the very interplay between health and body size, and completely rethink what a “healthy weight” really looks like.

The rise of BMI

BMI has persisted not because it is biologically precise, but because it is fast, cheap and simple. Developed by mathematician Adolphe Quetelet in the early 19th century as a statistical population tool, it was originally designed to document height and weight averages. As obesity increased in the 1970s, a study suggested it could be used to track this trend over large populations.

With rates of obesity rising further in the following decades, BMI became an increasingly popular research tool. And when the World Health Organization formally recognised obesity as a global epidemic in 1997, BMI was rolled out in healthcare as an assessment tool for individuals. Despite early critiques that this was inappropriate, its convenience meant it spread quickly, and BMI became medicine’s default screening gate.

Obesity is linked with several dangerous conditions, including cardiovascular problems, kidney disease, some cancers, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. Clinicians wanted a quick way to estimate when excess fat might become harmful, and BMI seemed to fill that role. The measurement assigns people a simple number, with those under 18.5 classed as underweight, over 25 as overweight and over 30 as obese. But Rubino says a risk-assessment tool for populations should never have been converted into a diagnostic tool for individuals.

A common critique is that BMI doesn’t reflect where fat is stored. It doesn’t acknowledge that men often carry visceral fat in the middle, in and around organs, which is more harmful than the subcutaneous fat on the arms, bottom and thighs that women are more likely to have. Not only that, it doesn’t distinguish between fat and muscle, meaning many athletes can end up being classed as unhealthy. This was the case for me when I underwent that shocking medical exam. I naturally carried more muscle and was an avid trail runner and swimmer. The very thing pushing me towards an “overweight” BMI was what made me fit and strong.

“ BMI is a good metric of volume – if a body is a cylinder. But I’m no cylinder. I have hips, I have curves on my body “

At the other end of the scale, someone can lack enough body fat for regular menstruation – which causes a host of other problems, including bone weakness and breakage, cardiovascular issues and pelvic pain – but be officially classed as “normal” according to their BMI. This isn’t uncommon in female athletes who carry enough muscle to keep them in the “normal” weight range, but don’t have enough fat. BMI is a proxy that can too easily mask true symptoms of illness.

“BMI is a good metric of volume – if a body is a cylinder. But I’m no cylinder. I have hips, I have curves on my body,” says Diana Thomas, a mathematician at the United States Military Academy at West Point in New York. “And so to just put a cylinder on me and say, ‘We’re going to use this body measurement from your outside to tell us what’s on the inside,’ seems pretty limited.”

Five years ago, Rubino had also grown frustrated with BMI. So he created a commission to re-evaluate the definition and diagnosis of obesity, the results of which were finally published last year as part of the Lancet global commission on obesity. The reliance on BMI created a “catch-22”, says Rubino, because it was used to diagnose obesity, which is purportedly a disease, but failed to meaningfully reflect health.

The commission’s report called for a major overhaul. Just as there is a distinction between pre-diabetes and diabetes, the report said obesity should be divided into pre-clinical obesity, when fat levels are a risk factor, and clinical obesity, when it should be considered a stand-alone illness. Crucially, the authors said BMI alone shouldn’t be used to determine obesity status.

Some people can be overweight but have no markers of ill health, which the Lancet commission flagged as another serious shortcoming of BMI. Over the past 20 years, there has been a growing understanding that obesity doesn’t always lead to disease. “Some people who carry some extra fat may actually fare better or may not be affected by it, like Queen Victoria, who lived into her 80s and died from unrelated causes,” says Rubino.

The Lancet’s recommendations were immediately taken up by more than 75 international medical organisations working on obesity, reflecting a seismic shift in the field: BMI is on its way out.

When does weight affect your health?

The connection between weight and health is much more complex than a number on a scale or chart. And with BMI not fit for purpose, researchers are looking for better tools.

We know that the location of fat, rather than the total amount, is a much better predictor of health. People with high visceral fat have more than double the risk of heart disease and greater risks of high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. They are also three times more likely to develop dementia by their mid-70s to early 80s. That’s why the Lancet commission recommends that healthcare providers determine excess body fat by directly measuring it if possible, with technology like bioimpedance tools that use low-voltage electricity to asses body composition.

BMI fails to account for significant muscle mass, meaning strong people are often classed as overweight

Getty Images

Alternatively, they should use a criteria that estimates visceral fat – such as waist circumference, waist-to-hip ratio or waist-to-height ratio – in addition to BMI. Regardless of the tool used, age, gender and ethnicity should all influence the interpretation of results, based on two decades of evidence showing that these factors affect where fat is stored and the associated risks.

The measures can be fairly simple: Sonia Anand at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, points to the findings of the the landmark INTERHEART study, which first showed that waist-to-hip ratio outperforms BMI as a predictor of heart attacks more than 20 years ago. Research since then has shown it is also a better predictor of mortality.

Another strong alternative to BMI is the weight-adjusted waist index (WWI), which divides waist circumference by the square root of body weight. Rather than estimating mass alone, it captures central fat storage – a pattern closely tied to inflammation, hypertension and cardiometabolic disease – plus it can be quickly calculated, using only a tape measure and scale.

Better ways to measure body fat

Waist-to-hip ratio

Divide the circumference of your waist (measured at its narrowest point above the belly button) by the circumference of your hips. A ratio above 0.9 for men and 0.85 for women is linked to serious health risks.

Weight-adjusted waist index

Divide your waist circumference in centimetres by the square root of your body weight in kilograms. A result of 10.4 or higher in men and 10.5 or higher in women is associated with health concerns.

Body roundness index

The formula for this index is highly complex, so it is easiest to use an online tool that will use your height, waist circumference and hip circumference to calculate your BRI. A lower score – below 4 in women and 3.5 in men – suggests less fat stored around the waist and fewer health risks.

In a study last year of 239 white women, those in the highest WWI quartile had significantly higher levels of visceral fat, higher blood pressure and higher levels of inflammatory markers than those in the lowest quartile, even when their BMIs were similar.

This is particularly meaningful for women, says Naveed Sattar, a professor of cardiometabolic health at the University of Glasgow, UK. Women typically have greater subcutaneous fat storage capacity, and waist circumference in women is a stronger prediction of diabetes than BMI. “Where you put your fat matters,” he says.

“ Evidence accumulated over two decades shows that BMI gives a distorted health reading for whole ethnic groups “

Height is also important. Taller people have bigger bones and more muscle, none of which is accounted for by BMI. A little over a decade ago, Thomas decided to create her own metric. As an athlete, she knew of the critiques of BMI, while her background in maths naturally pushed her to question the accuracy of nutrition and health advice. She came to believe health research needed “more math in it”.

Thomas used datasets from more than 7000 people to build a model linking body shape to fat patterns associated with health risk. From that, she developed the body roundness index (BRI) formula, which uses height, waist circumference and weight to model body geometry. Studies have since shown that BRI predicts total and visceral fat more accurately than BMI, waist or hip measures alone, and allows shape to be analysed as a continuum rather than a binary label.

This nuance means that waist-to-hip ratio, WWI and BRI are all more effective at highlighting the metabolic risk factors for conditions like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and cancers – all of which are linked to stomach fat, not just fat in general. And rather than solely relying on body measurements, physicians can add blood tests to evaluate risk. Testing for liver function and levels of triglycerides and HDL cholesterol is cheap and easy, says Sattar.

These measures have changed my understanding of my own body. My WWI says I’m in the first quartile, the “most healthy”; my waist-to-hip measurements put me in the “low risk level” category; and my BRI says I’m in the healthy zone and my visceral fat levels are “excellent”. Quite a different message than the BMI score.

Assessing where fat sits is crucial for understanding health risks

Martin Leon Barreto

The fight to do away with BMI

As well as misclassifying individuals like me, evidence accumulated over two decades shows that BMI gives a distorted health reading for whole ethnic groups. BMI was originally devised using metrics based on white people and, though studies exposing these blind spots began years ago, the implications have only started to shape policy recently.

South Asian, Chinese and Black people all get diabetes at higher rates and lower BMIs than white people. The reasons for this disparity aren’t fully understood for Black or Chinese people, but the effect in South Asian populations is linked to their genetic make-up. South Asian people naturally tend to have lower muscle mass and more fat mass than white people at the same BMI, says Sattar, and more rapidly add fat around the centre of the body, especially the liver.

These insights led South Asian countries to be among the first to challenge BMI. By 2022, 10 Asia-Pacific nations including India, Singapore, Sri Lanka and the Philippines created their own BMI thresholds, with lower cut-off points for obesity, and began using additional measures like waist circumference.

Some of the research questioning BMI started with Anand. “Being a South Asian woman, my family history of early-onset heart disease and diabetes being very prevalent, I was very passionate to try and understand our biological differences,” she says. Her first few grant applications to study BMI variations across ethnic groups were deemed unimportant, she says, and rejected. But she persevered. Her work ultimately showed that South Asian and Chinese people experience cardiometabolic risk at significantly lower BMI thresholds than white Europeans, while the measure also fails to predict risk among Black and Inuit populations.

The Philippines is one of several Asian countries to change national guidelines around BMI

Marek Slusarczyk / Alamy Stock Photo

Almost two decades on from her initial idea, Anand’s work helped spur a 2020 clinical practice guideline update in Canada, ensuring both lower BMI cut-offs for South Asian people and the recommendation that non-BMI measures be considered in evaluations of obesity for all groups.

Other countries have also started to adapt. In 2022, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, an independent regulatory advice body in England and Wales, issued new guidance encouraging the use of waist-to-height ratio in routine care. Critics of BMI – including Rubino – say it should never be used in isolation, and hope that support for the Lancet commission from so many groups, including the World Obesity Federation and World Health Organization, will put an end to this practice in the UK. In the US, the American Medical Association declared BMI “imperfect” in 2023 and recommended it be used only alongside other health measures.

In the era of weight-loss drugs like Mounjaro and Wegovy, this matters more than ever. Medication for obesity is currently distributed based on BMI cut-offs. In England, GLP-1 treatments are restricted to those with a BMI of 40 and above for Mounjaro or 35 and above for Wegovy (both adjusted for ethnicity) plus multiple obesity-linked conditions. In Japan, the drugs are reserved for those with a BMI above 35, while in the US, the Food and Drug Administration recommends the medications for anyone with a BMI of 30 or higher, although many insurance companies force higher limits.

With 1 billion people globally classed as obese according to BMI, there isn’t capacity to treat everyone, says Rubino. “And by the way, not all of the 1 billion need it.” Relying on BMI to determine both who is considered to have obesity and who gets treatment creates problems at every stage of the treatment process.

Medicine’s understanding of obesity is unlikely to improve unless the field is willing to accept – and even embrace – the complexity of human bodies. “One of the things I always ask [doctors] is, why does everything have to be easy? My body’s complicated. Embrace that complexity!” says Thomas.

For myself and many others whose lives have been affected by BMI’s authority, the shift towards shape and distribution-based measures isn’t about dismissing obesity-related disease. It is about recognising individual biology, ethnicity and lived experience. The emerging science points to a simple truth: health isn’t a single number, and bodies aren’t interchangeable cylinders.

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EARTH | FEB 11, 2026, 3:35 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Nepal and Northern India are not overdue for a huge earthquake

Many researchers thought that earthquakes in the Himalayas recur at regular intervals – but an analysis of sediment cores has shown they are largely random, and the region has seen far more than we previously realised

By Alec Luhn

Core samples from a lake in Nepal reveal a random pattern of historical earthquakes

Zakaria Ghazoui-Schaus, BAS

While some have argued northern India and western Nepal are overdue for a massive earthquake, an analysis says this is a myth, as the area has been experiencing smaller earthquakes at random for millennia.

It is common for officials and media to speak about populated areas near fault lines like Istanbul, Seattle and Tokyo being “overdue” for violent earthquakes. Because the central Himalaya fault segment in India and Nepal last had a major recorded earthquake in 1505, some research has suggested that earthquakes there recur about every 500 years, and a great earthquake is now imminent.

But scientists have now found at least 50 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or larger have taken place in this area in the past 6000 years, including eight since 1505. And these earthquakes have been occurring randomly rather than at regular intervals.

“We have to stop discussing and having long debates over the periodicity of earthquakes in the Himalayas and come to an agreement that it’s a random process … and consider the risk within that framework,” says Zakaria Ghazoui-Schaus at the British Antarctic Survey, who led the study.

The collision of the Indian and Eurasian tectonic plates that cast up the Himalaya mountains continues to this day, forming one of the largest seismic zones on the planet. The 2400-kilometre fault under the mountain range generates violent earthquakes, such as the magnitude 7.8 disaster that killed nearly 9000 people in and around Kathmandu in 2015.

However, less evidence of earthquakes has been found on the central segment of the fault immediately to the west of the Nepali capital, leading to fears that pressure was building up in this “seismic gap” and would soon be released in a devastating earthquake of magnitude 8 or 9.

Ghazoui-Schaus argues this was a misconception based on a “knowledge gap” rather than a seismic gap. Researchers have typically looked for evidence of earthquakes in the Himalayas by digging trenches to find ruptures in what was the ground surface in the past. While this method was able to uncover large earthquakes, it missed smaller “shadow earthquakes” that didn’t break the surface.

“You are only going to have a very sparse record of the largest earthquakes”, with traditional paleo-seismology methods, says Roger Musson, a retired seismologist from the British Geological Survey. “Whereas for historical earthquakes, then the catalogue can be good down to about magnitude 4 or so.”

Because the record was primarily populated with large earthquakes, it led to calculations of a long “interevent interval,” also known as a “return period,” which is the average time between earthquakes of a certain magnitude in an area.

To uncover a better earthquake record in the central Himalaya, Ghazoui-Schaus and his colleagues trekked to Lake Rara in western Nepal in 2013 and took a four-metre sediment core from the lakebed with an inflatable raft.

The research team preparing equipment for sediment core sampling at Rara Lake in Nepal

Zakaria Ghazoui-Schaus, BAS

They later analysed the core for turbidites, layers of fine sediments on top of coarser ones, which were deposited on the lakebed by underwater landslides triggered by earthquakes. The team has now identified 50 earthquakes of magnitude 6.5 or greater over the past 6000 years, dating each according to its depth in the core. These have likely released energy and lessened tension in the fault, Ghazoui-Schaus says.

Statistical analysis found the earthquakes tended to come in clusters, but these clusters occurred randomly. While that is what most seismologists would now expect based on the modern instrument record, Ghazoui-Schaus says it is one of the first times a paleo-seismological record has also confirmed it.

“If I have to build a house in western Nepal, I would definitely be more cautious in the way that I would build,” he says. And even though earthquakes come at random, calculating the average interval between them can still be useful as an indicator of seismic activity that could damage structures in an area like bridges or dams, according to Musson.

“If you’re planning for the next hundred years, you want to know how many earthquakes of a certain size are going to occur in that period,” he says. “And if you are prepared for that, then it doesn’t matter whether the earthquake happens next year or in 10 years’ time, because you’ve built your dam strong enough.”

Journal reference

Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adx7747

HUMANS | FEB 11, 2026, 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Ancient Peruvian civilisation grew mighty by harvesting guano

The Chincha Kingdom was transporting seabird excrement from islands to valleys as early as the 13th century, and this powerful fertiliser may have been key to its economic success

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

The droppings of Peruvian pelicans and Peruvian boobies have been prized for hundreds of years

Biljana Aljinovic/Alamy

Powerful fertiliser based on seabird droppings may have fuelled the rise of a Peruvian agricultural kingdom 900 years ago and helped drive its eventual takeover by the Incas.

Chemical analyses of ancient maize cobs from southern Peru show unusually high nitrogen isotope levels – substantial signs that the plants were fertilised with a mix of seabird excrement, feathers and carcasses known as guano. The findings provide the strongest evidence yet that indigenous Chincha farmers, fishers and merchants harvested this nutrient-rich fertiliser from nearby islands to enhance inland crop fields – and strengthen their socioeconomic position, says Jacob Bongers at the University of Sydney.

“Privileged access to a crucial resource is a pathway to power – which the Chincha Kingdom had in this case, and the Inca did not,” he says. “Social change may have arisen from a surprising source: bird poop. It’s a fascinating story.”

Between AD 1000 and 1400, the wealthy and densely populated Chincha Kingdom controlled one of Peru’s most productive coastal valleys before being incorporated into the Inca Empire in the 15th century.

The Chincha valley lies just 25 kilometres from the Chincha Islands – home to vast colonies of Peruvian pelicans (Pelecanus thagus), Peruvian boobies (Sula variegata) and guanay cormorants (Leucocarbo bougainvilliorum), along with penguins and gulls. These so-called Guano Islands gained international notoriety in the 19th century for the fertilising power of their bird droppings, largely thanks to their exceptionally high nitrogen content.

The Incas’ use of guano is well documented in early colonial accounts, which describe strict state control over the islands and heavy penalties for harming the birds. But until now, scientists have lacked firm archaeological evidence that their Chincha predecessors were already exploiting the resource. Many historians have long argued that they were – and that access to seabird fertiliser fuelled the kingdom’s economic success, says Bongers. Seabird imagery carved into ceremonial objects and depicted on textiles, ceramics and architectural friezes further suggests the birds held special significance for the Chincha.

Bongers had been collecting dozens of ancient maize cobs – “perhaps food for the dead” – from Chincha tombs and wondered if they could help solve the mystery.

He teamed up with Emily Milton at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC to analyse 35 maize cobs from 14 cemeteries in the Chincha valley, measuring their carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios. Bongers, Milton and their colleagues also analysed collagen from 11 ancient seabird bones from the region – including pelicans, boobies, cormorants, a gull and a penguin – to establish a local isotopic baseline for guano.

The ancient seabird bones showed elevated nitrogen-15 values typical of marine birds. Many of the maize cobs showed even more extreme nitrogen isotope ratios, a hallmark of seabird guano fertilisation.

The findings point to the Chinchas’ use of the island resource by at least 1250, says Jo Osborn at Texas A&M University.

Guano may have supported the kingdom’s economic expansion and strengthened its bargaining power when it was later incorporated into the Inca empire – with broader implications for how marine fertilisers shaped social change across the Andes, the researchers say.

“It makes a lot of sense that ancient Peruvians used guano as fertiliser,” says Dan Sandweiss at the University of Maine, who wasn’t involved in the study. “It was a significant expedition to get down there to the islands – but you do that for high-value things!”

The Chincha Island guano is particularly valuable, probably because of the limited rainfall, he says, which allows the nitrogen to stay intact, rather than getting leached out. “This Peruvian guano was the real stuff.”

Journal reference:

PLOS One DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0341263

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

The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed

About 4600 years ago, the population of Britain was replaced by a people who brought Bell Beaker pottery with them. Now, ancient DNA has uncovered the murky story of where these people came from

By Tim Vernimmen

The ancestors of the British Bell Beaker people lived in a wetland area and relied heavily on fishing

SHEILA TERRY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Analysis of ancient DNA has uncovered the origins of a mysterious group who appeared in Britain around 2400 BC and, in a century or less, all but replaced the people who built Stonehenge.

These people were associated with the Bell Beaker culture, which emerged in western Europe in the early Bronze Age and is named for the shape of the typical pots they left behind. This culture probably originated in Portugal or Spain, but the new study reveals that the people who took over Britain came from just across the North Sea, in the river deltas of the Low Countries. This resilient population had preserved some of its hunter-gatherer lifestyle and ancestry for millennia after early farmers had swept across Europe.

David Reich at Harvard University and his colleagues studied the genomes of 112 people who lived in what is now the Netherlands, Belgium and western Germany between 8500 and 1700 BC.

Before joining the project, Reich wasn’t too excited, he admits: “The Netherlands seemed like the most boring place in the world – every single bit of ground there has been walked on a million times before. But it turned out to be perhaps the most interesting place in Europe.”

The DNA sequenced by his lab revealed a population forged in the Rhine-Meuse delta in the Dutch-Belgian borderlands, originating from a resourceful group of hunter-gatherers surviving in the waterlogged wetlands around these big rivers, feeding on fish, waterfowl, game and various plants.

Neolithic farmers originating in Anatolia spread across Europe from around 6500 BC, probably because their ability to produce their own food meant they could raise many more children than hunter-gatherers did. In just a few centuries, hunter-gatherer genetic ancestry disappeared or was strongly diluted in each place where the farmers arrived.

But not, the ancient DNA reveals, in these wetlands, where the influx of farmer genes remained sparse for several thousand years. The dynamic, regularly flooded landscape of rivers, marshes, dunes and peat bogs was a nightmare for early farmers, but rich in opportunities for those who knew how to survive there, says team member Luc Amkreutz at the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, the Netherlands. “These hunter-gatherers were carving their own path, from a position of strength.”

Judging from the DNA, these people were far from marginalised. Their Y chromosomes, passed down from father to son, remained largely hunter-gatherer for another 1500 years or so after the arrival of farmers in the region, while their mitochondrial DNA and X chromosomes reveal a steady trickle of farmers’ daughters joining them. “This really was a surprise to us,” says team member Eveline Altena at Leiden University Medical Center. “Something you can’t really tell without DNA.”

This was probably a mostly peaceful process involving communities where women tend to move while men stay in their homesteads, says Reich, although an element of force can’t be ruled out. This exchange may have gone both ways, but DNA preservation is much worse in the drier areas where farmers lived, so this remains unknown for now, he says.

Bell Beaker pottery from Germany

Peter Endig/dpa picture alliance/Alamy

Archaeological remains reveal that, over time, the hunter-gatherers did gradually adopt pottery, grow some grain and raise some animals, but without abandoning their original lifestyle.

Then, around 3000 BC, a tribe of nomadic herders called the Yamna, or Yamnaya, from the steppes of what is now Ukraine and Russia started migrating to the west. Their encounters with eastern European farmers gave rise to the Corded Ware culture, named for the cord-like decoration of its pottery. Their descendants which swept across much of Europe, but hardly made a dent in the delta.

The study identified one skeleton from this time with a Yamna Y chromosome, and excavations have also revealed pots, some of which were used to cook fish – another example of the wetlanders using new objects from abroad in their own way. Overall, though, few people had much, if any, steppe ancestry.

That changed when, around 2500 BC, the Bell Beaker culture appeared. These people introduced steppe ancestry into the wetland people’s DNA, but a significant 13 to 18 per cent of their characteristic hunter-gatherer-early-farmer gene mix remained. They might have started fading into history right then. But it turns out they weren’t quite done yet.

A skeleton buried at Oostwoud in the Netherlands, whose DNA was analysed in the study

Provinciaal Archeologisch Depot North-Holland (CC by 4.0)

The new study reveals that the people who arrived in Britain around 2400 BC had almost the exact same blend of Bell Beaker and wetland community genes. And within a century, they would nearly – or even entirely – replace the Neolithic farmers who had built Stonehenge. “Our models indicate that at least 90 per cent, but up to 100 per cent, of the original ancestry was lost [from Britain],” says Reich.

It isn’t entirely clear if this started with the arrival of the Bell Beaker culture in Britain or if other people had been moving in earlier. Before the Bell Beakers arrived, people in Britain were cremating their dead instead of burying them, which means they rarely left DNA.

In any case, what happened was “very dramatic, unbelievable almost”, says Reich. The reasons for this rapid replacement have intrigued archaeologists since it was first suggested by a 2018 study. Reich suspects the involvement of a disease like the plague, to which people on the European continent may have been exposed before. People in Britain, meanwhile, may have been more vulnerable to it.

What probably didn’t play a role is religious fervour, says team member Harry Fokkens at Leiden University. “Existing monuments like Stonehenge and Avebury remained in use and were even expanded after the people who made them were gone.”

Michael Parker Pearson at University College London is intrigued by the extent to which the new population adopted Britain’s monument styles, such as henges and stone circles, even though they brought a completely new way of life with them, including new styles of pottery and dress.

The Bell Beaker people also introduced metals to Britain, he adds. “Some gold hair ornaments found in Beaker graves in Britain are nearly identical to ones found in Belgium.”

Journal reference:

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10111-8

Human origins and gentle walking in prehistoric south-west England

Immerse yourself in the early human periods of the Neolithic, Bronze Age and Iron Age on this gentle walking tour.

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ENVIRONMENT | FEB 11, 2026, 7:13 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

This state’s power prices are plummeting as it nears 100% renewables

South Australia is proving to the world that relying largely on wind and solar energy with battery back-up is incredibly cheap, with electricity prices tumbling by 30 per cent in a year and sometimes going negative

By Alice Klein

South Australia has built huge solar farms like this one in in Port Augusta

Brook Mitchell/Getty Images

As South Australia gets close to its goal of running purely on solar and wind energy, its electricity prices have dropped by a third in a year and are now the lowest in Australia. The state serves as a test case for the financial benefits that can be reaped from large-scale grid decarbonisation.

“South Australia is a world leader in terms of its renewable energy transition and with that comes risks, but now it is showcasing its successes,” says Tim Buckley, an independent energy analyst at Climate Energy Finance, an Australian think-tank based in Sydney. “South Australian consumers are starting to really benefit from sustained, lower power prices.”

South Australia generated 84 per cent of its electricity from solar and wind energy in the final quarter of 2025, the highest proportion of any major grid in the world. The state plans to reach 100 per cent by the end of next year.

This renewables push is driving down electricity prices. The independent Australian Energy Market Operator’s (AEMO) latest report shows that the average wholesale electricity price in South Australia fell by 30 per cent in the final quarter of 2025, compared with a year earlier. As a result, the state had the lowest price in Australia, along with Victoria, which has the second highest share of wind and solar energy in the nation.

This is a boon for the South Australian government because in the past, it has been criticised for driving up electricity prices with its rapid adoption of renewable energy. At times, the state has experienced large spikes in electricity prices when the wind hasn’t been blowing or the sun shining, because it has had to fall back on expensive gas energy. Owners of gas generators have charged high prices for this back-up energy to make up for its sporadic demand. Making matter worse, gas prices went up 500 per cent in Australia following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, says Buckley.

To address this price volatility, South Australia has built seven mega-batteries, each about the size of a football pitch. They are charged by adjacent solar and wind farms on windy, sunny days, then provide some back-up power on still, rainy days instead of gas generators. The latest two of these batteries went online in 2025 and contributed to the price lowering.

The success of South Australia’s batteries has inspired other Australian states to build their own. Last week, a report by consulting firm Rystad Energy noted that “utility-scale batteries are no longer a complementary technology in Australia’s power system – they are actively displacing gas generation across multiple states”. This has made Australia a “global proof point” for the effectiveness of the technology, it said.

Another contributor to falling power prices is a giant new wind farm in South Australia called Goyder South, which was switched on in October. The 412-megawatt wind farm is the biggest in the state and is expected to increase its wind generation by 20 per cent. “Basic economics says that if you build more supply, then prices go down,” says Buckley.

The AEMO report notes that wholesale electricity prices were actually negative in South Australia 48 per cent of the time in the last quarter. This meant the state was generating more electricity than it was using, so the price went negative to encourage electricity producers to stop producing, says Buckley.

In November, for example, South Australia set a new record when, at one point, it met 157 per cent of its electricity demand with renewable energy alone. On occasions like this, the surplus energy is soaked up by the state’s batteries, exported to neighbouring Victoria or curtailed, meaning wind and solar farms are temporarily disconnected from the grid.

At the same time, many South Australian homes have started using less grid electricity, or none at all, by powering themselves. Over half the houses in the state now have solar panels on their roofs, which provide power during the day. About 50,000 have also installed home batteries, which are charged by rooftop solar panels during the day and then provide power after the sun goes down. Since the federal Australian government began offering 30 per cent discounts on home batteries in July 2025, South Australia has installed the most home batteries per capita of any state or territory.

In December, the state finalised deals to build two more large wind farms so that it can meet its target of reaching 100 per cent net renewables next year. “I think the target is on track and these two new wind farms will be key enablers of that,” says Buckley.

Fossil hunting in the Australian outback

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HEALTH | FEB 11, 2026, 7:38 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

First ever inhalable gene therapy for cancer gets fast-tracked by FDA

A gene therapy that patients breathe in has been found to shrink lung tumours by inserting immune-boosting genes into surrounding cells

By Alice Klein

The gene therapy is administered as a mist that is inhaled

Nico De Pasquale Photography/Getty Images

A first-of-its-kind inhalable gene therapy for lung cancer that genetically modifies people’s lung cells has been fast-tracked towards potential approval after promising clinical trial results.

“Very encouragingly, the hypothesis was proven – that there was actually shrinkage of the tumours in the lungs,” Wen Wee Ma at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio told a recent meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

The treatment is novel because it uses a virus to carry immune-boosting genes into lung cells, which makes them better at fighting tumours on their own. Gene therapy usually involves replacing faulty copies of crucial genes.

Another unusual aspect is that it is breathed in rather than swallowed or injected. “It’s such a different way of giving anti-cancer treatment,” said Ma. The advantage of this mode of delivery is that it gets the therapy directly into the lungs. One reason why lung cancer is the deadliest form of the disease is that treatments given orally or intravenously struggle to make it to the lungs.

The new therapy contains a herpes virus that has been modified to make it harmless and unable to spread to other people. The virus is tasked with dragging two genes, one encoding the protein interleukin-2 and the other encoding interleukin-12, into lung cells. These are naturally produced in the body and help to suppress tumour growth. However, tumours often fight back and deplete them, so the gene therapy is designed to restore their production.

Since 2024, Ma and his colleagues have been testing the gene therapy in people with advanced lung cancer who have exhausted all other treatment options. To administer it, a liquid containing the gene therapy is nebulised, meaning it is converted into a fine mist that people directly inhale into their lungs from a device.

At the oncology meeting, Ma announced that the gene therapy had reduced the size of lung tumours in three out of 11 people, and stopped them from growing any bigger in another five people. Some patients experienced side effects like chills or vomiting, but no severe safety concerns were identified.

Based on these positive results, the gene therapy received “regenerative medicine advanced therapy designation” from the US Food and Drug Administration this week. This means the agency will seek to expedite its approval so patients can access it as soon as possible.

One drawback of the gene therapy is that it only targets tumours that are confined to the lungs, not when they have spread to other parts of the body. To address this, Ma and his colleagues are now testing it in combination with immunotherapies and chemotherapies, in trials that will involve about 250 patients.

Krystal Biotech, the company that developed the gene therapy, previously created the first-approved gene therapy that is rubbed into the skin. This uses the same modified herpes virus to carry collagen genes into the skin of people with a rare blistering skin condition called recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, thereby helping to repair their skin.

The company is also working on inhalable gene therapies for cystic fibrosis and a genetic lung condition called alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency.

SPACE | FEB 9, 2026, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Gravitational wave signal proves Einstein was right about relativity

Ripples in space-time from a pair of merging black holes have been recorded in unprecedented detail, enabling physicists to test predictions of general relativity

By Alex Wilkins

Artist’s impression of a black hole collision that produced GW250114

A. Simonnet/Sonoma State University; LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA Collaboration; University of Rhode Island

The loudest collision ever recorded between two black holes has allowed scientists to test Einstein’s theory of general relativity in unprecedented detail, showing that the physicist’s predictions were once again correct.

In 2025, an international collaboration of gravitational wave detectors, made up of ultra-sensitive laser arrays, detected a powerful ripple in the fabric of space-time, labelled GW250114, probably produced by the merger of two black holes.

The detectors, which include the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US and the Virgo detector in Italy, are far more sensitive than when LIGO made its first detection in 2016. This meant that GW250114 had the clearest and most noise-free data of any gravitational wave event so far, making it a unique testbed for predictions from otherwise well-tested physical theories.

Last year, researchers used data from GW250114 to test Stephen Hawking’s theorem, proposed more than 50 years ago, that a merged black hole’s event horizon, the region within which light can no longer escape, would not be smaller than the sum of its parent black holes. The results showed with nearly 100 per cent confidence that Hawking was correct.

Now, Keefe Mitman at Cornell University in New York and his colleagues have gone a step further and tested whether the black hole merger conforms with Albert Einstein’s general relativity.

Einstein’s original equations describe how any object with mass moves through space-time. When these equations are tweaked for two black holes merging and then solved, a distinct picture emerges. The black holes first spiral around each other with increasing speed, then crash together, releasing a colossal burst of energy, before vibrating at distinct frequencies, similar to how a bell rings after it has been struck.

These frequencies, called ringdown modes, have been relatively faint in previous gravitational wave events, making it impossible to detect the complex structure predicted by Einstein, but GW250114 was loud enough that the modes predicted by Einstein’s equations could be properly tested. Mitman and his colleagues simulated Einstein’s equations and produced predictions of how loud and at what frequencies these black hole vibrations should be. When they compared them to the measured frequencies, they closely matched.

“The amplitudes that we measure in the data agree incredibly well with the predictions from numerical relativity,” says Mitman. “Einstein’s equations are really hard to solve, but when we do solve them and we observe predictions of general relativity in our detectors, those two agree.”

“The upshot is Einstein is still correct,” says Laura Nuttall at the University of Portsmouth, UK. “Everything seems to look like what Einstein says about gravity.”

Despite the loudness of GW250114, the frequencies were still so faint that Mitman and his team couldn’t rule out that they might differ from Einstein’s predictions by less than about 10 per cent. This is mainly a consequence of the limitations in the sensitivity of our detectors, says Mitman, and should decrease as we improve the sensitivity of gravitational wave detectors. However, if Einstein’s theory is incorrect in some way, then this difference will persist.

“As we observe more and more events, or see louder single events, what could happen is that those error bars could just shrink to being around zero, or it could shrink to being away from zero,” says Mitman. “If it shrinks to being away from zero, that’s much more interesting.”

Journal reference:

Physical Review Letters, DOI: 10.1103/6c61-fm1n

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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Article amended on 11 February 2026

We corrected details about the appearance of ringdown modes in previous gravitational wave events.

LIFE | FEB 10, 2026, 7:01 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Newborn marsupials seen crawling to mother's pouch for the first time

Scientists have captured remarkable footage of the young of a mouse-sized marsupial, called a fat-tailed dunnart, making their way to their mother’s pouch soon after being born

By James Woodford

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_8y0eOrVbI

Minuscule marsupial newborns that weigh less than a grain of rice have been filmed crawling towards their mother’s pouch for the first time.

Unlike placental mammals, which give birth to much more developed babies, marsupials are born after extremely short gestation periods and must move to a pouch where they attach to a teat and continue to grow.

For many of Australia’s rare and small marsupials, this process remains a mystery – even for those species that are kept in captive colonies, says Brandon Menzies at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Menzies and his colleagues maintain a large population of hundreds of fat-tailed dunnarts (Sminthopsis crassicaudata), which are considered to be one of the closest relatives of the extinct Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). In collaboration with the firm Colossal Biosciences, they hope to one day bring back the Tasmanian tiger, or something resembling it, by gene-editing dunnarts.

However, even though the colony was established decades ago and the fertility of the females is closely monitored, no one has ever observed the birth of any pouch young or how they travel to attach to the mother’s teats.

Menzies says this is because there is no pregnancy test for the species, they are nocturnal and give birth overnight, and the dash to the pouch is estimated to take only half a minute for each batch of neonates over the 12 to 24 hours when groups of young are born.

Adult fat-tailed dunnarts

Emily Scicluna

But in 2024, a member of the team noticed blood in one of the enclosures. When the female dunnart was turned upside down and examined, the researchers saw tiny neonates, which weigh only 5 milligrams, making their way towards their mother’s pouch.

“We just saw the pouch young sort of waving their arms and crawling and wriggling,” says Menzies. “It’s very much a freestyle-swimming type of crawl, or a commando crawl.”

Young dunnarts in their mother’s pouch

Emily Scicluna

Realising this was a moment no one had ever captured before, Menzies managed to film 22 seconds of footage before returning the mother to her enclosure the right way up, as gravity is thought to be one of the key cues the young use to navigate.

The researchers estimate that the young were making arm movements at the rate of about 120 per minute.

The crawl to the teat is just the first test of survival: being a young marsupial is a brutal business, as many species give birth to more babies than the number of teats available. Fat-tailed dunnarts can gestate up to 17 young, but can only feed 10 – a less competitive attrition rate compared with that of Tasmanian devils, which give birth to up to 30 young and have only four teats.

Menzies says it is phenomenal that after only 14 days of gestation, the fat-tailed dunnarts can give birth to young that can move their arms and navigate to find a teat – which is why, until now, it was thought that the babies were so small that the mother must somehow contort herself so they are deposited directly into the pouch.

“The fact that they can crawl on their own to the pouch highlights the species’ incredible developmental capacity,” he says. “Only 10 days earlier, they were just a zygote made up of a few cells.”

Journal reference:

Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.251970

Fossil hunting in the Australian outback

Join this extraordinary adventure through the heart of Australia’s fossil frontier. Once a shallow inland sea millions of years ago, eastern Australia is now a hotspot for fossils. Over 13 unforgettable days, you’ll travel deep into the outback, tracing the footsteps of prehistoric giants and uncovering the secrets of Earth’s ancient history.

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HUMANS | FEB 10, 2026, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Which humans first made tools or art – and how do we know?

Building the human story based on a few artefacts is tricky – particularly for wooden tools that don’t preserve well, or cave art that we don’t have the technology to date. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how we determine what came first in the timeline of our species

By Michael Marshall

Recent findings have given us a new understanding of when the earliest digging and hunting tools arose

RAUL MARTIN/MSF/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

This is an extract from Our Human Story, our newsletter about the revolution in archaeology. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every month.

When writing headlines for stories about human evolution, the favourite superlatives are “oldest”, “earliest” and “first”. I have lost count of the number of articles I’ve written that used these.

And it’s not just about attracting more readers – even though it usually works that way. If a researcher can find evidence that a species or behaviour is older than previously thought, that is useful information. Figuring out the order in which things happened is crucial to understanding why they happened.

For instance, we used to think that all rock art was created within the last 40,000 years. That meant it had to have been created by our species (Homo sapiens), as other groups like the Neanderthals had died out by then. But it turns out that some prehistoric art is older than that, so it’s possible Neanderthals were artists too.

In the past month we’ve had a lot of “earliest” and “first” findings, and they got me thinking about how to interpret these things. When can we be confident that we have figured out how long something really existed for?

First!

Let’s start with a story I wrote, if only to get it out of the way. At a dig in southern Greece, archaeologists uncovered two wooden objects that appear to be tools: one seems to be a digging stick, the other’s specific use is difficult to identify. Both are about 430,000 years old, making them the oldest known wooden tools.

They aren’t that much older than the previous record-holders. The Clacton Spear found in the UK is thought to be 400,000 years old, though it was excavated many decades ago so the dating is necessarily uncertain. A set of wooden spears from Schöningen, Germany, were thought to be of a similar age, but their age has been revised downwards: some methods put them closer to 300,000 years old and a study from May 2025 indicated they were just 200,000 years old.

Bone tools also crop up in Europe around this period. At Boxgrove in the UK, researchers found a chunk of bone from an elephant-like animal, perhaps a steppe mammoth. It had been formed into a hammer for reshaping stone tools. The elephant bone is 480,000 years old, making it the earliest known use of elephant bone in Europe. However, elsewhere bone tools were in use much earlier. In east Africa, ancient humans were systematically making tools from bone, including elephant bone, 1.5 million years ago. The practice may date back even earlier, of course.

Let’s come forward in time a bit. At Xigou in central China, archaeologists have just documented a trove of 2601 stone artefacts, dating to between 160,000 and 72,000 years ago. The artefacts included hafted tools: that is, stone tools that were fitted onto something else, such as a wooden pole. This, the researchers say, is “the earliest evidence for composite tools in Eastern Asia, to our knowledge”.

And finally, in early January we learned that people in South Africa were hunting with poison arrows 60,000 years ago. Archaeologists found five arrowheads made of quartzite, which were coated with a sticky, poisonous liquid, probably from a plant.

Each of these finds has more to it than meets the eye.

Ever further back

Traces of plant toxins were found on these arrow points

Marlize Lombard

The oldest known wooden tools are almost certainly not the actual oldest wooden tools. The issue here is preservation: wood rots, so our record of prehistoric wooden artefacts is pretty scanty.

When I spoke to Katerina Harvati, who led the excavation of the wooden tools, she was very clear that people were using wooden tools long before 400,000 years ago. It’s just that we haven’t been able to find them.

In fact, given that wood is easier to work than stone, and that chimpanzees sometimes make simple wooden tools, it may be that wooden tools are the oldest form of technology. If next week a paper arrives claiming to have found wooden tools from a million years ago, it will be a significant discovery, but – other than the fact of their preservation – it won’t be remotely surprising.

It follows that we should not hang any major narratives about human technological development on the age of the oldest wooden tools. We would need to systematically investigate sites where such tools could be preserved, at a range of ages, before we could be remotely confident about when people started using them.

Let’s now reconsider those poison arrows. What they are is the oldest known examples of arrowheads with poison on them. However, the story points out that arrowheads with a design consistent with modern-day poison arrows can be found tens of thousands of years earlier. Furthermore, like wood, poisons are prone to biodegrade.

This is something where I think we can be a bit more confident. Poison arrows are another form of composite technology – putting two or more items together – and that seems to only arise in the later stages of human evolution. It’s not something we see any evidence of early hominins like Ardipithecus or Australopithecus making – whereas I wouldn’t bet against them making simple tools out of wood or bone. We should not wed ourselves to 60,000 years ago as the origin of poison arrows, but our error margin is probably narrower.

And then there’s the question of the oldest art, which is an absolute horror show.

Prehistoric graffiti

Hand stencils from a cave in Sulawesi, Indonesia

Ahdi Agus Oktaviana

The most famous ancient artworks are cave paintings, though there are also sculptures, engravings and much more. The trouble with a lot of this is that it’s really hard to date.

If you find a sculpture buried in sediments, it’s often possible to date the sediments. But cave paintings are much trickier. If they were made using charcoal, you may be able to use carbon dating, but only if they were made in the last 50,000 years: any older than that and carbon dating is useless. Most cave art has never been dated, and often can’t be dated given current technologies.

In the past couple of weeks, we learned that a hand stencil painted on a cave wall in Sulawesi in Indonesia was at least 67,800 years old. This makes it the oldest known rock art anywhere in the world, edging out a similar hand stencil at a cave in northern Spain, which has been attributed to Neanderthals.

Did you see the crucial caveat? It was the words “at least”. The way these artworks have been dated is by sampling thin layers of rock that have formed on top of them, due to water trickling over the rock surface and depositing minerals. These “flowstones” can be dated, but that just gives you a minimum age. The underlying artwork could be much older.

My point in going through all of this is not to say that we don’t know anything: on the contrary, we have a lot of information, much of which wasn’t available just 10 or 20 years ago. Instead, I want to think through how we might achieve a reliable timeline for human evolution and cultural development, and which bits are seemingly doomed to uncertainty.

In the fossil record, volume is helpful. Most palaeontologists don’t study large and charismatic animals like dinosaurs, but small things like marine molluscs. The reason is that these organisms are fossilised in huge numbers, which means it’s possible to trace evolutionary changes in a lot of detail. If a species is common in the fossil record and then suddenly disappears after 66 million years ago, that’s good evidence that the species really did go extinct at that point.

In the human fossil and archaeological record, what things do we have lots of, and what things are scarce?

There are many hominin species for which we only have a handful of specimens, especially the early ones. That means we have basically no information about how long they existed, or how widespread they were. We also can’t determine if one species evolved directly into another, or if some more complicated process occurred.

In contrast, our record of stone tools is pretty extensive. It has been inching further back in time: the current oldest known stone tools are the Lomekwian tools from Kenya, dating to 3.3 million years ago. I would not be surprised if older ones turned up. However, really early hominins like Orrorin (6 to 4.5 million years ago, maybe) and Ardipithecus (5.8 to 4.4 million years ago, ish) seem to have spent a lot of time in trees, so I actually would be surprised if they were making stone tools.

Wooden tools are another matter. Our sample size is small and spotty, and that’s down to limits to preservation. I don’t expect to have a reliable timeline of the development of wooden tools in my lifetime.

As for art, our main limit is technological. We have no shortage of preserved art: the problem is inventing ways to reliably date it. At the moment, we can’t draw a timeline of the development of art, and I am suspicious of any attempt to fit it into a wider narrative. But that could change as more art is dated and new techniques are devised. By the time I retire, I expect to have a much better grasp of how ancient humans’ artistic practices changed.

In some sense, all our stories about human evolution are provisional. That’s true of all palaeontology, of course, but some stories are more provisional than others. There isn’t much wiggle room about the end-Cretaceous extinction that took out the non-bird dinosaurs. But there is still a lot of wiggle room in the human story. Some of that can be closed by digging up more artefacts and creating better dating techniques, and some of it we might just have to live with.

Neanderthals, human origins and cave art: France

Embark on a captivating journey through time as you explore key Neanderthal and Upper Palaeolithic sites of southern France, from Bordeaux to Montpellier.

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PHYSICS | FEB 10, 2026, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Time crystals could be used to build accurate quantum clocks

Once considered an oddity of quantum physics, time crystals could be a good building block for accurate clocks and sensors, according to new calculations

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Guy Crittenden/Getty Images

Time crystals are an oddity of quantum physics, but new calculations show that these bizarre materials could be useful for building very accurate clocks.

All crystals are defined by repetition – conventional crystals are made from atoms arranged in repeating patterns, and time crystals have a repeating structure in time. If you observe a time crystal for long enough, you will see it cycle through the same set of configurations over and over. Moreover, this cycling arises spontaneously, not because the material is forced to maintain it, but because that is its preferred phase, similar to how the preferred phase of water at low temperature is ice.

Ludmila Viotti at the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy and her colleagues have now shown that some time crystals could be a good building block for very accurate quantum clocks.

They mathematically analysed a system of up to 100 quantum mechanical particles, each of which had two distinct states determined by the property of quantum spin, similar to how a coin on a table has two distinct states determined by which side is facing up. The specific spin system that the researchers studied could become a time crystal or exist in a more conventional phase that didn’t spontaneously oscillate in time, and it could be used as a clock in either phase. The team calculated how the performance of the clock made from spins – its accuracy and precision – in the time crystal phase would compare with a clock made from spins in this “normal” phase.

“In the normal phase, if you want to resolve smaller intervals of time, you will lose accuracy exponentially. In the time crystalline phase, for the same resolution, you can get much higher accuracy,” says Viotti. Although the spin-based clock would normally become less accurate if you wanted to, for example, measure seconds rather than minutes, this didn’t happen if the spins formed a time crystal first.

Mark Mitchison at King’s College London says it isn’t surprising that a time crystal would be a promising starting point for making a clock, but a rigorous analysis of that advantage was missing until now. He and his colleagues previously proved that nearly any random sequence of events can be turned into a clock, but a system that has self-sustained oscillations provides a more clock-like structure from the start, he says.

“For about 10 years, we have known that time crystals can exist, but it is still unclear how to exploit them,” says Krzysztof Sacha at the Jagiellonian University in Poland. “Just as ordinary crystals can be used both for jewellery and for building computer processors, we would like time crystals to enable useful technologies as well.”

Time crystals are unlikely to overtake the current best clocks in the world, which are made from extremely cold atoms, he says, but they could still be an alternative to timekeeping based on satellite systems such as GPS, which can be disrupted by nefarious actors. Clocks built from time crystals could also become the basis of sensors for magnetic fields, since even tiny amounts of such fields would disturb the clocks’ ticks, says Mitchison.

Yet, a lot more work remains before time crystals can be used practically, says Viotti. For instance, her team’s spin system ought to be compared with other systems that behave as accurate clocks and tested in an experiment with actual spins, she says.

Journal reference:

Physical Review Letters DOI: 10.1103/dj21-gmdj

ENVIRONMENT | FEB 10, 2026, 10:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Old EV batteries could meet most of China's energy storage needs

Electric vehicle batteries are typically retired once they reach about 80 per cent of their original capacity, but they could be repurposed in electricity grids to balance out slumps in renewable generation

By Alec Luhn

A vehicle battery factory in Guangxi, China

Costfoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Used electric vehicle batteries could meet two-thirds of China’s grid storage needs, charging up when renewable energy is plentiful and disbursing electricity when demand outstrips supply.

Renewable energy generation slackens when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, which can lead to a shortage at times of peak demand, like mornings and evenings and the winter months. Gas and coal plants typically fill that gap. But countries like China, the US, the UK and Australia are building huge amounts of grid storage based on batteries that can save renewable energy for later use.

As EVs become more common, batteries from dismantled cars could be plugged into the grid to achieve a carbon-neutral power system more quickly and cheaply, argue Ruifei Ma at Tsinghua University in China and colleagues. These second-life batteries could meet 67 per cent of the Chinese grid’s storage demand by 2050, while cutting costs by 2.5 per cent, according to their study.

EV batteries degrade as they are charged and discharged over the years, and they are typically retired once they reach about 80 per cent of their original capacity. While that degradation diminishes a car’s range and acceleration, it has little impact on a grid storage system, where hundreds or thousands of batteries are being charged and discharged over many hours.

“There’s still plenty of power left in them, and used as storage, they tend not to degrade as quickly,” says Gill Lacey at Teesside University, UK.

“We shouldn’t be throwing away these materials that cost a lot of money to mine and process and turn into batteries when we’ve got 80 per cent usable capacity left in the cells,” says Rhodri Jervis at University College London. “So, there’s a lot of desire to use retired battery packs in second-life applications from a cost-saving point of view, but I think probably more importantly from a sustainability point of view.”

Previous research has come to different conclusions about whether energy storage based on used batteries would be cheaper than new lithium-ion batteries, which have been falling in price.

But used batteries are likely to become more economical as increasing numbers of EVs come off the road. More than 17 million EVs were purchased in 2024, or about 20 per cent of all car sales, and almost two-thirds of them were bought in China.

The study found that in a scenario where batteries with different chemistries are sourced across all of China and deployed until they are at 40 per cent of their original capacity, second-life grid storage starts to grow ever more rapidly after 2030, while new batteries plateau. Total capacity would reach 2 trillion watts by 2050.

In a scenario in which grid storage relies on new batteries and pumped hydro — where water pumped into a reservoir flows downhill to drive a turbine — total capacity only reaches about half of that.

While second-life battery storage is still largely untested, the US start-up Redwood Materials has built a 63-megawatt-hour project out of decade-old car batteries for a data centre in Nevada. It claims its systems cost less than $150 per kilowatt-hour and can deliver power for over 24 hours, far longer than new lithium-ion batteries can realistically offer.

But used batteries need to be screened and grouped into units of similar capacity. Alternatively, the management system must be able to bypass individual batteries. Otherwise, the whole group will have to stop charging as soon as the most degraded battery reaches its capacity.

Damaged batteries must be screened out, too, and those that make the cut must have temperature and voltage sensors for each of their hundreds of cells. If a cell overheats, it can cause a massive, inextinguishable fire.

“Clearly the risks are higher, so you need to mitigate those with your safety and isolation and balancing and all the rest of it being more robust,” says Lacey.

Journal reference:

Cell Reports Sustainability DOI: 10.1016/j.crsus.2025.100613

COMMENT ENVIRONMENT | FEB 10, 2026, 7:42 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why 1.5°C failed and setting a new limit would make things worse

Setting a limit for global warming didn't succeed in galvanising climate action quickly enough – now we should focus on making the annual average temperature rise clear for all to see, says Bill McGuire

By Bill McGuire

Climate change has already led to more frequent disasters, such as the recent floods in Mozambique

Associated Press/Alamy

More than a decade on from the 2015 Paris climate conference, it is hard not to feel that we have, at best, been treading water on climate action. Sure, there are plenty more electric vehicles on the road and, globally, renewables now produce more electricity than coal. But we continue to pump out more than 41 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide every year, while fossil fuel companies plan for expansion and governments row back on green measures.

There was real optimism in Paris, as countries pledged to pursue efforts to limit the global average temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Ten years on, this ambition is, to all intents and purposes, dead in the water. Such is the mechanism used for defining when our world breaches 1.5°C, however, that the year this happens is likely to be officially confirmed only in 2040 or thereabouts – a decade after it actually occurs.

The 1.5°C mark has been conflated with the threshold for dangerous climate change and, as such, has been at the heart of all aspects of climate policy. We have been warned that crossing the 1.5°C threshold hugely increases the risk of critical elements of the climate system tipping, leading to further warming and catastrophic impacts, but even this hasn’t driven the action on emissions that the science demands.

So what happened? Why did we fail? Right at the heart of the issue lies the fact that 1.5°C was treated by many not as a limit but as a target, and whereas a limit is something we try to keep below, a target is something we aim at.

The world had heated by not much more than 1°C by the time of the Paris conference, and the prevailing rate of heating was measured at about 0.18°C a decade. This gave the impression that we had plenty of time to act, and the usual suspects took advantage of this. Governments and fossil fuel corporations keen to keep kicking the climate action can down the road claimed that business as usual could continue for now, and that the time for serious measures had not yet arrived. As a consequence, burning fossil fuels continues to add 37 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every year.

As we drift past 1.5°C, there is heated debate about a new lodestar to replace it. Some have suggested using an entirely different yardstick of our progress – or lack of it – such as the rate of take-up of renewable energy. But the key metric really has to be the global temperature rise. This is the benchmark against which the climate system’s response is measured, and it can provide a comparison with ancient episodes of rapid heating that have gripped our world. It is also one that everybody understands, even if many still don’t grasp its significance.

In this regard, because every fraction of a degree is now critical, some have proposed looking to 1.6°C as the new limit, or perhaps 1.7°C. But neither of these will cut it, firstly because they will once again be regarded as targets by those gaming the system, and secondly because at the current rate of heating –  0.27°C a decade – both will be exceeded as soon as the mid-2030s. The reality is that there isn’t a snowball in hell’s chance that we will act on emissions quickly enough to stay this side of either of these marks.

The truth is that adopting a new limit that will quickly become a target would actually make the situation worse, while tying policy to this would set us up, once again, to fail. Maybe, then, we should forget limits altogether, focusing instead on some impactful means of marking the annual global average temperature rise for all to see. This would first need a methodology that allows this figure to be stipulated instantaneously, rather than having to wait 10 years. However, there is already a way of doing this developed by Richard Betts at the UK Met Office, the country’s national weather service, and his colleagues.

Then we need some pictorial means of showing this in a way that everyone can understand – perhaps an Earth Thermometer that is updated at 12-month intervals. Following the example of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, who announce the time on the Doomsday Clock every January representing existential threats to civilisation, maybe a similar annual jamboree could spotlight the ratcheting-up of the global temperature on the same date every year, alongside those tipping points we are on the cusp of crossing, or have crossed already. This would provide an unequivocal benchmark of the shocking impact our activities are having on the planet’s temperature and signal the locking-in, without urgent action, of an increasingly perilous future.

Bill McGuire is professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London. His next book: The Fate of the World: A history and future of the climate crisis, is published by HarperNorth in May.

MIND | FEB 9, 2026, 7:52 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Specific cognitive training has 'astonishing' effect on dementia risk

A type of cognitive training that tests people's quick recall seems to reduce the risk of dementia, including Alzheimer's disease

By Helen Thomson

Cognitive training could arm the brain against the effects of dementia

Gary Burchell/Getty Images

Cognitive “speed training” can reduce the risk of a dementia diagnosis by 25 per cent – that’s according to results from the world’s first randomised controlled trial of any intervention against the condition.

“There was a lot of scepticism about whether or not brain training interventions were beneficial, and to me, [our study] answers the question that they are,” says Marilyn Albert at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.

Brain training has generated controversy for years. Early enthusiasm waned after several brain-training companies that had promised protection against cognitive decline were found to be overstating their benefits.

In 2014, almost 70 scientists signed an open letter saying that there was no conclusive evidence that brain training produced changes that had real-world relevance or promoted brain health. Months later, another open letter signed by more than 100 scientists countered their arguments.

Now, a 20-year study of 2832 people aged 65 and older suggests specific exercises may offer benefits.

The participants were randomly assigned to one of three intervention groups or to a control group. One group engaged in speed training, using a computer-based task called Double Decision, which briefly displays a car and a road sign within a scene before they disappear. Participants must then recall which car appeared and where the sign was located. The task is adaptive, becoming harder as performance improves.

The other two groups took part in memory or reasoning training, learning strategies designed to improve those skills.

The participants completed two 60-75-minute sessions per week for five weeks. About half of those in each group were then randomly assigned to receive booster sessions – four additional 1-hour sessions at the end of the first year, and another four at the end of the third year.

Twenty years later, the researchers assessed US Medicare claims data to determine how many of the participants had been diagnosed with dementia. They found that those who completed speed training with booster sessions had a 25 per cent lower risk of diagnosis with Alzheimer’s or a related dementia compared with the control group. No other group – including speed training without boosters – showed a significant change in risk. “The size of the effect is really quite astonishing,” says Albert.

“The analysis seems rigorous,” says Torkel Klingberg at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden. “It is impressive to have a 20-year follow-up, and reducing the risk score for dementia is an impressive and important result.”

Walter Boot at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York state cautions that the team measured many outcomes over the 20-year period, including mental health. “The more outcomes that are examined and the more statistical tests that are conducted, the greater the likelihood that at least one result will look meaningful, even if the intervention itself had no true impact,” he says. “This does not mean the findings are wrong, but it does mean they should be interpreted cautiously.”

In Double Decision, users are tested on their speed, attention and peripheral vision by focusing on one of two centre targets and a peripheral one. As the speed of the programme increases, the centre targets get more similar, and the peripheral distractions multiply

BrainHQ

Why speed training might work remains unclear. One possibility is its reliance on implicit learning, which occurs without conscious awareness. “We know that changes that occur from this kind of learning are very long-lasting,” says Albert. What’s more, although the duration of the training was relatively modest, it was demanding. “You really have to pay attention, and it gets harder if you do it well,” she says.

There are plenty of examples of short experiences that drive long-lasting changes in the brain, says Etienne De Villers-Sidani at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. For example, a single car crash can induce a lifelong fear of driving.

He suggests that speed training may build brain reserve – a kind of cognitive buffer against damage. If you assume cognition diminishes at a particular threshold of damage, then a brain with more neurons and connections is going to succumb later.

Albert adds that altered brain connectivity might also help people divide their attention more effectively, making it easier to navigate daily life as they age. This could then reduce isolation, encourage greater activity or increase social engagement – things known to contribute to long-term brain health.

The authors also claim that the results for the booster group might reflect speed training having a dose-dependent effect. Bobby Stojanoski at Ontario Tech University says that future work should focus on this relationship: “What is the optimal amount of training?”

The take-home message, says Andrew Budson at Boston University, is “not that everyone should go into their windowless basement and start doing speed training games on their computer”. But activities that use implicit learning may be beneficial in delaying the effects of Alzheimer’s disease. “Learning a new sport, vocation or craft is likely to produce long-lasting [beneficial] changes in the brain, in addition to any enjoyment you derive from engaging in these activities.”

Journal reference:

Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Translational Research and Clinical Interventions DOI: 10.1002/trc2.70197

HUMANS | FEB 9, 2026, 7:01 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Is this carved rock an ancient Roman board game?

The lines worn into an engraved limestone object from the Netherlands are consistent with the idea that it was a Roman game board, according to an AI analysis

By Chris Simms

The possible game board with pencil marks highlighting the incised lines

Het Romeins Museum

A mysterious flat stone with a geometric pattern of straight lines carved into it may be a previously unknown Roman board game.

Thousands of simulations by artificial intelligence of how sliding stone or glass pieces could have marked the surface suggest it was an early example of a blocking game, a type not documented in Europe until several centuries later in the Middle Ages.

Writings and physical remains have revealed that the Romans played many board games. These include Ludus latrunculorum, or the game of soldiers, where the goal is to capture the other player’s pieces; Ludus duodecim scriptorum, which means the game of 12 signs and is often thought of as an ancestor of backgammon; and games like tic-tac-toe, or noughts and crosses, where you win by placing three symbols in a line on a grid.

However, there are likely to be many games we don’t know about because nothing was written about them, no traces have survived or we just don’t recognise them for what they are.

In the Roman Museum in Heerlen, the Netherlands, Walter Crist at Leiden University, also in the Netherlands, came across a flat stone measuring 212 by 145 millimetres with a geometric pattern carved on its upper face. It was found at the Roman town of Coriovallum, which is buried under present-day Heerlen, and the type of limestone it is made of was often imported from France for use in decorative elements on buildings between AD 250 and 476.

“I was a bit sceptical at first because it’s a pattern I had not seen before, so I asked the museum to have a closer look,” says Crist. He then found visible wear on the object’s surface consistent with if you were pushing stone game pieces along the carved lines.

The wear was uneven, though, with most of it on one particular diagonal line.

To see what could have led to this distinctive pattern, Crist and his colleagues used an AI play system known as Ludii, which pitted two AI agents against each other. It simulated thousands of games with different numbers of starting pieces and 130 rule variations from various ancient board games that have been played in Europe, including haretavl from Scandinavia and gioco dell’orso from Italy.

Reconstruction of one of the main roads in the city centre of Coriovallum

Mikko Kriek/BCL Archaeological Support Amsterdam

The results revealed that nine similar blocking games, in which the person with more pieces tries to block their opponent from moving, could have led to the distinctive wear, says Crist.

The team is tentatively calling the game Ludus Coriovalli, or the game from Coriovallum.

“I’m not convinced we can ever know for sure, but the analysis shows that this object certainly could be a game board,” says Tim Penn at the University of Reading, UK.

“It’s an interesting approach,” says Ulrich Schädler at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. But he’s not convinced the object is a game board, because the geometric pattern seems imprecise and this is the only known instance of this pattern, when normally many versions of game boards are found.

Crist accepts that we may never know, but says it may have been a prototype game, or one that was normally played using marks scratched in the earth so no traces remain.

Blocking games in Europe are documented from the Middle Ages onwards, so if Ludus Coriovalli is a blocking game, it pushes the evidence back several centuries for people playing these games there. They may have existed earlier in South and East Asia, says Crist, and there seem to be some blocking-game-like patterns in Roman-era graffiti, but it is difficult to date those.

Combining archaeological and AI methods like this could provide glimpses of other mysterious ancient games, says Penn. Another possible game board, from the Roman legionary camp at Vindonissa in Switzerland, features markings that look like a square with an X inside it, with little holes where lines meet. “Maybe this kind of analysis could help cast new light on it,” says Penn.

Journal reference:

Antiquity DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2025.10264

Historic Herculaneum – Uncovering Vesuvius, Pompeii and ancient Naples

Embark on a captivating journey where history and archaeology come to life through Mount Vesuvius and the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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HEALTH | FEB 9, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

'Hidden' group of gut bacteria may be essential to good health

Scientists have pinpointed a group of bacteria that consistently appear in high numbers in healthy people, suggesting that these could one day be targeted through diet or probiotics

By Chris Simms

Gut bacteria that we barely know anything about may be essential for good health

3DMEDISPHERE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

A mysterious group of bacteria seems to thrive in the gut microbiomes of people without illness, hinting that they may be crucial to good health.

More than 4600 species of bacteria are estimated to reside in our gut, interacting with each other and our bodies to influence everything from our immune system to our sleep, rate of ageing and risk of mental health conditions.

Yet about two-thirds of these species are part of the “hidden microbiome”, most of which we haven’t managed to grow in a lab or even name. We only know they exist after spotting their genomes in the gut. “A burning question still remains: are these species just bystanders or relevant to human health?” says Alexandre Almeida at the University of Cambridge.

To get an idea, Almeida and his colleagues searched for the genetic fingerprints of bacteria in the array of genomes found in gut microbiome samples. These were taken from studies that involved more than 11,000 people from 39 countries, primarily in Europe, North America and Asia.

About half of these people had no known medical condition, while the other half had been diagnosed with one of 13 conditions, including inflammatory bowel disease, obesity and chronic fatigue syndrome.

The researchers linked 715 bacterial species to at least one of these conditions, of which 342 species were found in higher numbers when people had a condition and 373 were more numerous when people had a clean bill of health.

Among these candidates, a genus called CAG-170 emerged with the strongest link. “Consistently across different conditions, we found that CAG-170 seem to be markedly increased in health compared to disease,” says Almeida.

In another part of the study, Almeida and his colleagues investigated which bacterial species were most associated with a healthy mix of gut microbes or an unbalanced one, known as dysbiosis.

“We found that, again, CAG-170 seem to be having a pronounced effect,” says Almeida. “There was a clear correlation where, essentially, higher abundance of CAG-170 was associated with lower dysbiosis and a healthier gut microbiome.”

To investigate why this might be, the team then looked into CAG-170 genomes, discovering genes for metabolic pathways that can produce high levels of vitamin B12, and for enzymes that break down a range of carbohydrates and fibres.

There was no sign that CAG-170 bacteria use vitamin B12 themselves, but other species usually found alongside them often have the capacity to utilise it, says Almeida. “It seems like CAG-170 are taking more of an altruistic approach and providing metabolic support to the rest of the microbiome.”

This is an important step towards better understanding which features of our gut microbiome are associated with health or illness, says Nicola Segata at the University of Trento in Italy, whose work recently revealed what a healthy gut microbiome may look like, but didn’t specifically outline the mechanisms by which such bacteria may bring about these benefits.

Whether high numbers of CAG-170 cause good health or are a consequence of it isn’t easy to answer, says Almeida. Working that out will require studies that investigate whether introducing CAG-170 reduces the risk of certain conditions.

“The human microbiome and the human body are so tightly connected that they should be regarded as a single, extremely complex system,” says Segata. “Rather than discussing the causal role of the first with respect to the second, we should investigate how the overall system is linked to healthy or unhealthy states and to healthy and unhealthy diets.”

Segata says it is important to follow up this research with nutritional clinical trials to assess which changes in diet affect which parts of the microbiome-human system.

Almeida sees the potential of CAG-170 in two ways. The first is that these bacteria could be used as an indicator of gut microbiome health. The second is by opening the door to a new generation of probiotics designed to support overall health.

CAG-170 could be a good candidate for probiotics, says Segata, but it is very challenging to grow these bacteria in the lab, let alone develop methods to deliver them alive into the gut and then actually colonise it. “Finding the best food or the best prebiotic supplement able to increase the amounts of CAG-170 is likely something more at hand than the development of those species as a probiotic product,” he says.

But the genomic data offers a clue about what might help, says Almeida. CAG-170 bacteria seem unable to produce the amino acid arginine, so providing more of that may help culture the bacteria, or one day boost their presence in the gut.

Journal reference:

Cell Host & Microbe DOI: 10.1016/j.chom.2026.01.013

PHYSICS | FEB 9, 2026, 6:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Physicists can now take control of 'hidden' friction in devices

One type of friction can waste energy even when two perfectly smooth surfaces move against each other, but researchers are getting a handle on how to attenuate or stop it completely

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Objects are full of electrons that can interact to cause friction

Quality Stock/Alamy

Parts of devices that are perfectly smooth can still experience friction because of the electrons within them, but a new method may enable researchers to turn it down or fully turn it off. Controlling this electronic friction could help build more efficient and long-lasting devices.

The force of friction opposes motion, dissipates energy and exists everywhere around us, enabling us to walk without slipping, for instance, and to light matches. Within machines such as engines, friction wastes energy and causes wear, so it must be fought with lubricants and surface engineering. Yet, some friction can persist regardless of those methods because objects are full of electrons, which interact with each other.

Now, Zhiping Xu at Tsinghua University in China and his colleagues have devised a way to control this “electronic friction”. They made a device composed of two layers: a piece of graphite and a semiconductor made from either molybdenum and sulphur or from boron and nitrogen.

All three materials are good solid lubricants, which means that mechanical friction from them sliding against each other was nearly zero. This enabled the researchers to focus on the more “hidden” mechanism of electronic friction wasting energy when the device’s layers moved, says Xu. “Even when surfaces slide perfectly, mechanical motion can still stir up the ‘sea’ of electrons within the materials,” he says.

The researchers first studied how electronic states in the semiconductor layer corresponded to how energy was lost during sliding to confirm that they were really looking at electronic friction. Then, they tested several ways of controlling it.

They managed to fully turn it off by adding pressure to the device, which made electrons between the layers share states instead of interacting in energetically costly ways, and by adding a “bias voltage” to the device, which controlled how stirred-up the electron sea could get.

Changing the voltage along two different parts of the device, which affected how easy it was for electrons to flow within it, allowed the researchers to weaken electronic friction – it served as a control dial rather than an on-off switch.

Jacqueline Krim at North Carolina State University says the first studies of electronic friction date to 1998, when her team used a material that conducts electricity perfectly at extremely low temperatures – a superconductor – to see it disappear in this special state. Ever since, researchers have been developing new ways to control it without having to fully switch out materials or add new lubricants into their devices, she says.

Krim says the ideal situation would be analogous to using a smartphone app to adjust the friction of the soles of your shoes as you walk, for example, from an icy sidewalk into a carpeted room. “The goal is this real-time remote control with no down time or material waste. To achieve this, one needs a material that responds to external fields in a way that yields the desired friction level,” she says.

Xu says managing all types of friction present in a device is difficult, in part, because researchers have not yet developed a mathematical model that would rigorously relate all of them to each other. However, in cases where electronic friction is the dominant cause of energy waste or wear, his team’s findings could already be promising, he says.

Journal reference:

Physical Review X DOI: 10.1103/jlc2-qmr1

HEALTH | FEB 5, 2026, 6:30 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Statins don't cause most of the side effects listed on their labels

A review of the evidence suggests that statins are no more likely than a placebo to cause most of the side effects listed on their labels

By Carissa Wong

The issue of whether statins really cause a plethora of side effects may have finally been put to bed

Benjamin John/Alamy

The long list of side effects associated with statins is vastly overstated, according to the most rigorous assessment of the evidence to date. This is prompting calls for the drugs’ packaging to be updated, over concerns that warnings regarding these reported side effects are putting people off the life-saving medicines.

“We can now be confident that statins do not cause the vast majority of medical issues listed as potential side effects in statin patient information leaflets,” said Christina Reith at the University of Oxford at a press briefing on 3 February.

Statins, which lower cholesterol levels, are inexpensive drugs that significantly cut the risk of heart attacks and strokes. But there has long been concern surrounding their recorded side effects, namely muscle pain, despite a study in 2022 showing that this isn’t commonly caused by statins.

“Unfortunately, ongoing confusion and concern – not just in patients, but also many doctors regarding potential statin side effects – mean that many people are not willing to start statins, or stop [taking] them,” said Reith.

Now, Reith and her colleagues have looked into the side effects that are commonly listed on statin labels, such as dizziness, fatigue, memory loss and headache, which normally end up there following evidence from case reports and observational studies. They didn’t investigate muscle pain or weakness, or whether there is an increased risk of diabetes, which was flagged as a small risk in a previous analysis.

The researchers analysed 19 randomised controlled trials, involving 120,000 participants who were followed for 4.5 years, on average, looking into the effects of five of the most commonly prescribed statins relative to a placebo.

Of the 66 side effects they analysed, they found that statins don’t seem to be the cause for 62 of them, with similar rates of incidence occurring in the placebo groups. They may arise due to the nocebo effect, where the expectation of harm leads to someone experiencing it, says Jeffrey Berger at New York University Langone Health.

The researchers did find that statins legitimately raise the risk of a few side effects, such as excess protein levels in urine, limb swelling and changes in liver function, but not to the extent that they seem to cause harm. “This allows us to be confident in saying that the benefits of statins really do significantly outweigh their risks,” said Reith.

Drug regulators should now update statin labels, says Karol Watson at the University of California, Los Angeles. For instance, labels could make clear which side effects are actually caused by statins and which seem to occur at similar rates among people on a placebo, she says.

But this is rarely a quick process – the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency only recommended that statin labels update descriptions of muscle weakness and pain as a side effect in January 2026, for instance.

In the meantime, clinicians can use the results to reassure people who are taking statins, or who could benefit from them. “It’s not about telling people that they’re crazy, that they’re wrong or you don’t have a side effect, it’s about educating them to change their expectations and help them,” says Berger.

Watson hopes the review will settle the debate around statin side effects. “The focus of future work should shift away from asking whether statins generally cause these symptoms – we already have this answer,” she says. Instead, it should focus on uncovering who might actually be susceptible to certain statin-related side effects – such as people with several health problems – and why, in real-world settings, she says.

Journal reference:

The Lancet DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(25)01578-8

HUMANS | FEB 8, 2026, 7:01 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Seafarers were visiting remote Arctic islands over 4000 years ago

The first people to reach the Kitsissut Islands off the north-west coast of Greenland were Indigenous peoples, who crossed over 50 kilometres of treacherous water

By Michael Marshall

A site on Isbjørne Island where Palaeo-Inuit people erected a circular tent

Matthew Walls, Mari Kleist, Pauline Knudsen

Humans were voyaging to remote islands off the north-west coast of Greenland 4500 years ago. This required them to cross over 50 kilometres of open water – one of the longest sea journeys made by Indigenous peoples in the Arctic.

These intrepid seafarers were the first humans to ever reach these islands, says archaeologist John Darwent at the University of California, Davis, who wasn’t involved in the study.

In 2019, Matthew Walls at the University of Calgary in Canada and his colleagues surveyed the Kitsissut Islands, also known as the Carey Islands, north-west of Greenland. The islands lie in the Pikialasorsuaq polynya, an area of open water surrounded by sea ice. Studies of marine sediments indicate that the polynya only formed about 4500 years ago.

The researchers focused on the three central islands: Isbjørne, Mellem and Nordvest. They found five sites with a total of 297 archaeological features. The biggest clusters were on Isbjørne, along beach terraces. There, the team found traces of 15 circular tents, each divided into two halves by stones, with a central hearth. These “bilobate” tents are characteristic of the Paleo-Inuit, the first peoples to reach northern Canada and Greenland.

Walls and his colleagues radiocarbon-dated a single wing bone from a seabird called a thick-billed murre, found in one of the tent rings. They estimate the bone is 4400 to 3938 years old. This indicates that people were on the Kitsissut Islands by this time, very soon after the polynya formed.

“There’s a nesting colony of thick-billed murre,” says Walls. People would have collected their eggs and hunted them for meat. He suspects they also hunted seals.

The Paleo-Inuit were already on Greenland by this time and probably voyaged west from there to Kitsissut, says Walls. “The shortest distance is about 52.7 kilometres.” However, given prevailing currents and winds, they probably set off from a more northerly point, resulting in a longer but safer journey. To the west of Kitsissut is Ellesmere Island, which today is part of Canada, but it is further away and the currents in between are challenging.

The only comparable sea journey known from Arctic prehistory is the crossing of the 82-kilometre Bering Strait, from Siberia into Alaska, which was probably first made at least 20,000 years ago. However, the Diomede Islands serve as a stopping point halfway across.

“They did have to have some sophisticated watercraft in order to cross that stretch of water,” says Darwent. Given the size of the community on Kitsissut, single-person kayaks wouldn’t have been enough. “It is whole families, and you’re not going to be able to take kids and maybe elderly across into that sort of area with kayaks,” he says. Instead, the Paleo-Inuit must have used larger craft that could carry perhaps nine or 10 people.

No boat remains were found on Kitsissut, and such remains are scarce in the Arctic. “They would have been skin-on-frame watercraft,” says Walls, like those used by later Inuit communities.

These first Paleo-Inuit settlers would have helped shape the ecosystem of Kitsissut, says Walls. By bringing nutrients in from the sea and leaving their waste on land, they fertilised the barren soils and enabled vegetation to grow on the islands. “You have rich vegetation there, at least at the start, that’s dependent in some ways on humans who are part of the cycling of nutrients between those systems.”

Journal reference:

Antiquity DOI: 10.15184/aqy.2026.10285

Arctic expedition cruise with Dr Russell Arnott: Svalbard, Norway

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ENVIRONMENT | FEB 6, 2026, 1:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Weakening ice shelf has caused crucial Antarctic glacier to accelerate

The flow of ice at Pine Island Glacier in West Antarctica has sped up dramatically due to the disintegration of the ice shelf in front of it, and this could lead to faster sea level rise

By James Woodford

Giant icebergs have been breaking off the edge of Pine Island ice shelf

NASA/Brooke Medley

A large and fast-melting glacier in West Antarctica has sped up dramatically since 2017. This may be a sign that the floating ice shelf in front of it is no longer helping to hold back the ice.

Pine Island glacier is the fastest-flowing glacier in Antarctica and the largest contributor to sea-level rise of all Antarctic glaciers. It is a key part of the West Antarctic ice sheet, which holds enough ice to raise the global sea level by 5.3 metres if melted completely.

The Pine Island ice shelf lies in front of the glacier and juts out over the ocean. It is thought to play a crucial role in holding back the inland ice and shielding it from warm water, buttressing an amount of ice equivalent to 51 centimetres of sea-level rise.

The instability of Pine Island glacier and the neighbouring Thwaites glacier, nicknamed the Doomsday glacier, poses a major threat to the long-term viability of the broader West Antarctic ice sheet.

Sarah Wells-Moran at the University of Chicago and her colleagues tracked the movement of Pine Island glacier using imagery from the Copernicus Sentinel-1 Satellite and observations going back to the early 1970s.

The glacier’s velocity increased from 2.2 kilometres per year in 1974 to 4 kilometres per year by 2008. Then, between 2017 and 2023, it jumped to nearly 5 kilometres per year, a 20 per cent increase over six years and a 113 per cent increase since 1973.

Between 1973 and 2013, the rate of ice discharge from Pine Island glacier increased by more than three-quarters.

These changes led to a dramatic retreat of the glacier’s grounding line, the point at which the ice shelf begins to float rather than rest on the seafloor, by more than 30 kilometres.

The team compared these observations with computer models and concluded that the rapid acceleration has occurred due to the thinning and fracturing of the ice shelf as warmer sea water reaches further along its underside. The sides of the ice shelf have become detached from the surrounding ice, “unzipping” the margins of the shelf, write Wells-Moran and her colleagues.

They conclude that Pine Island ice shelf “now provides negligible buttressing to the ice upstream”, which has accelerated the loss of ice from West Antarctica.

Sue Cook at the University of Tasmania in Australia says calving – the break-up of ice at the front of the ice shelf – isn’t enough to explain the glacier’s acceleration. “Most likely the cause is increased damage in the shear margins of the glacier,” she says. “This study helps to confirm that mechanism.”

Ted Scambos at the University of Colorado says warm ocean water may be reaching the margins of the ice shelf where it juts into Pine Island Bay, a glacial carved fjord. “With the loss of the ice shelf, it is likely that ocean circulation in the fjord will speed up, and the intensity of the circulation near the point where the glacier is grounded on the bedrock will increase,” says Scambos.

Nerilie Abram at the Australian Antarctic Division says the study helps demonstrate how much and how quickly Pine Island ice shelf is failing. “There is no doubt that ice loss from this region will continue to impact the world’s coastlines over the coming decades and centuries,” says Abram.

Reference:

Eartharxiv DOI: 10.31223/X5047F

The northern lights, fjords and glaciers: Svalbard and Tromso, Norway

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PHYSICS | FEB 6, 2026, 12:44 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Physicists warn of 'catastrophic' impact from UK science cuts

Science funding cuts in the UK are expected to be a "devastasting blow" for physics research, affecting international projects such as particle detection experiments at CERN

By Matthew Sparkes

The Large Hadron Collider at CERN could be affected by UK spending cuts

Traczyk, Piotr/CERN 2021-2024

UK scientists are warning of a “catastrophic” impact on physics research due to budget cuts at public funding bodies. Research groups around the country face average cuts of 30 per cent, but have been asked to plan for up to 60 per cent.

UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) is a public body that funds science and business, under the control of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. It has announced a budget of £38.6 billion over the next four years, which it claims is actually a slight rise, though this doesn’t factor in inflation. But it has also warned that physics research is due for significant cuts.

UKRI spending is intended to further scientific research but also generate a return for the country. The organisation’s chief executive, Ian Chapman, said in a press briefing on 5 February that the organisation was now focusing more on commercialisation. “We’re a public body, in service of the UK public. The public should expect us to make those hard choices to make sure we make the biggest impact to the country, to grow our economy,” he said.

The organisation distributes grants through nine councils, one of which – the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) – focuses on particle physics, nuclear physics and astronomy. This includes the budget for the UK’s contributions to CERN and the European Space Agency. It is STFC that faces the bulk of the cuts, at a reported £162 million.

Recipients of STFC funding have been told by the body to expect cuts of 30 per cent overall, but were asked to draft different budgets with cuts of 20 per cent, 40 per cent and 60 per cent, according to the Institute of Physics (IOP), which called the news a “devastating blow for the foundations of UK physics”.

IOP president-elect Paul Howarth said in a statement that the cuts would harm “human understanding of the universe and human progress”. “The Large Hadron Collider alone has informed our fundamental understanding of the universe and the matter it is made of. Accelerators developed for particle physics are used in X-ray facilities and new cancer treatments,” he said. “This cut in UK funding will hold up advances in its experimental capability, which will mean less innovation and ultimately less economic growth. We urge the government to step back and consider how its new funding strategy will impact UK science.”

Michele Dougherty, executive chair of STFC, said in a briefing that the organisation had been too ambitious about what it wanted to achieve in previous years. “We’re spread much too thinly, we’re trying to do too many things,” she said. “We’ve got a difficult couple of years in front of us. We simply don’t have the money to do everything.”

Dougherty admitted in the briefing that international collaborations on particle physics were coming to an end and that hard choices were being made. “I think it’s a message that our international partners understand. They too are under financial constraints,” she said.

John Ellis at King’s College London says the cuts tarnish the UK’s reputation among international scientific collaborators. “That’s not the way forwards for international collaboration, and it risks labelling the UK as an unreliable partner,” he says. “People are going to say, ‘Well, look, how do we know that Perfidious Albion is actually going to do what it says it’s going to do?'”

An LHC experiment known as LHCb, which is investigating differences between matter and antimatter, will have its budget cut to zero, says Ellis, which jeopardises plans to upgrade the detectors. Reports suggest that the US-led Electron-Ion Collider, being built at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state, is another affected project.

“International partnerships are crucial for research and innovation, and UKRI remains committed to our existing international obligations – including as the second largest international contributor to CERN,” said a statement issued by UKRI. “Following the spending review that gave UKRI a record four-year settlement to deliver a new mission, UKRI is reforming to align with national priorities. At the same time curiosity driven research will continue to make up around 50% of our funding.” It added that a decision about future infrastructure projects being funded will be announced shortly.

Ellis says the wider cuts to physics research could have long-term implications for the UK, as postdoctoral and junior researcher positions will be lost. “What you risk doing is cutting a whole generation of our young researchers off at the knees,” he says. “It’s not going to be a minor effect.”

Jim Al-Khalili at the University of Surrey, UK, warned that the impact of the cuts would reduce the knowledge, skill and experience available to run the country’s nuclear industry, as well as affect general research. “These proposed cuts are going to be devastating for our community,” he says. “If this goes through, the impact on the core programme will be catastrophic.”

Alicia Greated at the Campaign for Science and Engineering, which represents UK research bodies, says UKRI has made mistakes in how it communicated the cuts, which led to significant confusion and uncertainty. “Regardless of the rationale behind the decision to make savings in the STFC budget, which we do need further clarity on, the impact is the same,” she says. “STFC facilities support all research in the UK, not just that in the physical sciences. Less money for them could undermine a critical part of our research infrastructure.”

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

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

Article amended on 9 February 2026

We removed inaccurate details about projects and groups being affected and added a statement from UKRI.

HEALTH | FEB 6, 2026, 11:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why exercise isn't much help if you are trying to lose weight

When we exercise more, our bodies may compensate by using less energy for other things – especially if we eat less too

By Michael Le Page

There are lots of reasons to exercise, but it may not lead to weight loss as much as we have been led to believe

Jeffrey Isaac Greenberg 5+/Alamy

Exercise is tremendously beneficial for our health in many ways, but it’s not that effective when it comes to losing weight – and now we have the best evidence yet explaining why this is.

People who start to exercise more burn extra calories. Yet they don’t lose nearly as much as weight as would be expected based on the extra calories burned. Now, an analysis of 14 trials in people has revealed that our bodies compensate by burning less energy for other things.

What’s more, this compensation effect is greater if people eat less as well as exercising more – and can completely cancel out the extra energy spent exercising. In other words, while eating less will result in weight loss, exercising while dieting may not result in any additional weight loss.

“The real killer here is that if you pair exercise with diet, your body goes, ‘fine, well, then I’m going to compensate more’,” says Herman Pontzer at Duke University in North Carolina. “It’s still good for you, just not for weight loss.”

When Pontzer studied Hadza hunter-gatherers in Tanzania, he was amazed to find that despite their physically active lives, they used no more energy overall than people who sit at a desk all day. This discovery led Pontzer to propose, in 2015, that our bodies have evolved to limit how much energy we burn, and compensate for greater physical activity by saving energy in other ways.

There are studies that back the idea, but not everyone in the field is convinced. Now, Pontzer and Eric Trexler, also at Duke University, have identified studies done for other reasons whose findings can be analysed for evidence of compensation. These studies shouldn’t be biased in relation to whether compensation occurs, says Pontzer. “They had no dog in the fight when the data were collected.”

In particular, the pair looked at 14 trials involving around 450 people altogether (the numbers are small because monitoring overall energy expenditure requires using specialised, expensive methods). On average, Pontzer and Trexler found that people’s total energy expenditure increased by just a third of what would be expected based on the increase in exercise.

For instance, Pontzer says, suppose people did enough exercise to burn an extra 200 kilocalories a day. Their total energy expenditure, in these studies, only increased by about 60 kilocalories.

But there was a lot of variation within this. For people who continued eating as normal, total energy expenditure increased, on average, by half of what would be expected. But for those who ate less at the same time as exercising more, total energy expenditure often did not go up. “They’re doing that 200 kilocalories a day of exercise, but it’s not showing up at all,” says Pontzer.

The type of exercise mattered, too. Compensation occurred only with aerobic exercises, such as running. With weightlifting or resistance training, energy use went up by more than expected. For instance, the total energy expenditure of people who expended an extra 200 kilocalories lifting weights went up by 250 kilocalories a day.

It’s hard to measure how much energy people use lifting weights, Pontzer says, so these findings need to be treated with caution. But he speculates that weightlifters might be burning extra energy to repair and build muscle.

Pontzer had previously thought the type of exercise didn’t matter. “It’s really a surprise to me,” he says. “I think it’s exciting and points to something that we hadn’t known before.” However, people who did weightlifting in these studies gained muscle and hardly lost any fat, Pontzer says. “So it’s still not a good way to lose weight.”

So, why doesn’t our total energy use go up by as much as would be expected when we do more aerobic exercise? The analysis suggests that our bodies compensate by reducing the amount of energy dedicated to all the background tasks it does. The resting metabolic rate, particularly during sleep, may fall in response to more aerobic exercise.

“We’re changing what our different organ systems are doing [after exercising],” says Pontzer. “And if we can figure out exactly what’s changing, we’re going to understand a lot more about how exercise affects our body [and] why some people seem to benefit from exercise more than others.”

While Pontzer sees the findings as very clear evidence of compensation, others are still not convinced. Dylan Thompson at the University of Bath in the UK points to a meta-analysis concluding that aerobic respiration does not alter the resting metabolic rate.

There are also some key limitations to the studies analysed, says Javier Gonzalez, also at the University of Bath. For instance, the extra exercise people were asked to do might have replaced other forms of exercise, such as gardening. This could explain why people’s energy usage didn’t go up by as much as expected, Gonzalez says.

But Pontzer says this can be ruled out in some of the studies. Compensation has also been seen in animal research, backing the human results. Nonetheless, Thompson and Gonzalez think more rigorous studies are still needed. “We really need carefully designed randomised controlled trials in humans,” says Thompson.

Journal reference:

Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2026.01.025

Technology

- Fast-charging quantum battery built inside a quantum computer (paid): 2026 Feb 5

TECHNOLOGY | FEB 5, 2026, 12:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Fast-charging quantum battery built inside a quantum computer

An experiment with superconducting qubits opens the door to determining whether quantum devices could be less energetically costly if they are powered by quantum batteries

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

mustafaU/Getty Images

A quantum battery has been built within a quantum computer, a first step in determining whether such batteries could play a role in powering future quantum technologies.

Conventional batteries store energy because their components undergo electrochemical reactions, but quantum batteries rely on quantum bits, or qubits, which undergo changes in their quantum states. Some studies have shown that harnessing quantumness in this way can result in faster charging, but the practicality and usefulness of quantum batteries remain open questions.

“Many future quantum technologies will need their quantum versions of batteries,” says Dian Tan at Hefei National Laboratory in China. “While significant progress has been made in the development of quantum computation, communication and sensing, the energy-storage mechanisms for these quantum systems have not been fully explored.”

Tan and his colleagues built a battery using 12 qubits made from tiny superconducting circuits, each of which they could control with microwaves. Every qubit played the role of a battery cell and also interacted with its nearest neighbours.

The researchers could control those interactions, so they experimented with two different charging protocols. One mimicked how conventional, or classical, batteries get charged, so it didn’t use these quantum interactions, but the other protocol did. The team found that using quantum interactions between the qubits made the battery attain more power on average, more quickly.

“The quantum battery achieves maximum power that is up to twice as large as the classical charging power,” says team member Alan Santos at the Spanish National Research Council. It is important that this worked with each qubit interacting only with its nearest neighbour, he says, because that is standard for superconducting quantum computers, and engineering more of these advantageous interactions would be practically difficult.

James Quach at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia says that, until now, quantum battery charging experiments have used, for example, molecules instead of components of an existing quantum device. Quach and his colleagues have previously theorised that quantum computers powered by quantum batteries could be more efficient and easier to make larger, which would make them more powerful. “This was a theoretical idea that we proposed only recently, but the new work could really be used as the basis to power future quantum computers,” he says.

However, making precise comparisons between conventional and quantum batteries is difficult, says Dominik Šafránek at Charles University in the Czech Republic. In his view, there is currently no obvious way to translate the measured quantum battery advantages into unambiguously useful devices.

Kavan Modi at the Singapore University of Technology and Design says for qubits that interact only with their nearest neighbour, his team’s mathematical work has shown there can be only modest charging advantages, which could easily be cancelled out by other properties of real-life quantum computers, such as their noisiness or slow qubit control.

At the same time, quantum computers may end up being much more energetically costly than conventional computers, so studying how energy can be moved within them may become a necessity if we are to build very large quantum computers, says Modi.

Tan says he sees energy storage for quantum technologies, such as quantum computers, as the ideal use case for his team’s quantum battery. The researchers now want to combine their battery with a qubit-based quantum heat engine, which would produce energy that could then be stored in the battery, all within a quantum computer.

Journal reference:

Physical Review Letters DOI: 10.1103/sp5l-c6m8

Space

- Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior (paid): 2026 Feb 6

SPACE | FEB 6, 2026, 9:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior

Five volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io erupted simultaneously, spewing a mind-boggling amount of lava onto the surface and giving us clues to what may lie underneath

By Leah Crane

A volcanic eruption on Io photographed by the Galileo spacecraft

NASA/JPL/DLR

Five volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io erupted all at once in a cataclysm of lava. This means that they are probably all connected to the same underground magma network, which will help solve the mystery of Io’s insides.

At the end of 2024, researchers monitoring Io via NASA’s Juno spacecraft saw an unusually enormous lava flow near its south pole. “There was this one gigantic eruption and lava flow, and that’s what first caught our eye, but on second look, all these other hotspots lit up as well,” says Jani Radebaugh at Brigham Young University in Utah. “There’s so much magma that we can’t quite wrap our minds around it.”

The erupted lava spanned an area of about 65,000 square kilometres and released more energy than any eruption previously spotted on Io. “Picture standing at the edge of one of these features, and the valley that has been cold suddenly fills up with an entire lake of lava. As it fills up, you turn and look over your shoulder, and another massive crack opens up in the ground and fills with lava at exactly the same time,” says Radebaugh. “It would be terrifying, and so beautiful.”

The question, though, is where all that magma came from – we know very little about Io’s interior structure, so it is a tough one to answer. Previous work has shown that, contrary to researchers’ long-held expectations, Io doesn’t have a global magma ocean buried under its crust, so it is unclear how so much magma could bust through the surface all at once.

Radebaugh and her colleagues suggest that a sort of magma sponge may sit below huge regions of the surface, forming an interconnected network of pores that fill with lava and then spurt it out through the hotspots. We will need more observations to confirm this, though, and with Juno having moved further away from Io, it is unlikely we will get them anytime soon.

Despite Io’s small size – it is only slightly larger than Earth’s moon – the extreme nature of these eruptions makes them similar to volcanic events on Earth. “This is actually like early Earth when it was much hotter and more active, so Io can tell us a lot about our past,” says Radebaugh. While the source of this wildly powerful series of eruptions may remain a puzzle for now, when it’s solved it could help fill in a chapter of our own story.

Journal reference:

JGR Planets DOI: 10.1029/2025JE009047

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.

Life

- Five stunning images from the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards (paid): 2026 Feb 5

- Bonobo's pretend tea party shows capacity for imagination: 2026 Feb 5

LIFE | FEB 5, 2026, 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Five stunning images from the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards

An otherworldly coral, a very cute moth and an intricately beautiful mushroom are among the winners in the prize this year

By Carissa Wong

Ross Gudgeon’s winning image, Fractal Forest

Ross Gudgeon/CUPOTY

Sometimes beauty is found with a shift in perspective. These gorgeous images are among the winners of the latest Close-up Photographer of Year contest, an international photography competition dedicated to unveiling nature’s hidden wonders.

Peer through the delicate pink branches of a cauliflower soft coral in the main image, above, which won the underwater category in the awards. Photographer Ross Gudgeon captured this ethereal shot in the blue waters of the Lembeh Strait in Indonesia by placing a tiny camera inside the spongy structure. “I carefully threaded the [lens] through the branches of the soft coral so as not to damage them, creating an image looking from the inside out,” said Gudgeon in a statement.

Artur Tomaszek’s winning photograph, entitled Dinner

Artur Tomaszek/CUPOTY

This lynx spider, above, is about to tuck into a handful of unlucky termites. Artur Tomaszek took the shot, winner of the arachnids category, on a hot spring evening in Hong Kong, when sudden rainfall prompted thousands of termites to start swarming in the air, providing the perfect opportunity to record the ambush. “The main difficulty in capturing the picture was the thousands of termites flying in my face, attracted by the camera’s flash,” said Tomaszek.

Valeria Zvereva’s winning shot, called Mushroom in the Nude Style

Valeria Zvereva/CUPOTY

Light filters through the intricate underside of a lamellar mushroom’s cap in Moscow, Russia, in the image above, captured by Valeria Zvereva and winner of the fungi and slime moulds slot in the awards.

In the photo below, decaying lotus leaves sit on dark water, creating a delicate lacework of purple and green studded by bright green clusters of floating fern. Finding the fern among the skeletal leaves “felt like the rebirth of hope and a symbol of the continuation of life”, said photographer Minghui Yuan, who took top prize in the plants category with the image.

Minghui Yuan won the plant category for this shot, called Rebirth from Destruction

Minghui Yuan/CUPOTY

Staring straight into the big eyes of this adorable bombycid moth, Laurent Hesemans snapped this photograph, below, in Tinamaste, Costa Rica, winning the invertebrate portrait category with it. “Incredibly photogenic, the large eyes and antenna positions of these moths, especially the males, always lend their portraits a somewhat melancholy feeling,” said Hesemans.

Laurent Hesemans’s shot Good Boy, which won the invertebrate category

Laurent Hesemans/CUPOTY

LIFE | FEB 5, 2026, 2:00 PM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Bonobo's pretend tea party shows capacity for imagination

Kanzi, a bonobo with exceptional language skills, took part in a make-believe tea party that demonstrated cognitive abilities never seen before in non-human primates

By James Woodford

Kanzi the bonobo at the age of 43

Ape Initiative

A bonobo that took part in a pretend tea party like those acted out by young children has shown that our closest primate relatives have the capacity for make believe.

Kanzi the bonobo (Pan paniscus) was born in the US in 1980 and died at age 44 in March last year. He spent most of his life at the Ape Initiative in Des Moines, Iowa, where he was renowned for being able to communicate by pointing at symbols on a board.

In the year before he died, Amalia Bastos at the University of St Andrews, UK, and her colleagues ran a series of experiments aiming to understand whether, along with his superior language skills, Kanzi was also able to engage in what researchers describe as “secondary representations”. This is the ability to imagine an alternative reality and, in some situations, share that pretense with another individual – a skill that humans develop at an early age.

At 2 to 3 years old, children can follow the movement of imaginary liquid between containers and keep track of where the “tea” is or isn’t, says Bastos. “That’s exactly the sort of context we presented to Kanzi to test this ability in a non-human animal.”

In the first stage of the experiment, researchers pretended to pour non-existent juice into two empty cups before pretending to empty one of the cups and then asking Kanzi which one he wanted. More than two thirds of the time, Kanzi chose the cup that hadn’t been emptied and still contained the pretend juice.

“If Kanzi hadn’t conceived of ‘imaginary juice’ in the cups throughout the study, he should have picked between the two cups at chance – after all, they were both empty,” says Bastos.

Then the researchers placed an empty cup and one containing juice on a table in front of Kanzi. He chose the cup containing juice more than three quarters of the time. This test was to ensure the bonobo could differentiate between real and fake juice.

For the third test, the team started by placing a real grape into one of two cups; Kanzi selected the real grape every time. Then a pretend grape was placed in each of two cups before one was emptied. Again, in over two-thirds of attempts, Kanzi correctly chose the cup that still contained a pretend grape.

Bastos says all of the team’s studies with great apes are fully voluntary. “The fact that Kanzi stuck around and continued to engage even in trials where he knew there would be no reinforcement says to me that he must have at least enjoyed it a little bit.”

Gisela Kaplan at the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, says the experiment is “unambiguous that the bonobo has understood the pretense and is entering into the game”.

“This experiment is clean and simple and mimics child play with doll houses, kids serving cups of tea to each other in tiny cups and pretending to drink or offering pieces of cake that do not exist,” she says.

Miguel Llorente at the University of Girona, Spain, describes Kanzi as the “Einstein of his species” and he now wants to understand how and why such imaginative capabilities emerged in the first place.

“His lifelong exposure to symbolic language and human interaction has likely acted as a powerful cognitive scaffold, allowing him to externalise and sharpen mental tools that might remain latent in wild bonobos,” he says. “While Kanzi represents the cognitive ceiling of his species, his performance suggests that the raw biological hardware for imagination was already present in our common ancestor 6 to 9 million years ago.”

Journal reference:

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adz0743

Health

- Moving inductions to early morning could shorten labour by 6 hours (paid): 2026 Feb 6

- Vegan toddlers can grow at the same rate as omnivores: 2026 Feb 5

HEALTH | FEB 6, 2026, 4:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Moving inductions to early morning could shorten labour by 6 hours

By matching uterine contractions up with the body’s natural circadian rhythms, inducing labour in the early morning is linked to shorter labour and fewer emergency C-sections

By Alice Klein

If given the choice, opting for a labour induction in the early morning could speed things along

Iuliia Burmistrova/Getty Images

The best time to induce labour is in the early morning, research suggests. By aligning with our natural body clocks, early-morning inductions seem to shorten labour times and reduce the need for Caesarean sections.

“It’s a simple, no-cost approach that could make the experience better for everyone – the mother, the baby and the medical staff,” says Hanne Hoffmann at Michigan State University.

About a third of labours in the UK, the US and Australia are now induced, meaning they are brought on with medication or other artificial means, rather than waiting for them to start on their own. Inductions are commonly recommended if a baby is overdue or has issues with its growth, since prompt delivery reduces the risk of stillbirth. Other reasons include the waters breaking without initiating labour, which can increase the risk of infection.

The problem is that induced labours are often more drawn out than those that occur spontaneously. “I’ve had friends who’ve been induced and they’ve been in labour for two days. I was just blown away by how long and painful it was for them,” says Hoffmann.

This led Hoffmann – who studies circadian rhythms, natural oscillations in the activity of our tissues, driven by internal clocks – to wonder whether there might be an optimum time of day for inducing labour. “We know that spontaneous labour follows circadian patterns because uterine contractions tend to peak in the late evening, and we primarily give birth at night,” she says. This pattern may have evolved because there is less threat from predators at night.

To learn more, Hoffmann and her colleagues analysed records of more than 3000 induced labours conducted at a hospital in Michigan between 2019 and 2022. They found that the shortest labours were those induced between 3am and 9am. For example, those induced at 5am lasted for 15 hours on average, whereas those induced at 11pm lasted a staggering 6 hours longer, about 21 hours on average. The shorter morning-inducted labours were also less likely to lead to emergency Caesarean sections.

The reason for this early-morning benefit may be that receptors in the uterus are more responsive to the hormone oxytocin at this time. In spontaneous labour, oxytocin is responsible for stimulating uterine contractions. In inductions, a synthetic form of oxytocin is usually given to achieve the same effect. “When doctors induce labour with a big oxytocin bolus, it might be high-fiving the body’s own built-in morning oxytocin party, giving contractions an extra enthusiastic push,” says Satchidananda Panda at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San Diego, California.

The researchers also found that people with a high body mass index or who were giving birth for the first time appeared to benefit most from early-morning induction. They now plan to investigate the underlying biological mechanisms.

While it may not be practical for hospitals to schedule all inductions between 3am and 9am, they could consider prioritising first-time mothers and those who are overweight or obese, says Hoffmann.

Importantly, the study didn’t find any medical complications associated with inducing early in the day. “There were no increased risks of admissions to the NICU [neonatal intensive care unit] or other adverse outcomes,” says team member Rene Cortese at the University of Kansas Medical Center. “This is another important message of the study: you’re mitigating one risk but not creating another.”

The team now hopes to conduct a study to confirm that assigning pregnant people to early-morning inductions does indeed improve their labours. “We need to do a proof of concept study to make sure we can replicate this [finding],” says Hoffmann.

Other chronotherapies – medical interventions that are timed to align with circadian rhythms – are also being explored in the fields of oncology, cardiology and psychiatry. For example, a recent study found that treating cancer before 3pm could help patients live longer.

Journal reference:

American Journal of Obstetrics & Gynecology DOI: 10.1016/j.ajogmf.2026.101898

HEALTH | FEB 5, 2026, 11:06 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Vegan toddlers can grow at the same rate as omnivores

Two-year-olds raised in vegan or vegetarian households don't necessarily have restricted growth, according to a study of 1.2 million children

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

Meat and dairy aren’t essential for a child’s development

Evgeniia Gordeeva/Getty Images

Babies born into vegan or vegetarian families may be slightly underweight in early infancy, but seem to catch up to their omnivore peers by age 2.

Official advice generally states that a well-planned vegan diet – rich in vegetables, beans, whole grains and fortified products – can provide all the nutrients needed for good health. But it can still be very difficult to meet a child’s growing nutritional needs, with veganism being linked to amino acid and protein deficiencies.

When it comes to the pros and cons of veganism at a young age, small studies have provided conflicting results. To address the issue on a wider scale, Kerem Avital at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel and her colleagues have now analysed data on 1.2 million babies collected from national family care centres in Israel between 2014 and 2023, following records of each baby’s length, weight and head circumference from birth to 24 months.

The team then compared those growth rates to the type of diet that the babies’ parents reported having when the infants were about 6 months old. The vast majority of the households said they were omnivorous, with just 1.2 per cent self-reporting as vegetarian and 0.3 per cent as vegan.

But this still accounted for about 18,000 babies in the vegetarian and vegan families. “Because of the massive scale of this study, even a low percentage represents a large enough number of children to be statistically significant and provide reliable evaluations,” says Tomer Avnon at Tel Aviv University in Israel, who wasn’t involved in the study.

In the first 60 days of life, the babies’ length, head circumference and rates of restricted growth and development were similar across all diet groups. Babies in meat-free families, however – particularly those in vegan households – were slightly more likely to be underweight. Being overweight was rare overall, but tended to be less common in the vegetarian and vegan households.

By around age 2, those differences had largely evened out, with growth measures converging across all three groups. Restricted growth was more common among the toddlers from vegetarian and vegan families, but the differences were small and not statistically significant, says Avital. The researchers accounted for factors that could influence the results, such as income, maternal age and breastfeeding.

“The results are quite heartening,” says Avnon. “It is deeply reassuring to see large-scale data confirming that children of vegetarian and vegan mothers can expect a healthy developmental future.”

The study falls in line with medical observations that babies born small for their gestational age usually “catch up” later on, says Avnon. It should also provide reassurance that meat-free diets can support healthy early growth, he says, but points out that the diets were self-reported by the parents, which could affect the accuracy of the results. “Specifically, this study lacks a precise, day-to-day evaluation of the child’s actual nutrition during their early years, which remains a critical factor in long-term development,” he says.

Zulfiqar Bhutta at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada, questions whether the slight variations in restricted growth that the researchers found might be a cause for concern down the line. “The small but appreciable differences in growth between the three groups could well be relevant long term, especially given evidence from elsewhere that vegan diets are associated with lower bone mineral density and micronutrient status,” he says.

He therefore cautions against interpreting the findings as reassurance that vegan and vegetarian diets are always appropriate in early life, especially in parts of the world where malnutrition is prevalent.

Although the study was carried out in Israel, Avital says the results probably apply to countries with similar incomes and accessible healthcare, such as the UK. Bhutta now wants to see larger studies that more accurately collect information on diet, as well as factors like parental height.

Journal reference:

JAMA Network Open DOI: 10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.57798

Table of Contents

New Scientist: 2026 Feb 11

Features

Putting a price tag on nature failed. Can radical tactics save it? (paid): 2026 Feb 11

How teaching molecules to think is revealing what a 'mind' really is (paid): 2026 Feb 10

Your BMI can't tell you much about your health – here's what can (paid): 2026 Feb 9

News

Nepal and Northern India are not overdue for a huge earthquake: 2026 Feb 11

Ancient Peruvian civilisation grew mighty by harvesting guano: 2026 Feb 11

The surprising origins of Britain's Bronze Age immigrants revealed (paid): 2026 Feb 11

This state’s power prices are plummeting as it nears 100% renewables (paid): 2026 Feb 11

First ever inhalable gene therapy for cancer gets fast-tracked by FDA (paid): 2026 Feb 11

Gravitational wave signal proves Einstein was right about relativity (paid): 2026 Feb 9

Newborn marsupials seen crawling to mother's pouch for the first time: 2026 Feb 11

Which humans first made tools or art – and how do we know? (paid): 2026 Feb 10

Time crystals could be used to build accurate quantum clocks (paid): 2026 Feb 10

Old EV batteries could meet most of China's energy storage needs (paid): 2026 Feb 10

Why 1.5°C failed and setting a new limit would make things worse (paid): 2026 Feb 10

Specific cognitive training has 'astonishing' effect on dementia risk: 2026 Feb 9

Is this carved rock an ancient Roman board game? (paid): 2026 Feb 10

'Hidden' group of gut bacteria may be essential to good health: 2026 Feb 9

Physicists can now take control of 'hidden' friction in devices (paid): 2026 Feb 9

Statins don't cause most of the side effects listed on their labels: 2026 Feb 5

Seafarers were visiting remote Arctic islands over 4000 years ago (paid): 2026 Feb 9

Weakening ice shelf has caused crucial Antarctic glacier to accelerate (paid): 2026 Feb 6

Physicists warn of 'catastrophic' impact from UK science cuts: 2026 Feb 6

Why exercise isn't much help if you are trying to lose weight: 2026 Feb 6

Technology

Fast-charging quantum battery built inside a quantum computer (paid): 2026 Feb 5

Space

Synchronised volcanic eruptions on Io hint at a spongy interior (paid): 2026 Feb 6

Life

Five stunning images from the Close-up Photographer of the Year awards (paid): 2026 Feb 5

Bonobo's pretend tea party shows capacity for imagination: 2026 Feb 5

Health

Moving inductions to early morning could shorten labour by 6 hours (paid): 2026 Feb 6

Vegan toddlers can grow at the same rate as omnivores: 2026 Feb 5