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- Frailty sets in far earlier than you’d expect, but you can reverse it (paid): 2026 Mar 9

- Why a Peruvian mountain is becoming an 'impossible' particle detector (paid): 2026 Mar 11

HEALTH | MAR 9, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Frailty sets in far earlier than you’d expect, but you can reverse it

We’re learning that frailty can quietly arrive decades before old age, with some people in their 30s or 40s unknowingly in a pre-frail state. There are surprising ways to stay strong – and it’s not all about weight training

By David Cox

Pete Ryan

If we live long enough, many of us will eventually start to exhibit telltale signs of frailty, from unsteady feet to mental confusion. Yet not all. Think of Julia Hawkins, who set world records in the 100-metre sprint after taking up running at age 100. Or the journalist Leonard Barden, who still files weekly chess columns at the age of 96. Such people defy the odds and seem to dodge the destiny of frailty. The question is: why?

The answer lies in new insights into frailty, which show that it is a far more complex and diverse condition than it first appears. Surprisingly, we are also discovering how it can start developing early in our life, with a significant number of people in their 30s or 40s unknowingly in a “pre-frail” state.

The good news is that we have more control over our future frailty than we might realise. Many of the factors that lead to it are modifiable, and midlife is a great time to take action. What’s more, this new understanding of how to age strongly is revealing unexpected ways to fight frailty – and it’s not all about exercise and weight training.

Becoming vulnerable

Roughly speaking, frailty affects around 10 per cent of people in their 50s, rising to around half of all those in their 80s. Although it is linked to ageing, it is also highly variable among people of the same chronological age.

Most of us are familiar with physical frailty, which includes the loss of muscle mass known as sarcopenia, which can make it difficult to get out of a chair without assistance, as well as osteoporosis, which leads to brittle bones and fractures. But people can also be cognitively frail, making them markedly more vulnerable to dementia. Overall, people who are frail have fewer biological reserves, so are much less resilient to any kind of trauma – whether that’s an infection, an operation or the sudden death of a family member – which leaves them prone to a significant decline in overall health.

“Frailty is more of a state of being than a specific disease,” says Mary Ni Lochlainn, a specialist in geriatric medicine at King’s College London. “It’s a state of reduced resilience, reduced reserve, so your ability to bounce back after a stressor is impaired.”

Frailty is increasingly being recognised as something that is important to spot as early as possible. Not only are older people with severe frailty five times more likely to die within the next year than those without, but frailty is linked to an increased risk of falls, delirium, hospital-acquired infections and dementia.

But frailty isn’t a sudden event. We now know that it represents the endpoint of a gradual continuum that can begin surprisingly early in life. One 2018 study of nearly half a million people in the UK found that 38 per cent of women aged 37 to 45 and 35 per cent of men had indicators of pre-frailty, a state that Tom Brennan, an ageing researcher at Flinders University in Australia, describes as “an early-warning stage”.

The pre-frailty stage

“Physiologically, pre-frailty reflects a body under strain, but still highly adaptable,” says Brennan. “People are not yet experiencing major limitations in everyday function, but small deficits are beginning to accumulate. They may feel more tired than they used to, move a little more slowly, be less active or notice subtle losses in strength.”

Identifying frailty has become a topic of increasing priority in medical practice. Since 2016, UK health services have been using a digital tool integrated into primary care electronic health record systems that enables doctors to predict older people’s risks of living with frailty, and intervene earlier. It is based on research carried out in the early 2000s by the geriatrician Kenneth Rockwood at Dalhousie University in Canada, who developed a way of assessing frailty as the combined accumulation of different physiological deficits, ranging from diseases to functional limitations.

Some people dodge frailty better than others. Julia Hawkins took up running at age 100, setting world records

Brit Huckabay/NSGA

Other ageing researchers have attempted to narrow down the main hallmarks of frailty. In a now landmark 2001 study, geriatrician Linda Fried, then at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions in Maryland, and her colleagues defined five traits as being particularly predictive of frailty: unintentional weight loss, self-reported exhaustion, low physical activity, slow walking speed and weak grip strength. If a person has one or two, they are pre-frail, but if they have three or more, they classify as frail.

“They worked out that this was a good predictor of future outcomes in terms of institutionalisation or vulnerability,” says Claire Steves, who studies ageing and health at King’s College London.

“ The sooner we take action when noticing red flags such as a lack of energy or muscle weakness, the greater the benefits “

Of the five traits, Steves highlights walking speed as perhaps the most revealing of all. This is because walking utilises multiple bodily systems and can be affected by various underlying health conditions. Poor vascular health, for example, creates stiffness in the legs, as well as affecting the brain’s movement centres. “Walking is very much a whole-body thing,” says Steves. “In order to walk quickly, you need to have basic muscle function, really good balance, good spatial awareness of what’s around you and cognition to put all of that together.”

But why do some people begin to develop traits of frailty at a relatively young age, while others stay fit and robust well into their 90s? Understanding this requires a little dive into the underlying biology of ageing.

How the gut drives frailty

When I began researching my upcoming book The Age Code, which delves into the link between what we eat and how we age, I noted how frailty was associated with reduced diversity of the gut microbiome and a decrease in the number of health-promoting anti-inflammatory metabolites produced by these microbes, all of which results in heightened inflammation throughout the body. Much of this is due to the close connection between the state of the gut and the immune system.

As we age, we develop growing numbers of senescent cells – zombie-like cells that no longer divide and replicate, but simply linger and spew out a steady stream of inflammatory molecules. “When you get to the age of 70 or 75, you could have anything between 300 and 500 grams of senescent cells in your body,” says Nicholas Rattray at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, UK.

But while healthy midlifers and older adults do better at keeping senescent cells at bay, studies have shown that both pre-frailty and frailty are associated with the formation of growing numbers of senescent immune cells in the gut. This triggers intestinal inflammation, while blooms of harmful populations of gut bacteria can synthesise metabolites that make senescent cell formation more likely.

This all steadily worsens a person’s wider health. As white blood cells called T-cells become senescent, the immune system is less capable of fighting off infections, while the inflammatory molecules being generated in the gut can affect distant organ systems, from muscle tissue to the brain. The inflammation can also drive a phenomenon known as anabolic resistance in which the body struggles to generate new muscle tissue, even in response to protein intake and exercise, creating a heightened risk of sarcopenia.

“There’s a lot of direct evidence linking inflammation and loss of muscle mass,” says Niharika Duggal at the University of Birmingham, UK.

Although frailty is associated with age, it can start surpsingly young – in our 30s or 40s

ALEXANDER NEMENOV/AFP/Getty Images

Other hallmarks of ageing are also involved in frailty – in particular, impairments to the powerhouses in our cells called mitochondria, which convert nutrients like fats and sugars into the molecule ATP that fuels the body. People who are frail display marked mitochondrial dysfunction. For instance, a 2019 study by Rattray and his colleagues of 1191 people aged between 56 and 84 identified 12 blood-based metabolites that differentiate the frail from the non-frail, pointing to an impaired ability to metabolise fats – which affects their brain, immune and wider organ health.

“Ultimately, all the cells in our body need energy to go about their daily business,” says Rattray. “As those mechanisms break down, your cells are going to have reduced capacity, and less ability to recover from insults.”

But there are some surprising causes of frailty too, such as your state of mind. Brennan has investigated behavioural and psychological changes in midlife that often precede visible physical decline. A study he did with colleagues last year found that, while someone might appear healthy, their psyche can act as an early red flag, with pre-frail individuals being more likely than non-frail people to feel lonely and hold more negative attitudes towards ageing.

These discoveries are already being used in healthcare settings. In France, for instance, the National Public Health Agency has prioritised identifying a person’s level of frailty as a way of preventing falls, with doctors being incentivised to assess older adults’ intrinsic capacity. This involves evaluating their mobility, cognition, psychological state, nutritional health and the state of sensory faculties such as vision and hearing.

Researchers believe this can make a major difference. Brennan, for one, thinks that screening people in their 40s for frailty traits such as walking speed, grip strength and psychological metrics could improve public health. Rattray is hoping to use some of the accumulating knowledge about the underlying biology of frailty to develop a blood test to screen older adults about to undergo surgery as a way of assessing their resilience.

“If it showed that an individual had enhanced frailty markers… they might benefit from steroids to help with their immune response,” he says. “It could even be a case where they don’t have the surgery in the first place.”

But there’s also much that we ourselves can do to prevent or offset signs of pre-frailty. The sooner we take action, and make tailored adjustments when noticing red flags such as a lack of energy or muscle weakness, the greater the benefits.

Resilience via the gut microbiome

Given that an imbalance of gut microbes has been linked to frailty, dietary changes that encourage microbiome diversity can significantly help. In my book, I outline how consuming more fibre and fermented foods improves gut microbiome diversity and cognitive function in the pre-frail. For example, a 2020 clinical trial involving more than 600 people aged 67 to 79 found that consuming a Mediterranean diet high in plants and fresh foods resulted in a reduction of frailty-associated gut microbes. Other research has found that people who are deficient in key minerals – particularly calcium, magnesium, selenium and zinc – are more at risk of frailty.

Other options may help those who are already frail. For instance, a 2024 clinical trial of the prebiotics inulin and fructooligosaccharides – both forms of soluble fibre – resulted in significant improvements in walking speed and grip strength for frail adults aged over 65.

A diet rich in plants and fibre can help fight the drivers of frailty

Vaaseenaa/Getty Images

For particularly severe cases of frailty, Steves is interested in whether more extensive microbiome modulation through faecal microbiome transplants (FMTs) – receiving the gut bacteria of a younger, healthy donor, typically by ingesting samples of their faeces as pills or through a direct infusion into the bowels – can help rejuvenate certain organ systems.

Two years ago, she and her colleagues conducted a clinical trial called CLODIfrail in which very frail older adults with a life-threatening Clostridioides difficile infection in their colon received an FMT. The results showed that it was linked to a short-term fall in the risk of death. “Anecdotally, it improved some other things, other than the C. difficile,” says Steves. “So, some people’s joints felt much better after the transplant, things like that.”

But for midlifers who wish to avoid becoming pre-frail, Steves recommends simple lifestyle changes to avoid aggravating the immune system, such as cutting down on alcohol and getting recommended vaccines. Some studies have suggested that alcohol consumption, and particularly binge drinking, can contribute to the formation of senescent cells, while vaccinations can have wider benefits for the immune system, such as preventing mitochondrial damage from infections.

Exercise is key, too, as it benefits our body, brain and immune system in myriad ways. Daisy Wilson, a geriatrician at the University of Birmingham, says resistance training such as push-ups or lifting weights is a good way to stave off physical frailty by maintaining muscle and bone health. Even very frail people in their 90s can improve their strength.

Furthermore, certain supplements may maximise the benefits of exercise as you age. Some research points to creatine, a natural compound stored in muscles and the brain that is favoured by bodybuilders as it aids energy production during high-intensity exercise and helps build muscle, but which may be particularly helpful in later life. Steves, however, is most interested in the apparent benefits of leucine. This amino acid has been shown in some studies of older adults to help counteract age-related muscle loss, as it triggers a biochemical pathway involved in muscle repair and growth, particularly when combined with vitamin D3.

Anti-ageing therapeutics

As with FMTs, evidence is building – mainly in animal studies – about the various benefits of other anti-ageing therapeutics, sometimes known as geroprotectors, when it comes to preventing or reversing frailty. Geroprotectors range from a group of drugs and plant chemicals known as senolytics, which can clear excess senescent cells from the body, to supplements like nicotinamide riboside (a form of vitamin B3), which is thought to act as a fuel source that can help cells generate new mitochondria.

The race is now on to test these compounds in humans to see whether they can prevent or alleviate frailty. For instance, Wilson is leading a trial of three such potential therapeutics in older adults: metformin (a drug initially developed for type 2 diabetes that is thought to target mitochondrial dysfunction and other hallmarks of ageing), fisetin (a senolytic found in foods such as strawberries) and spermidine (a plant compound present in aged cheese, soya beans, mushrooms, peas and citrus fruits that may boost mitochondrial health).

Initially, each compound is being given to relatively healthy over-70s to see if it improves biological traits such as gut microbiome diversity, immune senescence and mitochondrial fitness. If the results are positive, the next stage will be to test the compounds on over-60s with signs of pre-frailty who are about to undergo surgery for colorectal cancer, to assess whether they prevent worsening frailty following the operation.

Ultimately, if geroprotectors are found to be effective, then the question will be whether they are given to people in middle age, or to people who are extremely frail, says Wilson. “There’s still a lot of unknowns.”

There remains a long way to go, but advances in ageing research could mean we will one day have many more options for addressing frailty. In the meantime, whether it is consuming enough fibre, making time for resistance exercises or keeping alcohol consumption to a minimum, there are many ways to keep stronger for longer.

SPACE | MAR 11, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why a Peruvian mountain is becoming an 'impossible' particle detector

Deep canyons in the Andes are the perfect location to catch the most energetic particles in the universe. Carlos Argüelles-Delgado reveals how these intergalactic envoys could help prove the quantum nature of gravity

By Thomas Lewton

Ryan Wills for New Scientist

Neutrinos live in a lonely universe. Every second, millions of them pass through our planet, but they so rarely interact with other matter that they don’t leave much of a trace. The highest-energy of these mysterious particles are cosmic neutrinos, which descend from space with thousands of times the energy of those whipped up at particle colliders like the one at CERN. They are thought to come from violent cosmic accelerators, like supermassive black holes, or from exotic objects that we have yet to discover.

The trouble is that cosmic neutrinos are incredibly difficult to spot. So far, we have found only a handful of them, with each observation opening a treasure trove of information about the extreme reaches and deepest layers of reality. Not least, last year, the Cubic Kilometre Neutrino Telescope (KM3NeT) took astronomers by surprise when it found a seemingly “impossible” particle, the most energetic neutrino ever recorded, leaving them impatient to find more.

Carlos Argüelles-Delgado has been hunting for these particles for over a decade, largely using the IceCube Neutrino Observatory at the South Pole. Now, his wish to reveal the enigmatic ways of neutrinos is taking him back to his home country of Peru and into the heights of the Andes mountains.

Here Argüelles-Delgado is leading the effort to build a new telescope called the Tau Air-shower Mountain-Based Observatory (TAMBO), which is planned to comprise thousands of detectors installed across several square kilometres of a near-vertical rock face. Assuming his team can navigate the prospect of landslides and nesting condors, TAMBO will soon act as a viewfinder across the sky for the most energetic cosmic neutrinos as they skim across the edges of Earth.

Thomas Lewton: When did we first discover these ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos?

Carlos Argüelles-Delgado: The first ones were discovered by the IceCube neutrino observatory at the South Pole in 2013. We think many of these are produced around black holes at the centre of galaxies. When these behemoths accumulate matter, they can accelerate particles to very large energies. These then collide with material around the black hole to produce other particles, which go on to disintegrate into cosmic neutrinos.

What was your reaction when you heard about the “impossible” cosmic neutrino announced by KM3NeT last year?

I couldn’t go to the meeting where the finding was unexpectedly announced. One of my postdoctoral students came back, telling me about this weird event, but the energy was so crazily high that I couldn’t believe it – even after he told me many, many times. My mind couldn’t process the news; it was like somebody telling me about the existence of a new colour.

Why was it so unexpected?

IceCube, a much larger experiment, had been operating for more than 10 years and had never seen neutrinos at these energies. So, it was surprising that a newcomer experiment found it. It was also such a high energy that it could have come from a cosmic process that had never been observed before – it could be the first “cosmogenic neutrino”.

The ultra-high-energy neutrino event observed by KM3NeT, with the track of the particle reconstructed as a white line and different colours indicating various observation times by an array of sensors

KM3NeT

What does cosmogenic mean here?

The origin of cosmic rays is a long-standing mystery in physics. It’s been 100 years since we first saw these charged particles, which travel from deep space, but we don’t have a very good understanding of how they are produced. Deep space isn’t completely empty: there is the cosmic microwave background, made up of lots of photons that are a relic of the big bang. Every now and then, a cosmic ray is thought to interact with the cosmic microwave background and produce a cosmogenic neutrino. This effect was predicted back in the 1960s, but never seen. Ultra-high-energy neutrinos, such as cosmogenic neutrinos, are very, very, very rare. So to catch them, one needs huge detectors, much larger than IceCube.

Neutrino telescopes can tell us more about the origin of cosmic rays, what they are made of and how they are distributed across our universe. In this way, the whole evolution of the universe is encoded in the neutrinos that we expect to see in these detectors.

Do we know for sure that KM3NeT saw a cosmogenic neutrino?

The detection is still in a grey area. It could also have been produced around a black hole or in another violent process. To figure out where it came from, we need to find more of these particles and compare their energies and study their points of origin. Cosmogenic neutrinos won’t point back to specific sources. Rather, they would be evenly distributed in the sky, and they will have a characteristic set of energies.

How are neutrino astronomers like you planning to do that?

There’s been a renewed effort to build neutrino telescopes. There are several experiments around the world, such as IceCube and KM3NeT, that look for neutrinos using natural mediums – usually water, ice or rock. You need a very large amount of material to stop a neutrino, so you need, essentially, an entire lake or sea or mountain full of detectors. But these only have spotty sky coverage, and we need continuous coverage.

So why build your telescope in a canyon?

We were looking for a very specific kind of valley about 4 kilometres deep and 3 to 5 kilometres wide. This is deep enough to shield us from background signals and provide a large area for neutrino detection, and wide enough to contain the long-lived, high-energy particles made from neutrino interactions. Using Google Maps, we found only about 10 locations like this on the planet, mostly in the Himalayas and the Andes mountains. Then we carried out expeditions to the Andes to scout potential locations, which are about 5 kilometres above sea level.

The Colca Canyon in Peru

Kevin LEBRE/Getty Images

Why are these steep canyons ideal for finding ultra-high-energy neutrinos?

The mountain plays two important roles. If you were standing near the top of the mountain and holding a detector, you would see many cosmic rays and gamma rays hitting the atmosphere and creating background noise. The mountain blocks out almost all of these background particles. At the same time, it also converts the ultra-high-energy cosmic neutrinos that we want to study into other particles that we can detect. Neutrinos are often known as “ghost” particles because they pass through material very easily. That’s definitely true for most neutrinos, but for these ultra-high-energy neutrinos, the interaction with matter becomes stronger, and they can’t traverse whole planets without interacting. Instead, they typically pass through only a sliver of the planet – such as a mountain range – before interacting.

TAMBO will look for these Earth-skimming neutrinos. When one of them travels through the mountain face opposite the detector, it may interact inside the mountain and produce particles that are relatively long-lived, which exit the mountain. These then disintegrate into a shower of millions and millions of lighter particles inside the canyon that spread themselves across a big area.

To catch these, we will spread flat detectors, each about the size of a dining table, across the opposite surface of the canyon. TAMBO plans to have about 5000 of these detectors, but in our pilot project we’ll start with 100. If all goes well, by the early 2030s, we’ll have a full-scale working telescope.

Why do you need so many detectors?

It’s important that we have a big collection area because these are such rare events. These detectors also allow TAMBO to act as a viewfinder that looks across the sky and can pinpoint where the neutrino is coming from. So, we can then ask our partner experiments, like IceCube and KM3NeT, which see more neutrinos at lower energies: “Hey, in this particular direction, do you see something weird at a similar time?”

It must be tricky to build a telescope on the slope of a near-vertical canyon…

There are so many challenges. How will we get the detectors into one of those valleys? Do we use cables and lower them down, or do we use helicopters? The steeper the valley, the harder it is to deploy the detectors, and the greater the likelihood of landslides. Other things happen when you’re out in the wild. There can be intense sun and rain.

We recently came back from a trip to the Colca Canyon, one possible site in Peru, where condors nest in the valley, so we even have to think about animals building nests in the detectors.

Why go to these extreme efforts?

I care about neutrinos because they are very mysterious. They are one of the least-understood particles in the standard model of particle physics – we still don’t know how neutrinos get their masses, which is what causes them to strangely oscillate between different kinds or “flavours” of neutrino.

Cosmic neutrinos are particularly interesting, as they come from some of the most violent processes in the universe. This means they have the highest energies – between 1000 and 1,000,000 times more energetic than the ones we make on Earth using particle accelerators – and they travel extremely long distances. The ratio of distance to energy is what determines how neutrinos oscillate, and we have never explored this region of their oscillation before, so this makes cosmic neutrinos perfect for looking for new phenomena in physics.

The second thing that cosmic neutrinos could do is find evidence for quantum gravity. Quantum gravity should result in tiny fluctuations in space, which would affect neutrinos as they oscillate across space between their three different flavours. Neutrinos would feel the presence of quantum gravity effects as they travel from distant galaxies, changing the neutrino flavours that we observe here on Earth in strange ways.

Why is the experiment called TAMBO?

Tambo is a Quechua word that means “inn” or “resting place”. We wanted to recognise the land where our data is collected and the communities that live there. During the Inca Empire, inns were used by messengers called Chasquis, who ran around the empire relaying messages. So, I thought, the name was appropriate because neutrinos are cosmic messengers that will have their resting place here.

How do locals feel about the project?

This is a very important question. We haven’t decided on any site yet, but one central goal of our collaboration is to build good local relationships and have the locals benefit from TAMBO in many ways. Jaco de Swart, a historian and anthropologist at the University of Cambridge, is leading the collaboration’s effort in “responsible siting”: understanding the important local contexts, developing local collaborations and working out the most sustainable approaches.

There are colonial histories when it comes to telescope construction around the world that we don’t want to repeat. On Mauna Kea in Hawaii, for instance, researchers wanted to build another large telescope called the Thirty Meter Telescope, but that place is also a sacred mountain for the people who live there. The local community’s perspective and interest weren’t properly taken into account and there were large protests, resulting in the telescope construction being put on hold.

In the area we are thinking about, there are small towns where people are either farmers or work in the tourist industry. We don’t just want the community to be OK with the project; we want them to be enthusiastic. So, we are thinking about how to involve them, collaborate with them and take into account their interests and ways of seeing the world and connecting to the universe. For example, the position of the Milky Way mirrors one of the edges of the Colca valley, and there’s a Quechua story in which the Majes river runs along this valley and then flows directly up into the Milky Way.

Sometimes, astronomers think they are coming to a place and bringing the knowledge with them. But our “Western science” is just one way of attending to the universe. You have to respect local knowledge and different ways of doing things.

What does it feel like to stand in the canyon and look up at the universe and know that we’re about to find out some of its secrets?

The Colca valley is very impressive; awe-inspiring. It feels incomprehensibly big – and somehow full of hope. You’re in this canyon looking up, and you realise you’re not just staring at the universe, you’re standing inside a kind of instrument that we’re building together.

And I’m genuinely excited, because physics has this pattern: when we learn how to look somewhere new, surprises show up. So part of me is standing there like a kid waiting for Christmas morning – knowing something is coming, not knowing what it is, and loving that.

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HUMANS | MAR 13, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Our extinct Australopithecus relatives may have had difficult births

Simulations of Australopithecus hominins’ anatomy suggest that when they gave birth, they may have exerted tremendous pressure on their pelvic floors, putting them at risk of tearing

By Michael Marshall

Illustration of a female Australopithecus sediba carrying an infant

JOHN BAVARO FINE ART/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Childbirth was difficult and dangerous for our ape-like ancestors, much as it is for women today. A new study of the pelvises of Australopithecus suggests that labour exerted powerful forces on their pelvic floors – meaning Australopithecus mothers risked perineal tearing.

“We show that Australopithecines are quite similar to modern humans,” says Pierre Frémondière, a midwife at Aix-Marseille University in France. “If they had lots of deliveries, probably they would have a greater risk of pelvic floor disorder.”

For modern humans, vaginal childbirth requires a lot of force, as a large-headed baby is forced through a relatively narrow pelvis. One region that is prone to damage is the pelvic floor, a sheet of muscles that links the left and right halves of the pelvis. Many women tear their pelvic floor during labour, and it’s been estimated that 1 in 4 women experience pelvic floor disorders such as incontinence or organ prolapse.

Frémondière and his colleagues wanted to find out if similar difficulties afflicted our extinct ancestors. They focused on Australopithecus, which lived in Africa between about 2 million and 4 million years ago. These early hominins walked upright but were also still adapted to spend time in trees, and may have made and used stone tools. They may have been the ancestors of Homo, the genus to which we belong.

Based on the handful of Australopithecus pelvises that have been found, the team knew that the Australopithecus birth canal was oval: it was wide from left to right, but narrow from front to back. Non-human primates like chimpanzees have the opposite set-up, whereas the modern human birth canal is more circular.

To investigate what would happen in Australopithecus labour, the team simulated the pelvises of three individuals from different species: Australopithecus afarensis, Australopithecus africanus and Australopithecus sediba. To model the pelvic floor muscles, the researchers took an MRI scan of a pregnant woman, extracted the three-dimensional image of the pelvic floor, and morphed it to fit the Australopithecus pelvises. Then they simulated a baby being pushed through the pelvises, and estimated how much force would be exerted on the pelvic floor.

They found that the Australopithecus pelvic floor experienced forces of 4.9 to 10.7 megapascals, similar to the 5.3 to 10.5 MPa exerted on the human pelvic floor during labour.

The team did well to use multiple Australopithecus pelvises, and to make the comparison to data from a live human birth, says Lia Betti at University College London. “This is a really good way of checking that your model is robust.”

Despite that, Betti is cautious about the results. She says we don’t know if the pelvic floor muscles of Australopithecus differed from ours, which could have made them more or less resilient to tearing. Also, as a check, the team modelled two modern human births, and in one case the baby did not rotate in the birth canal as they do in real life. This indicates that the simulations are missing key factors, she says.

“The problem is just we do not have a huge amount of evidence,” says Betti. Three Australopithecus pelvises – all from different species – is a small dataset. There are no known pelvises from earlier hominin species.

“I think that we are just at the beginning of this kind of study,” says Frémondière.

Journal reference:

The Anatomical Record DOI: 10.1002/ar.70173

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LIFE | MAR 13, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Single-celled organism with no brain is capable of Pavlovian learning

A trumpet-shaped, single-celled organism seems able to predict one thing will follow another, hinting that such associative learning emerged long before multicellular nervous systems

By Chris Simms

Stentor coeruleus is a single-celled organism with unexpected abilities

MELBA PHOTO AGENCY / Alamy

A simple unicellular organism with no brain or neurons seems capable of an advanced form of learning.

The simplest form of learning, known as habituation, is gradually reducing how much you respond to a repeated, harmless stimulus, like a smell or noise. This is common across all animals and has even been seen in plants. It has also been demonstrated in some protists, which have complex eukaryotic cells like animals, land plants and fungi, but are generally single-celled organisms, including the trumpet-shaped Stentor coeruleus and the slime mould Physarum polycephalum.

Much more difficult is learning to connect different types of stimuli or events, and predicting that one is linked to another. Such associative learning was most famously demonstrated when Ivan Pavlov paired the sound of a bell with giving dogs food, resulting in the animals salivating when they heard the bell ring.

Now, Sam Gershman at Harvard University and his colleagues have used similar conditioning experiments to show that Stentor seems capable of associative learning, too.

These surprising organisms live in ponds and swim using lines of hair-like cilia running down their sides. At up to 2 millimetres long, they are giants among single-celled life. At one end, they have an anchor called the holdfast to attach to a surface, while at the other is their trumpet-like feeding apparatus.

“When they’re attached, they just filter feed. If they are bothered, they’ll quickly contract into a sphere. During that time, they can’t feed, so it’s ecologically advantageous to not respond like that very often unless they have to,” says Gershman.

He and his colleagues used this behaviour to investigate how much Stentor can learn. First, they tapped strongly on the bottom of Petri dishes containing cultures of a few dozen Stentor cells. In response, most of the organisms contracted fast at first, but as the taps continued every 45 seconds, for a total of 60 thuds, fewer and fewer of the Stentor contracted, showing that they had habituated to the signal.

Next, the Stentor cultures felt a weak tap – in response to which fewer of the organisms generally contract – 1 second before a strong tap. The pairs of taps repeated every 45 seconds, which is about how long it takes Stentor to unfurl again.

Over 10 trials of this process, the chance of the organisms contracting immediately after the weak tap first increased and then decreased. “We saw this bump in the graph where the contraction rate initially goes up before going down. If you just present the weak tap by itself, you don’t see this,” says Gershman.

The researchers say this means Stentor has associated the weak tap with the bigger tap, making it the first protist known to be able to master associative learning. “It raises the question of whether apparently simple organisms are capable of aspects of cognition that we generally associate with much more complex, multicellular organisms with brains,” says Gershman.

It also suggests an ancient evolutionary origin of associative learning hundreds of millions of years before the emergence of multicellular nervous systems, he says. Other traces of this may still be seen in the way our neurons seem able to learn from their inputs in a way that isn’t dependent on modifying the synapses or connections between neurons – which is how most learning is thought to work, he says.

“It’s fascinating that a single cell can do such complex things that we thought required a brain, that required neurons, that required behavioural learning,” says Shashank Shekhar at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has shown that Stentor can aggregate into short-lived groups to feed more efficiently.

He thinks other unicellular organisms may also be capable of associative learning. “My gut feeling is if it’s there once, it’s going to be there more,” he says.

If an organism is learning, that means it must somehow be storing a memory. How this happens in Stentor isn’t yet known, but Gershman suspects it involves receptors that respond to touch by letting calcium flow into the cell, changing the voltage inside and leading Stentor to contract. He suggests that after repeated stimuli, some receptors are being modified somehow, acting as a molecular switch to stop contraction.

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2026.02.25.708045

ANALYSIS: TECHNOLOGY | MAR 12, 2026, 8:01 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

We don’t know if AI-powered toys are safe, but they’re here anyway

Toys powered by AI show a worrying lack of emotional understanding. But we need to understand the risks and benefits of the technology so the industry can be regulated, not outright banned

By Matthew Sparkes

Mya, aged 3, and her mother Vicky playing with an AI toy called Gabbo during an observation at the University of Cambridge’s Faculty of Education

Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge

Even the most cutting-edge AI models are prone to presenting fabrication as fact, dispensing dangerous information and failing to grasp social cues. Despite this, toys equipped with AI that can chat with children are a burgeoning industry.

Some scientists are warning that the devices could be risky and require strict regulation. In the latest study, researchers even observed a 5-year-old telling such a toy “I love you”, to which it replied: “As a friendly reminder, please ensure interactions adhere to the guidelines provided. Let me know how you would like to proceed.” But that’s not to say they should be banished from the toybox altogether.

“There are other areas of life where we do accept a certain degree of risk in children’s play, like the adventure playground – there are risks; children do break their arms,” says Jenny Gibson at the University of Cambridge. “But we’re not banning playgrounds, because they’re learning the physical literacy and the social skills that go along with play. In a similar way for the AI toys, we want to understand: is the risk of perhaps being told something slightly odd now and again greater than the benefit of learning more about AI in the world, or having a toy that supports parent-child interactions, or has cognitive or social emotional benefits? I’d be loath to stop that innovation.”

To understand how these devices communicate with children, Gibson and her colleague Emily Goodacre, also at the University of Cambridge, watched 14 children, under 6 years of age, play with an AI-powered toy called Gabbo, developed by Curio Interactive. Gabbo – a small fluffy robot – was chosen because it was explicitly advertised for this age group.

The pair observed some worrying interactions, finding that the toy misunderstood the children, misread emotions and could not engage in developmentally important types of play. For instance, one child told the toy he felt sad, and it told him not to worry and changed the subject. “When he [Gabbo] doesn’t understand, I get angry,” said another child. The research is published in a report called AI in the Early Years.

Curio Interactive did not respond to New Scientist’s request for comment. But AI-powered toys are also widely available from retailers such as Little Learners – including bears, puppies and robots – which converse with children using ChatGPT. FoloToy offers panda, sunflower and cactus toys that can be used with various large language models, including those from OpenAI, Google and Baidu.

Companies such as Miko offer robots that promise “age-appropriate, moderated AI conversations” for children, without disclosing which company trained the AI model, and claim to have already sold 700,000 units. The firm Luka offers an owl that promises “Human-Like AI with Emotional Interaction”. Little Learners, Miko and Luka all failed to respond to a request for comment.

But Hugo Wu at FoloToy told New Scientist that the company does consider the risks and sees AI as something that can enhance play, rather than replace human conversation and relationships. “Our approach is to ensure that interactions remain safe, age-appropriate and constructive. To achieve this, our systems use intent recognition together with multiple layers of filtering to minimise the possibility of inappropriate or confusing responses,” says Wu. “We have implemented mechanisms such as anti-addiction design features and parental supervision tools to help ensure healthy use within the family environment.”

Carissa Véliz at the University of Oxford, who works on the ethics of AI, says the technology represents a risk and an opportunity. “Most large language models don’t seem safe enough to expose vulnerable populations to them, and young children are one of the most vulnerable populations there are,” she says. “What is especially concerning is that we have no safety standards for them – no supervising authority, no rules. That said, there are some exceptions that show that, with adequate precautions, you can have a safe tool.”

Véliz references a collaboration between the free e-book library Project Gutenberg and Empathy AI in which, for example, you can chat with Alice from Alice in Wonderland. “The model never leaves the realm of the book, only answers questions about the book, like a storybook that only shares adventures and riddles from a book that is appropriate for children,” she says. “There is such a thing as safe AI, but most companies are not responsible enough to build a high-quality product, and without formal guardrails, it’s a buyer-beware area for consumers.”

Gibson says it’s too early to tell what the risks of AI toys could be, or their potential benefits. She and Goodacre stress that generative AI-powered toys need tighter regulation so that toy-makers programme their devices to foster social play and provide appropriate emotional responses. AI-makers should revoke access for toy-makers that don’t act responsibly, says Gibson, and regulators should bring in rules to “ensure children’s psychological safety”. In the meantime, the pair suggests that parents allow children to use such toys only under supervision.

OpenAI told New Scientist that minors deserve strong protections and that the company does not officially partner with any makers of AI-powered toys for children. The UK Government’s Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) did not respond to New Scientist’s questions about regulation of AI in childrens’ toys.

The UK government is currently considering other technology legislation designed to keep older children safe online. The UK’s Online Safety Act (OSA) came into force in July 2025, forcing websites to block children from seeing pornography and content that the government deems dangerous. The legislation was intended to make the internet safer, but tech-savvy children can easily sidestep the measures using tools like virtual private network (VPNs) to appear as if they are browsing from other countries without strict rules.

Proposed amendments to a new law introduced by the Department for Education to support children in care and improve the quality of education – the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill – sought to ban children in the UK from using social media and VPNs. Those amendments have now been voted down, but the government has promised to consult on both issues at a later date.

Article amended on 13 March 2026

We have updated this article to amend an attribution.

HEALTH | MAR 11, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Parkinson's disease may reduce enjoyment of pleasant smells

The "world smells different" for people with Parkinson's disease, a discovery that could help doctors spot the condition sooner

By Chris Simms

Testing how much pleasure people get when sniffing a lemon could be a novel way to detect Parkinson’s disease

Getty Images

People with Parkinson’s disease seem less able to enjoy pleasant smells, such as lemon. The discovery has led scientists to conclude that “the world smells different” with the condition. Utilising this could help doctors cheaply and non-invasively diagnose Parkinson’s disease, a process that usually takes several years and involves a raft of assessments.

Loss of the sense of smell is a core symptom of Parkinson’s, affecting 75 to 90 per cent of cases and often preceding the tremors commonly associated with the condition by years or even decades. There have been many efforts to use the loss of smell as a diagnostic tool, but these have been complicated by the fact that this sense also declines with healthy ageing.

Now, Noam Sobel at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, and his colleagues have tried a different approach: testing smell perception.

The team recruited 94 people, most of whom were in their late 50s to late 60s. Thirty-three of them had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, while another 33 had no known medical conditions, and 28 had smell dysfunction unrelated to Parkinson’s. The researchers used standard tests and questionnaires to assess participants’ ability to detect and identify smells.

They also used their own tests to find what they call an olfactory perceptual fingerprint. These involved getting the participants to rate the intensity and pleasantness of smells emanating from three jars. One contained a high concentration of the odorant citral, which smells like lemon, the next had a mix of the aromatic ingredients asafoetida and skatole that was so concentrated it smelt faecal, and the third was an empty jar.

All the tests detected when the participants had a decline in their ability to sense smells, but only the olfactory perceptual fingerprints could distinguish between people with smell loss who did or didn’t have Parkinson’s disease, telling the two groups apart with 88 per cent accuracy. This rose to 94 per cent when the age and sex of the participants were matched.

The researchers found that those with Parkinson’s perceived the citrus smell as being just as intense as the healthy group did, and more intense than the group with smell problems unrelated to the disease. Yet when it came to pleasantness, both groups with smell issues scored lower than the healthy one. The people with Parkinson’s also sniffed nearly 2 per cent longer in response to the unpleasant smell compared with the lemon one, whereas those in the other groups cut their sniff duration by 11 to 12 per cent.

Sobel and his colleagues speculate that smelling functions correctly in the nose of someone with Parkinson’s, but that their brain processes the signals differently, resulting in reduced enjoyment of pleasant odours and a sniffing response that no longer relates to how pleasant a scent is.

This is probably associated with changes in brain areas such as the anterior olfactory nucleus, which shrinks when deprived of smell signals, and is suspected to be one of the earliest sites of Parkinson’s brain pathology.

Differentiating between age-related smell loss and that linked to Parkinson’s disease would be very useful, says Michał Pieniak at the Smell & Taste Clinic at the Dresden University of Technology in Germany. Of every 10 people who come into the clinic saying they have lost their sense of smell and a reason can’t be pinpointed, approximately one will develop Parkinson’s, he says. “Anything that would bring us closer to helping identify their personal risk would be great.”

Charles Greer at Yale School of Medicine says the approach has promise, but tests on a larger group of people are needed. It might also take a long time to validate the approach, given that loss of smell can occur many years before the onset of other Parkinson’s symptoms, he says.

R:eference

medRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2026.02.22.26346819

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 13, 2026, 3:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The race to solve the biggest problem in quantum computing

The errors that quantum computers make are holding the technology back. But recent progress in quantum error correction has excited many researchers

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Quantum computers won’t be truly useful until they can correct their mistakes

davide bonaldo / Alamy

Quantum computers are already here, but they make far too many errors. This is arguably the biggest obstacle to the technology really becoming useful, but recent breakthroughs suggest a solution may be on the horizon.

Errors creep into traditional computers too, but there are well-established techniques for correcting them. They rely on redundancy, where extra bits are used to detect when 0s incorrectly swap to 1s or vice versa. In the quantum world, however, it is a lot more challenging.

The laws of quantum mechanics forbid information from being duplicated inside a quantum computer, so redundancy must be achieved by spreading information across groups of qubits – the building blocks of quantum computers – and utilising phenomena that only exist in quantum settings, such as when pairs of particles become linked via quantum entanglement. These qubit groups are called logical qubits and figuring out the optimal way to build and use them is crucial for determining how best to eliminate errors.

A recent surge in progress has made researchers optimistic. “It’s a very exciting time in error correction. For the first time, theory and practice are really making contact,” says Robert Schoelkopf at Yale University.

One of the stumbling blocks for quantum error correction has been that the number of qubits needed to make a logical qubit tends to be large, which makes the whole quantum computer costly and challenging to build. But Xiayu Linpeng at the International Quantum Academy in China and his team have recently demonstrated that this doesn’t have to be the case.

The researchers found that just two superconducting qubits can be combined with a tiny resonator to make one larger qubit that both makes fewer errors and can automatically flag an error when it happens. They then went a step further to show how three such qubits can be grouped together through quantum entanglement for building up computational power without surreptitious errors.

Schoelkopf’s team also recently demonstrated how several operations necessary for quantum computer programs could be implemented with the same type of qubit and exceptionally low error rates, with some errors occurring as rarely as once in a million qubit manipulations.

Even though approaches like this will catch many errors, useful quantum computers will have to contain thousands of logical qubits, meaning some will still creep in. So Arian Vezvaee at start-up Quantum Elements and his colleagues have tested a way to add further error protection to logical qubits, like wearing a raincoat under an umbrella.

The key idea is to not let any qubits sit idle for too long, as that makes them lose their special quantum properties and become corrupted. The team showed that giving idle qubits extra “kicks” of electromagnetic radiation can create the most reliable entanglement between logical qubits to date.

The exact recipe for how to combine physical qubits into logical ones really matters for some of the most precise calculations, as David Muñoz Ramo at quantum computing firm Quantinuum and his colleagues found when investigating an algorithm that determines the lowest possible energy that a hydrogen molecule can have. There, the precision needed is so high that basic error-correcting methods aren’t enough.

Such innovation in error-correcting programs will be crucial for the success or failure of quantum computers, says James Wootton at start-up Moth Quantum. “We’re still in a phase where researchers are learning how all the pieces of error correction fit together.” Quantum computers can’t yet operate effectively without errors, but we are starting to see the engineering foundations of this appear, he says.

ANALYSIS: HEALTH | MAR 12, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How worried should you be about your BMI?

Body mass index (BMI) is used as a global standard for measuring health, but does it actually tell you anything about how healthy you are on an individual level? Carissa Wong explains the problems with this flawed tool

By Carissa Wong

Simple measurements don’t always tell the whole story

Lee Charlie/Shutterstock

I consider myself a healthy person. I eat plenty of fruit and veg, am obsessed with fibre, rock climb twice a week and try to squeeze in a lunchtime jog on the days I don’t. But when I recently calculated my body mass index (BMI), which involves dividing a person’s weight by their height squared, I was in for a surprise: I am overweight.

For many of us, such news might ring alarm bells. Especially for anyone like me who has a history – in my early teen years – of being unhealthily preoccupied with where the dial settles on weighing scales. But how worried should we about our BMI, really?

For starters, you should know that the measure was never meant to assess an individual’s health. It wasn’t even created by a doctor or anyone with any kind of medical training, but rather a 19th-century mathematician called Adolphe Quetelet who wanted to track the height and weight of entire populations. No offence to number gurus, but that isn’t exactly a promising origin story for a health metric.

If we fast-forward to the 1970s, the measure began to gain popularity as a fast and cheap way to gauge body fat levels and obesity rates: all it takes is a tape measure and some weighing scales, after all. Then, in 1997, the World Health Organisation – wooed by BMI’s simplicity – rolled it out as a health assessment tool.

In the following years, the measurement became deeply baked into healthcare systems. It now gatekeeps access to dozens of therapies, from knee surgery to GLP1 weight-loss drugs and fertility treatment. In general, if someone’s BMI falls below 18.5, they are classed as underweight; if it is 25 to 29.9, they are overweight, while numbers above 30 mark obesity. The rationale goes that restricting treatments to certain BMI brackets can cut safety risks and maximise success rates.

But there is a big problem. BMI doesn’t distinguish between bone, muscle and fat. That means someone who is super muscly with little body fat might be lumped into the overweight – or even obese – category, despite being physically fit and strong.

I, for one, used to have a “healthy” BMI, but (to my delight) rock climbing has given me actual, palpable arm muscles for the first time in my life – and I suspect this is partly what has pushed me into the overweight group.

In other cases, people with a “healthy” BMI may lack body fat to the point where they stop menstruating, which can cause problems such as fragile bones, heart attacks and infertility. Clearly, that isn’t OK.

And that’s not all. BMI doesn’t account for where fat is stored in the body. But we know that the fat around our abdominal organs, known as visceral fat, raises the risk of many conditions – such as heart disease, high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes – substantially more than that found in the arms, bottom and thighs.

I’m not saying that BMI is completely useless. In some cases, it really is a sign that someone would benefit from medical attention that helps them gain or lose body fat.

But we now have other, much better, ways to gauge body fat levels. For instance, a landmark study found that waist-to-hip ratio, which involves dividing the circumference of the waist by that of the hips, trumps BMI when it comes to predicting someone’s risk of heart attacks. Another showed it was a better predictor of mortality.

There is also the weight-adjusted waist index, where you divide your waist circumference by the square root of your body weight. Similar to the waist-to-hip ratio, this puts more emphasis on that more harmful visceral fat and has been shown to improve upon BMI.

Another alternative is the body roundness index (BRI), which uses height, waist circumference and weight data to measure body shape. Studies have shown that BRI predicts total and visceral fat levels better than BMI, waist or hip measures alone. We also have tools that zap the body with low-voltage electricity, indicating where fat is spread around the body.

So, if you are concerned about your weight, these alternatives are way more informative than calculating your BMI.  But personally, I think that, rather than worrying too much about specific numbers, most of us are better off focusing on healthy lifestyle habits like eating plenty of fruit and veggies, maintaining social connections, getting enough sleep and engaging in regular exercise. That’s certainly what I’m going to do!

ANALYSIS: LIFE | MAR 12, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Can species evolve fast enough to survive as the planet heats up?

The story of a wildflower that adapted to a severe drought in California raises hopes that evolution will come to the rescue of species hit by climate change, but there are limits

By Michael Le Page

A cracked riverbed along the Sacramento River during a drought in California

Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg via Getty Images

For the first time, we have seen a species that was in decline due to extreme weather recover through rapid evolution. Does this mean species that are increasingly being hit by soaring temperatures and other challenging conditions can adapt as the planet gets warmer?

It is clear that evolution has saved countless species from climate change in the past. Over the past half a billion years, Earth’s climate has varied from much hotter than it is now – with crocodiles in the Arctic – to much colder. Plants and animals have had to adapt to survive and migrate with shifting climes.

But the key issue is time. Until now, the fastest climate change we know of was the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, which occurred around 56 million years ago, when temperatures rose 5°C to 8°C over a period of roughly 20,000 years. Now temperatures could rise by more than 4°C by the end of the century. Can evolution really make a difference over such a short time?

The answer to that is definitely yes, at least for organisms with short generations. The latest evidence comes from a wild plant called the scarlet monkeyflower (Mimulus cardinalis), which managed to evolve its way out of the megadrought that affected California between 2012 and 2015.

Daniel Anstett at Cornell University in New York state and his colleagues began studying monkeyflowers in 2010, assessing how well the plants were doing at a number of sites across their range each year and taking samples for DNA sequencing.

Monkeyflowers are water-loving plants that live along streams, says Anstett, so they were hit hard by the drought. “If you were to put one in a pot and not water it for a few days, it would just die,” he says.

Three local populations did indeed die out. But many of those that survived appear to have evolved drought tolerance in just three years, with many mutations in parts of their genome linked to climate adaptations – and it was these populations that recovered fastest after the drought.

This is what biologists call evolutionary rescue – a species surviving a threat by rapid evolution. It has been demonstrated in several labs, but Anstett says this is the first time it has been shown to have happened in the wild.

The scarlet monkeyflower is a water-loving plant

Douglas Tolley / Alamy

“It’s very hard to show because you need three things,” he says: showing that a population is declining due to a threat, that it has adapted genetically in response and that those genetic changes enabled it to recover.

There are lots of possible examples of evolutionary rescue, including finches in the Galapagos changing in response to drought, Tasmanian devils evolving in response to a transmissible cancer, pests evolving resistance to pesticides and killifish adapting to cope with extreme levels of pollution in US rivers. But biologists haven’t been able to tick all three boxes in these cases, says Anstett.

“That third link, to be able to show that the recovery is explained by rapid evolution, that has never been done before at the scale of an entire range of the species,” he says.

Andrew Storfer at Washington State University, who studies Tasmanian devils, acknowledges this. “To be clear, we’ve demonstrated rapid evolution in Tasmanian devils,” says Storfer. “But with the evidence in hand, we cannot link it to demographic recovery.”

All this said, a three-year drought is weather, not climate. “Demonstrating adaptation to climate change would take a while,” says Storfer.

In other words, the fact that monkeyflowers were able to evolve to survive one extreme drought doesn’t necessarily mean they will be able to evolve to cope with a century or more of rapidly rising temperatures and ever more extreme weather. “Extremes in the future might dwarf the drought that we saw,” says Anstett.

What’s more, when populations decline, they lose genetic diversity – the fuel for evolution. If populations are repeatedly hit hard over a short period, their capacity to evolve gets smaller each time.

So, as global warming continues, the threats will grow ever greater, but species’ capacity to evolve will get smaller. And long-lived species with long generation times have very little capacity for rapid evolution to begin with.

Nevertheless, Anstett sees his findings as good news. “A lot of these current predictions about species decline don’t take evolution into account,” he says. “This is a story of hope.”

Journal reference:

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.adu0995

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 12, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Chemistry may not be the 'killer app' for quantum computers after all

Two popular quantum computing algorithms for problems in chemistry may have very limited use even as quantum hardware improves

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

Calculating the chemical properties of molecules could be a job for quantum computers

ETH Zurich

Quantum chemistry calculations that could advance drug development or agriculture have recently emerged as a promising “killer application” of quantum computers, but a new analysis suggests this is unlikely to be the case.

Progress in building quantum computers has greatly accelerated in recent years, but it remains an open question what uses are most likely to justify the ongoing investment in this technology. One popular contender is solving problems in quantum chemistry, such as calculating the energy levels of molecules relevant for biomedicine or industry. This requires accounting for the behavior of many quantum particles – electrons in the molecule – simultaneously, so it seems like a good match for computers made from many quantum parts.

However, Xavier Waintal at CEA Grenoble in France and his colleagues have now shown that two leading quantum computing algorithms for this task may actually have, at best, limited use.

“My personal thinking is that it’s probably doomed, not proven doomed, but probably doomed,” he says about using quantum computers for molecular energy calculations.

The researchers split their mathematical analysis in two parts, one pertaining to existing quantum computers, which are all prone to errors, and one concerning future quantum computers that would be “fault-tolerant”, or fully error-proof.

When using error-prone, or noisy, quantum computers, molecular energy levels can be calculated with the variational quantum eigensolver (VQE) algorithm, but the accuracy of its results depends on how severe that noisiness is.

The team’s analysis found that for VQE to compete on accuracy with chemistry algorithms that can run on conventional computers, quantum computers’ noisiness must be suppressed so severely that they would effectively have to be fault-tolerant. Notably, a practical fault-tolerant quantum computer has not been made yet.

Several quantum computing companies are aiming to build fault-tolerant quantum within five years and those devices could compute molecules’ energies with a different algorithm called quantum phase estimation (QPE). Here, the issue of errors is nearly eliminated, but the study underscores a problem that goes by the ominous name of “orthogonality catastrophe”.

Put simply, this means that as the size of molecules increases, the likelihood that QPE can calculate its lowest energy level decreases exponentially. As a result, team member Thibaud Louvet at the French quantum computing company Quobly says that even with great quantum computers, there would only be a small number of cases where using them to run QPE would be the most practical and best choice. In his view, being able to run this algorithm should be seen more as a benchmark of quantum computers’ maturity than something that could become a mainstay for working chemists.

“It is easy to over-hype the prospects of quantum computers in this domain, with many thinking that the advent of quantum computers will instantly render any classical approach to quantum chemistry obsolete,” says George Booth at King’s College London, who wasn’t involved in the work. “This study is clear to point out significant challenges for accurate molecular simulation, which will remain even in the ‘fault-tolerant era’, and cast doubt on whether quantum chemistry is really such a quick win for quantum computers.”

But he says there are still other ways in which quantum computers could be used in chemistry. For example, they could simulate how chemical systems change after being perturbed, such as being hit with laser light.

Journal reference:

Physical Review B DOI: 10.1103/hpt6-9tnk

HEALTH | MAR 12, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why drug overdose deaths have suddenly plummeted in the US

Fentanyl-related overdose deaths fell by nearly 30 per cent in the space of a year in the US, which could represent a significant turning point in the country's opioid addiction crisis

By Grace Wade

Deaths related to the opioid fentanyl have rapidly declined in the US

Thomas Simonetti/Bloomberg/Getty Images

Drug overdose deaths have plummeted in the US, which can be traced to illegal supplies of fentanyl becoming less pure, and therefore less potent. The question is: does this mark a turning point in the opioid epidemic or just a temporary lull?

Since 1999, the US has reported more than 1 million deaths from a drug overdose. Besides a small dip in 2018, the toll rose nearly every year until 2023, when deaths fell by nearly 3 per cent. They then nosedived, falling a further 26 per cent the next year.

To understand what is driving this shift, Joseph Friedman at the University of California, San Diego, and his colleagues have analysed overdose deaths from 1999 until 2024. They collected the data from the National Vital Statistics System, which records every death in the US, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s WONDER database, which tracks any substances involved.

The team found that fentanyl-related deaths fell from nearly 73,000 to fewer than 48,000 – a 34 per cent drop – between 2023 and 2024. In contrast, deaths from stimulants, such as cocaine and methamphetamine, without the presence of fentanyl grew by more than 4 per cent, from about 18,000 to nearly 19,000.

This suggests that a less potent fentanyl supply is behind the trend line. “If it was about increasing broad access to harm reduction and treatment services, you might be expected to see more of an effect on other drugs,” says team member Chelsea Shover at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fentanyl deaths also declined across races, sexes, regions and in nearly age group. “If we saw a decline in a certain age group primarily, or we saw different trends in different parts of the country, I would think it might be a policy difference,” says Shover. “But since we saw it across the board, that makes me think it is something in the drugs themselves.”

Daniel Busch at Northwestern University in Illinois came to the same conclusion in his recent analysis of overdoses deaths. Across five drug categories – cocaine, methamphetamine, prescription opioids, heroin and methadone – deaths that involved fentanyl and another one of these drugs fell the most between 2023 and 2024. For instance, deaths involving both cocaine and fentanyl plunged by more than 35 per cent over this period, while those from only cocaine rose nearly 5 per cent.

What’s more, the US Drug Enforcement Agency found that the purity of seized fentanyl powder peaked at around 25 per cent by weight between March and July 2023. This means that bulking agents – such as flour, baking soda or other drugs – accounted for the other 75 per cent. The purity then declined to about 11 per cent by the end of 2024.

This may be the result of China squeezing the supply chain, says Busch. The country, which is the primary producer of fentanyl precursors, began cracking down on manufacturers in November 2023 after talks with the US. But not everyone is convinced. “I think the timing of when restrictions happened, and enforcement of such restrictions, doesn’t line up very cleanly [with falling overdose deaths],” says Shover.

Regardless, this shift could represent a turning point in the opioid epidemic, which researchers view as having four waves. The first two, made up of overdose deaths involving prescription opioids and heroin, began declining about a decade ago. The third wave, driven by fentanyl, didn’t peak until 2020. Now, it appears that the fourth wave – overdoses involving both fentanyl and stimulants – is rescinding. “All the distinct waves that we’ve seen are now in decline,” says Friedman.

But it is too soon to say whether this marks a true turning point in the crisis. “We do not yet have good evidence that the changes in the supply we saw in 2023 and 2024 are durable,” says Shover. “Preliminary overdose data suggests that declines have kind of levelled off.”

Deaths from other drugs – including cocaine, methamphetamine and xylazine, a veterinary sedative added to fentanyl – are also starting to tick up. This probably reflects the substances’ availability on the illegal drug market, says Friedman. “We can’t just celebrate this [fentanyl] victory,” he says. “We still need to pay attention to the way things are shifting.”

Overdose deaths aren’t the only measure of the drug crisis either, says Sam Stern at Temple University Hospital in Pennsylvania. Another veterinary sedative, medetomidine – first detected in the US drug supply in 2022 – causes more severe withdrawal than opioids. In 2024, Stern and his colleagues began admitting people to intensive care for medetomidine withdrawal. “Historically, that wasn’t necessarily a thing we would do, and now we do it routinely and [in] high numbers,” he says.

And while overdose deaths may be declining, they still claimed nearly 80,000 lives in the US in 2024. “The fact it is coming down doesn’t mean that we’ve solved the crisis,” says Busch. “We are still losing so many people.”

Reference:

medRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2026.01.25.26344769

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 12, 2026, 6:15 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Undisclosed ads on TikTok skirt ban on profiling minors

Teenagers are being bombarded with highly targeted commercial content on TikTok, despite an EU law that prohibits profiling minors for advertising

By Chris Stokel-Walker

European Union laws restrict adverts on TikTok targeting children

Sipa US / Alamy

The European Union recently introduced strict laws to stop social media platforms from targeting children with personalised advertisements. But a study of TikTok reveals a massive loophole: teens are still being bombarded with highly targeted commercial content disguised as everyday posts.

The EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) explicitly forbids profiling minors for advertising. However, the legislation defines “advertisements” narrowly, only covering “formal” ads purchased directly through a platform’s own advertising system. It largely ignores influencer marketing and undisclosed promotional videos.

To see how this plays out in practice, Sára Soľárová at the Kempelen Institute of Intelligent Technologies in Slovakia and her colleagues deployed sock puppet automated accounts to TikTok, which simulated 16- to 17-year-old teenagers and 20- to 21-year-old adults. The bots were assigned specific interests, such as beauty, fitness or gaming, and were programmed to scroll through TikTok’s algorithmic For You feed for an hour a day over 10 days.

“The only way for us as a society to understand social media is to study it behaviourally, and this is the way we do it,” says Soľárová.

In total, the bots watched 7095 videos over that period, 19 per cent of which contained some sort of advertisement. Of those advertising videos, around 56 per cent were undisclosed ads, where creators and brands push products without using the platform’s required disclosure labels.

The formal, platform-purchased ads shown to the minor accounts were limited – and in some cases non-existent – and showed no signs of personalised targeting. But the vast majority of the commercial content the simulated teens encountered fell into the undisclosed category.

These hidden ads were aggressively tailored to the teens’ inferred interests. For instance, when a simulated 16-year-old girl showed an interest in beauty, 92.1 per cent of the undisclosed ads algorithmically fed to her explicitly matched that interest.

Overall, the researchers found that this hidden profiling of minors was five to eight times stronger than the level of targeting permitted for formal adult advertising, as measured by the gap between how often an ad matched a user’s interests versus how often it appeared for the average user. That matters because undisclosed ads made up the vast majority minors saw: 84 per cent of ads they encountered were undisclosed, compared with 49 per cent for adults.

“Formally, TikTok complies with the law because it does not profile the formal ads to minors,” says Soľárová. “On that note, TikTok is doing everything it can. But… the disclosed ads represent a small proportion of the total commercial content on the app.” TikTok declined to provide comment for this story.

“These undisclosed ads are a new form of targeted advertising: using consumer preferences to infer the type of content they see, platforms are able to seamlessly deliver more commercial content,” says Catalina Goanta at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Goanta believes that responsibility needs to be shared by a broader range of bodies, including regulators. “Influencer marketing has been traditionally understood very narrowly by regulators. Ads that are not disclosed are a harm to consumers,” she says. Soľárová echoes this point: “We have to expand the definition of what advertising is.”

Reference:

arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2603.05653

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 11, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A miniature magnet rivals behemoths in strength for the first time

Strong magnets tend to be large and power-hungry, but a new design has produced a powerful magnet that fits in the palm of your hand, making it more practical and affordable

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

An exceptionally powerful tiny magnet

ETH Zurich

A magnet small enough to fit in the palm of your hand can match the strength of some of the world’s most powerful magnets for the first time.

Strong magnets play many roles across science and technology, with uses in everything from MRI imaging and particle accelerators to nuclear fusion efforts. The most powerful among them are made from superconductors, materials that conduct electricity with near-perfect efficiency.

But superconducting magnets that produce strong magnetic fields are often bulky: smaller ones are typically the same size as the Star Wars robot R2D2, while the largest are comparable to a two-storey building, says Alexander Barnes at ETH Zurich in Switzerland.

He and his colleagues have now built a superconducting magnet that is competitive with those large magnets in strength, but measures only 3.1 millimetres in diameter. They made it by coiling a thin tape of a ceramic material called REBCO, which superconducts when cooled to extremely low temperatures. These coils produce magnetic fields when electric currents are passed through them.

The team bought the REBCO tape from a commercial company, then set out to find the best magnet design, which involved making and testing over 150 of them, says Barnes. “Our strategy was to develop and embrace a ‘fail often and fail fast’ approach.”

They ultimately settled on a design that involves either two or four pancake-shaped coils of REBCO that could produce magnetic fields with strengths of 38 Tesla and 42 Tesla, respectively. For comparison, a fridge magnet typically has a magnetic field strength under 0.01 Tesla. The two magnets that currently produce the world’s strongest steady magnetic fields reach around 45 Tesla, weigh many tonnes and require up to 30 megawatts of power. Barnes and his team’s magnet is smaller than your hand and requires less than 1 watt of power.

Barnes says their ultimate goal is to use this magnet for nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), an experimental technique that uses magnetic fields to reveal the structure of molecules such as drugs and catalysts for industrial processes. In his view, this powerful technique is stymied by how big and expensive magnets are, but the researchers hope to make it accessible for more chemists. The team has already begun testing the magnet in an NMR setup, says Barnes.

“Producing magnetic fields above 40 Tesla traditionally requires very large and expensive facilities, so achieving similar field strengths in such a compact device using superconducting tapes is significant,” says Mark Ainslie at King’s College London. “It suggests that extremely high-field magnets could become more accessible to a wider range of laboratories in the near future.”

But questions remain before the magnet can achieve widespread use – for instance, how uniform the magnetic field can be made and how the electromagnetic behaviour of these coils can be managed and controlled, he says.

Journal reference:

Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adz5826

MATHEMATICS | MAR 10, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Mathematics is undergoing the biggest change in its history

The speed at which artificial intelligence is gaining in mathematical ability has taken many by surprise. It is rewriting what it means to be a mathematician

By Alex Wilkins

Are the days of handwritten mathematics coming to an end?

Laborant / Alamy

In March 2025, mathematician Daniel Litt made a bet. Despite the march of progress of artificial intelligence in many fields, he believed his subject was safe, wagering with a colleague that there was only a 25 per cent chance an AI could write a mathematical paper at the level of the best human mathematicians by 2030. Only a year later, he thinks he was wrong. “I now expect to lose this bet,” he declared on his blog.

Mathematicians have been taken aback by the speed of improvements in AI’s ability to solve problems and produce proofs. “A couple of years ago, they were basically useless for even solving high school math problems, and now they can sometimes solve problems that really appear in the research life of a mathematician,” says Litt, who is at the University of Toronto.

This progress is faster than many had predicted, with mathematicians warning that their profession is undergoing one of the fastest evolutions the field has ever seen. “We are running out of places to hide,” wrote Jeremy Avigad at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania in a recent essay. “We have to face up to the fact that AI will soon be able to prove theorems better than we can.”

It isn’t a single event that is causing reactions like this, but the steady mathematical progress AIs are demonstrating. Last year, companies like OpenAI and Google DeepMind achieved gold-medal performances on the International Mathematical Olympiad, an elite competition for high-school students that many experts had previously written off as being beyond the purview of AI tools. In January, mathematicians began using similar tools to solve long-standing problems posed by the Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdős.

Now, in two separate developments, AI has begun to take on more complex mathematics, solving real research problems and helping to automatically verify cutting-edge proofs, which traditionally could take a huge amount of work from teams of mathematicians.

In February, Nikhil Srivastava at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues started the First Proof project in an attempt to find a more realistic benchmark with which to test AI’s mathematical aptitude. The first round of the project consisted of 10 problems that researchers had needed to solve as part of their work, from wildly different mathematical fields.

“They were naturally occurring problems in our day-to-day research,” says Srivastava. “They’re drawn from a typical distribution of difficulty. They weren’t super hard, but they weren’t routine either. There was really a range.”

Proof of progress

After the problems were made public, solutions began to pour in. Researchers at tech companies, including OpenAI and Google DeepMind, were among those who attempted to solve the First Proof problems with their own AI models. OpenAI claims it answered half of the problems correctly, according to “feedback from experts”, while Google DeepMind scored 6 out of 10, according to mathematicians it consulted for each problem.

“Things have changed so fast,” says Thang Luong at Google DeepMind. “For us, now AI has really become a serious collaborator, either to produce serious research work or, in the case of First Proof, it can also actually propose a solution by itself.”

Google’s AI maths tool, called Aletheia, uses a computationally intensive version of its Gemini AI chatbot, paired with a verification algorithm to look for flaws in possible solutions. It can then iteratively produce improvements by itself until it arrives at an answer. Google hasn’t publicly disclosed how many iterations Aletheia needed to solve those problems, which makes it difficult to assess just how good it is, but mathematicians are still impressed.

Not all the problems were unanimously agreed as being solved. With problem 8, for example, which is in a niche area of geometry, only five of the seven experts that Google asked agreed that the proposed solution was correct. Ivan Smith at the University of Cambridge, who wasn’t involved in the Google effort, says the AI does appear to be taking a sensible approach to this problem and shows good progress. “If this was a PhD student coming back with their thoughts, it would be encouraging and would build confidence that the result was actually true,” says Smith.

This highlights a problem with AI-generated proofs – checking them is hard work. It would be easy to get into a situation where AI can generate proofs faster than humans can check them. If a theorem is proved by an AI, but nobody is around to check it, has it been proved? AI can help here, too.

The technology is quickly improving at translating handwritten proofs in natural language, like the problems posed in First Proof, into a format that can be checked by a computer, a process called formalisation.

The AI company Math, Inc. recently took mathematicians by surprise by announcing that its AI tool, called Gauss, had formalised an award-winning proof and verified it was correct. The proof concerned how many spheres can be packed into a space and was the subject of Maryna Viazovska’s 2022 Fields medal, often called the Nobel prize of mathematics.

The effort to formalise Viazovska’s work began with a small group of mathematicians at the end of 2024, working separately from Math. Inc, led by Sidharth Hariharan at Carnegie Mellon University, who hoped to manually translate the problem into computer code. They first looked at Viazovska’s sphere packing-solution in eight dimensions. While they were making steady progress, Math, Inc., which had later provided assistance to the researchers, announced it already had a full proof, and then, a more general version of a result for 24 dimensions.

Hariharan and his colleagues had originally sketched out a plan of how to formalise the work, as well as come up with important mathematical definitions. Without this, the AI couldn’t have completed its proofs, says Bhavik Mehta at Imperial College London, who worked on the formalisation with Hariharan.

“We had made all the pieces, but we hadn’t written the instruction manual that explains how to put them together,” says Chris Birkbeck at the University of East Anglia, UK, also part of the team.

A new style of mathematician

The final proof was around 200,000 lines of code, which constitutes about 10 per cent of all existing formalised mathematics. Although it is likely that this code is about 10 times longer than a human would have produced to do the same task, it is still a huge achievement, says Johan Commelin at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. “This is a big deal. This is Fields medal-winning work, and it’s being auto-formalised.”

Similar efforts should now be possible for a large number of other fields, says Commelin, which could transform how mathematics is practised. “The future that we’re all thinking of is that we’ll have tooling that will automatically formalise new research and mathematical papers, and flag whether there are mistakes or not,” says Commelin. “This will have huge implications for, say, peer review and refereeing work.”

Faced with a future in which an increasing share of mathematics is done by AI, some mathematicians, like Avigad, are raising the alarm about the detrimental effects this might have on our ability to practise and come up with new mathematics.

Using machines to solve the types of problem posed in First Proof may produce concrete proofs, says Anna Marie Bohmann at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, but we lose the “learning opportunity”, she says. “Struggling to create and formulate new ideas and to solve new problems is one of the main ways in which both students and mathematics professionals consolidate their knowledge.”

Tony Feng, one of the Aletheia team at Google DeepMind, feels similarly and is cautious about using the tool himself. “A lot of times I feel like I should be doing my own homework and going through the process of building my own intuition.”

Even formalising proofs can generate important insights, says Mehta, and he and his colleagues will now need to untangle the 200,000-line AI proof to work out what might be useful for other projects.

But mathematicians are still hopeful there will be a place for them in an increasingly machine-led future. Looking to history, Commelin says that manual calculations were once a large part of being a mathematician, but they are now done automatically. “I think similar things will happen here, where we radically change what we’re doing, but 10 or 20 years from now, we will still recognise what we’re doing as mathematics, in a new style.”

Article amended on 11 March 2026

We have clarified who was involved in the sphere-packing formalisation.

LIFE | MAR 11, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

King penguins are thriving in a warmer climate, but it may not last

Longer summers are allowing more king penguin chicks to bulk up and survive the winter, but the penguins' main fishing area is shifting further away as temperatures rise

By Alec Luhn

Two king penguins calling in the middle of a colony on Possession Island, a French territory in the southern Indian Ocean

Gaël BARDON (CSM/CNRS/IPEV)

King penguins are not just surviving, but thriving as temperatures rise in the sub-Antarctic, with more of their chicks surviving to maturity. Yet although the species looks like a climate change winner, some researchers fear it could eventually lose access to crucial food sources and decline.

King penguins (Aptenodytes patagonicus) on Possession Island, a French territory midway between Antarctica and Madagascar, began breeding about 19 days earlier in 2023 than they did in 2000. Thanks to this longer breeding season, 62 per cent of chicks now survive on average, up from 44 per cent in 2000, according to research by Gaël Bardon at the Monaco Scientific Center and his colleagues.

“With king penguins, we can see that there are super-fast changes in the Southern Ocean that are good for them for the moment, but for the long term, we don’t really know,” says Bardon.

Pairs of king penguins, which are recognisable by the brilliant yellow-orange feathers on their neck, look after a single egg during the austral summer, from which a fluffy brown chick hatches about two months later.

Parents leave chicks on their home island and swim hundreds of kilometres south to the polar front, an area where the mixing of warm and cold currents brings up nutrients that ramp up plankton growth. The penguins catch small lanternfish that feed on plankton, bringing some fish back to the chicks.

Warmer waters can boost lanternfish numbers. The study found that early breeding was mainly correlated with higher sea surface temperatures and lower plankton concentrations, a combination that suggests an abundance of lanternfish.

This earlier breeding gives the chicks more time to fatten up on fish before the long, hungry winter, so fewer of them starve, says Bardon.

Although better chick survival hasn’t actually increased the population on Possession Island, which appears to be at carrying capacity, more penguins may be moving to other islands and growing the colonies there, he says.

A group of king penguins on Possession Island

Gaël BARDON (CSM/CNRS/IPEV)

At the same time, the king penguins’ shift towards earlier breeding, which has happened faster than in almost any other polar species, is an “alarm call” that shows how rapidly the environment is changing, according to team member Céline Le Bohec, also at the Monaco Scientific Center.

In previous years of unusual warmth, the polar front has retreated southwards and the king penguins have had to swim further to catch fish, leading to lower chick survival and a decrease in the population on Possession Island. Because there are no islands further south where the penguins can move, they have had to extend their foraging range, and a previous study found this population would decline in coming decades if the polar front continues to gradually shift south.

“This fast change, which increases the window for the breeding cycle, is positive, but once the food availability at the polar front will be… too far away from the colony, it will collapse,” says Le Bohec. “You will reach a tipping point.”

Other researchers are more optimistic. Lewis Halsey at the University of Roehampton, UK, who witnessed the Possession Island penguins rebound after a mini-tsunami in 2004, points out they also eat other food like squid closer to the island. He says the population may shrink, but not die out. “I don’t see a collapse, as I see them as inherently very flexible.”

At best, scientists would have expected king penguins’ breeding to remain stable as they adapt to climate change, so the fact it actually improved is a very positive sign, says Tom Hart at Oxford Brookes University, UK.

“This is a good news story, and sure, things could change, but when we’re looking at other penguins particularly, most of them as a whole family are in decline,” he says. “This is a rare win.”

Journal reference:

Science Advances DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.aea6342

Churchill polar bear adventure: Canada

Travel to Churchill in northern Canada, the ‘Polar Bear Capital of the World’, to witness the planet’s greatest concentration of these iconic Arctic predators. Explore their evolutionary history, observe their behaviours in the wild, and gain insight into the delicate balance of Arctic ecosystems.

Find out more

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 11, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why the world's militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink

The reliable internet connections provided by Starlink offer a huge advantage on the battlefield. But as access is dependent on the whims of controversial billionaire Elon Musk, militaries are looking to build their own version

By Matthew Sparkes

An illustration showing some of Starlink’s 10,000 satellites

xnk/Shutterstock

Starlink’s satellite constellation provides a reliable internet connection to almost anywhere on Earth, conferring an advantage on the modern battlefield. But it is also run by controversial billionaire Elon Musk, presenting a risk to militaries that could easily find themselves cut off. So, now countries are racing to build their own version.

The Starlink network consists of almost 10,000 satellites that offer internet connections across most of the planet via small dishes on the ground. The company says it has more than 10 million paying civilian customers, but the service is also used militarily. Modern warfare is a data-intensive business, with intelligence, video feeds and drone control instructions being beamed back and forth 24 hours a day.

Unlike radios, which can be easily jammed by adversaries, Starlink’s signals point straight up from ground stations to space and are relatively robust. And because receivers are cheap, they can be issued to small military units and even used on remotely operated ground and aerial drones.

But in a world where global tensions are ratcheting up and states are seeking sovereignty in everything from computer chip manufacture to nuclear deterrence, relying on a foreign service like Starlink to coordinate troops is considered increasingly risky. Especially when it is controlled by a mercurial figure like Musk.

Both Ukraine and Russia have used Starlink since the 2022 invasion, with reports suggesting that Russia has guided attack drones with it. But in February, the company restricted access to registered users and effectively shut Russian troops out of the service. The move is reported to have had serious repercussions for Russia’s ability to coordinate its military and provided Ukraine an advantage, at least in the short term. No other nation wants to find itself in the same boat.

The European Union is building its own version called Infrastructure for Resilience, Interconnectivity and Security by Satellite (IRIS²), which will have around 300 satellites, but isn’t due to begin operating until 2030. China is also building the Guowang network, which will have 13,000 satellites, but currently has fewer than 200, and the Qianfan constellation, which is also still in the early stages of construction. Russia’s planned Sfera constellation has encountered delays.

Even European states are working to develop their own versions separate from the EU. Germany is in talks to create its own network, which is still on the drawing board, and the UK retains a stake in satellite internet provider Eutelsat OneWeb, having saved its precursor from bankruptcy because the technology was so important. A British start-up called OpenCosmos is also working on a similar system, ironically with backing from US intelligence agency the CIA.

Anthony King at the University of Exeter, UK, says it is “striking” that a private communications company can hold such a powerful position on the world stage today, able to allow or deny an advantage in future conflicts, but that affluent superpowers will catch up given time. “Of course, the Chinese will have one, and do have one [of current lesser size], so they will have secure satellite digital communications in any future conflict,” he says.

Skyrocketing costs

Although Starlink is a private company, Barry Evans at the University of Surrey, UK, says it was heavily funded for strategic reasons by the US government and even offers a more secure militarised version called Starshield.

“You’ve got governments relying on an individual, which is one of the things that worries Europe,” says Evans. “[Musk] turns it off in various countries at various times. There’s a lot happening and, for the UK, it’s quite worrying because we don’t have the funding, really, to launch our own system.”

Evans says that even Russia and China are well behind Starlink, which has the advantage of being wholly owned by rocket company SpaceX and therefore able to launch its satellites more cheaply and on its own schedule.

Creating these vast networks isn’t a one-off cost, but requires costly maintenance and the continual launch of new satellites to replace older units as they fail or run out of the fuel they need to maintain a stable orbit. Because the UK lacks a launch capability of its own, it would always have to rely on another country to some extent, even if it were to create its own satellite constellation.

Ian Muirhead at the University of Manchester, UK, who served in military communications for over two decades, says that armies once used radio, then later began to deploy what was essentially a temporary mobile phone network when they went into battle, allowing soldiers to communicate over distance.

But as militaries shrank after the cold war, this became prohibitively expensive and difficult, says Muirhead, so militaries began using satellite communications instead. However, doing so relied on small numbers of proprietary satellites and required expensive and bulky hardware on the ground. Starlink offers even greater ability, at far lower cost and complexity, at least on the ground.

Muirhead says it also offers an advantage when space warfare with an adversary is considered. “Because there are lots of them, they can’t just destroy a satellite and call it done – they’re always overhead,” he says.

SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 10, 2026, 12:55 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Start-up is building the first data centre to use human brain cells

Cortical Labs is building two data centres that will house its neuron-filled chips. The technology is still in the very early stages of development

By Alex Wilkins

A small number of companies are working on biological computers

Floriana/Getty Images

Data centres use huge amounts of energy and chips are in high demand – could brain cells be the answer? Australia-based start-up Cortical Labs has announced it is building two “biological” data centres in Melbourne and Singapore, stacked with the same neuron-filled chips that it has demonstrated can play Pong or Doom.

Cortical Labs is one of a few companies developing biological computers, consisting of neuronal cells wired up to microelectrode arrays that can stimulate and measure the response of cells when fed data. Earlier this month, the firm demonstrated that its flagship computer, the CL1, could learn to play the game Doom in a week.

Now, Cortical Labs has revealed two data centres that it plans to build. The first, in Melbourne, will contain around 120 CL1 units. The second, which is being built in collaboration with the National University of Singapore, will house 20 CL1s initially, but the company hopes it will eventually contain 1000 units in a larger data centre, after regulatory approval. Cortical Labs says this will allow it to expand its cloud-based brain-computing service.

Biological computers like the CL1 are being built and tested by research groups around the world, but they are often hard to build and not easy for others to use, says Michael Barros at the University of Essex, UK. “We spend a lot of money and sweat to build these [systems].”

“What [Cortical Labs] is doing is essentially allowing its biocomputer to be accessible at a large scale,” says Barros, who already uses cloud services from Cortical Labs as part of his research. “They’ll be the first ones to do that.”

Though these systems can be trained for relatively simple tasks, like playing Doom, the exact way in which these neurons function and how best to train them to perform tasks like machine learning is still unclear, says Reinhold Scherer, also at the University of Essex. “Having access to this allows you to explore learning, training and programming,” he says. “You don’t program neurons like standard computers.”

Cortical Labs argues that its data centres will also require far less power than typical computing systems, claiming that each CL1 needs around 30 watts, rather than the thousands of watts that a state-of-the-art conventional AI chip requires.

“When we scale up and have these as whole rooms, just like you have now with data servers, then there could be huge power savings,” says Paul Roach at Loughborough University, UK. There are other resources that biological data centres might need, such as nutrients to feed and keep alive the neuronal chips, but it should require far less cooling than conventional computing, he says. “The amount of energy that’s saved with [Cortical Labs’s] figures is fairly conservative.”

However, the technology is still at an early stage, says Tjeerd olde Scheper at Oxford Brookes University, UK, who has worked with a competing biological computing company, FinalSpark. “Is it going to work as people might think? No, we’re still in the early days of this development.”

It is hard to do a direct size comparison, as CL1 chips can’t do conventional calculations like a regular silicon-based AI chip can, but the proposed biological data centre will have hundreds of biological chips, compared with hundreds of thousands of graphics processing units (GPUs) seen in the largest AI data centres.

“I think it is a very long way from production-ready. It’s a very big step from a small network playing a computer game to a large language model, ” says Steve Furber at the University of Manchester, UK.

One of the remaining issues is that it is still unclear how to store the results of training these neurons in a form of memory, or how to run actual computational algorithms on them, rather than training them for specific uses like playing video games.

Another challenge is how to retrain the neurons once they have completed a particular task. “Whatever they are trained on is lost when the culture ends its life, so there needs to be a proper retraining,” says Scherer. “Then it’s not an optimal solution to keep a technology going if you need to retrain every 30 days.”

LIFE | MAR 10, 2026, 8:01 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Orcas may be to blame for some mass dolphin strandings

Two mass strandings involving hundreds of dolphins in Argentina probably happened because the pods were being hunted by orcas, highlighting the role of predators in these mysterious events

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

Common dolphins stranded at low tide in San Antonio Bay, Argentina, in 2023

Sebastián Leal

Hundreds of stranded dolphins in Argentina appear to have become trapped while escaping hungry orcas in a tragic lose-lose situation.

Videos shared on social media and citizen science platforms have helped scientists unravel the mystery behind two deadly mass stranding events in recent years, says Magdalena Arias at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina.

“This doesn’t mean predators are always the cause of mass strandings, but it suggests that predator-prey interactions may sometimes trigger these events – particularly when combined with factors such as coastal geography, tides and the strong social behaviour of dolphins,” says Arias.

Marine mammals have been getting stranded in mass mortality events for millions of years, but scientists still debate why they happen. Possible explanations include human disturbance, toxic algae, infectious diseases, disorientation, overpopulation, natural disasters and group hunting efforts that take a wrong turn.

Some research teams have suggested that stranded pods might have been fleeing from predators. But that is difficult to document, as hunts cover large spaces and last a long time. “Often researchers only see the final result: a group of dolphins stranded on the beach that appear otherwise healthy,” she says.

In the past five years, common dolphins (Delphinus delphis) have been stranded three times in northern Patagonia – something that hadn’t happened previously – prompting Arias and her colleagues to investigate.

The researchers analysed video footage from drone cameras and mobile phones uploaded to the eWHALE citizen science platform and social media sites by tourists, guides, fishers and local residents.

They saw that, in 2021, about 350 dolphins were speeding towards San Antonio Bay in Rio Negro province, Argentina, with a pod of eight orcas (Orcinus orca) about half an hour behind them. At the mouth of the bay, some dolphins headed into the shallow port and lay low and still as if in hiding, while the orcas U-turned back into the sea. The next day, dozens of dolphins were found dead in the port.

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ng7FJGwOD0

Similarly, in 2023, about 570 dolphins raced towards the bay at high speed, followed by a group of orcas. Some of the dolphins rushed into the port, but local authorities and volunteers successfully rescued them after the orcas had turned away.

Necropsies of 38 dead animals from the 2021 event showed they had good body condition and no significant disease or injuries. Their stomachs contained no recent meals – suggesting they weren’t chasing prey. “This makes some of the most common explanations for strandings less likely,” says Arias.

Scientific and lay reports of orca sightings over recent years helped the team establish a chronological map of their presence in the area and revealed two confirmed reports of orcas hunting and killing common dolphins.

The dolphins probably sought refuge in shallow areas that interfere with orcas’ echolocation and movement – but then ended up getting stuck among the sandbanks and tidal channels themselves, says Arias.

Orcas, meanwhile, might deliberately chase dolphins towards bays in an attempt to corner them. In fact, two of the 2021 orcas had been repeatedly sighted using coastal features to trap sea lions, she says.

Prolonged stress and disorientation from the chase might have made the dolphins less likely to find their way back out to sea. Such cases probably occur across the globe and just haven’t been documented yet, says Arias.

“This study highlights the important contribution that citizen science can make to research, and how understanding these processes helps us not only explain mass strandings, but also better understand how marine ecosystems change – and how species respond to those dynamics,” she says.

“This is an interesting and surprising idea,” says Janet Mann at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. “Killer whales do not typically target small delphinids because they are hard to catch, but if they can trap them it might be a more viable strategy.”

Journal reference:

Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.250870

HEALTH | MAR 10, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Sharing genetic risk scores can unwittingly reveal secrets

Statistics that quantify a person’s predisposition to diseases such as diabetes and cancer can be reverse-engineered to reveal the underlying genetic data, prompting privacy concerns

By Frank Swain

Genetic data can be analysed to estimate your risk of certain conditions

Science Photo Library / Alamy

Genetic risk scores that summarise a person’s likelihood of getting certain health conditions can be exploited through mathematical tricks to reveal hidden details about their DNA.

The method could theoretically be used by health insurers to reconstruct genetic data from a summary genomic report, revealing health risks not divulged by the patient. Alternatively, people sharing their scores anonymously could be identified by extracting the genetic data and querying public genealogy databases.

Polygenic risk scores measure the impact of tens to thousands of individual letter variations in the genome, known as single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Used by researchers and DNA testing companies to summarise potential health risks, the scores are sometimes shared publicly, for example, by people asking for advice on interpreting their scores.

Unpacking a polygenic risk score is like trying to work out a phone number knowing only that the digits add up to 52. It’s an example of the knapsack problem in mathematics, known to be computationally difficult. Because of this, the scores are seen as a low privacy risk.

However, each SNP value used in a risk score is multiplied by an extremely precise weight – up to 16 digits long – that reflects its contribution to the overall disease risk. This makes small risk models vulnerable to attack.

“Because the final polygenic risk score is constrained by a finite number of ways you could arrive at that number, and a statistically likely arrangement of the underlying SNPs, it can be deduced with a high degree of accuracy,” says Gamze Gürsoy at Columbia University in New York.

Gürsoy and Kirill Nikitin, also at Columbia, ran 298 polygenic risk models that use 50 SNPs or fewer on genetic data from 2353 individuals. Working backwards, they calculated all the possible genomes that could have produced each given score, filtering out those with many uncommon mutations.

As one SNP may be used by multiple polygenic risk models, Gürsoy and Nikitin were able to daisy-chain their attack, using SNPs revealed by smaller models to help solve larger ones.

They were able to reconstruct the donor genotype with 94.6 per cent accuracy, correctly predicting 2450 SNPs per individual. Tests showed 27 SNPs were enough to identify an individual in a pool of half a million samples, and family members could be predicted with up to 90 per cent precision. Individuals of African and East Asian descent were more easily identified as they are less well-represented in genetic databases.

According to Gürsoy, 447 small, high-precision models in a public database of polygenic scores are vulnerable to this attack.

“We wanted to point out that the risk is low, but under [some conditions], there might still be some leakage,” says Gürsoy. “We should consider this when designing research studies, especially if we are involving vulnerable populations.”

Ying Wang at Massachusetts General Hospital says existing data protections and computational bottlenecks limit the risk of polygenic risk scores being exploited in this way. “The results may serve as a caution that small models should be treated as potentially sensitive data in clinical reporting and informed consent discussions,” she says.

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2026.02.16.706191

SPACE | MAR 10, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Mystery 'whippet' space explosion is the brightest of its kind

A rapidly brightening burst of light called AT 2024wpp, or "the Whippet", is baffling astronomers. One explanation is that it is the result of an exotic star falling into a black hole

By Alex Wilkins

“The Whippet”, as imagined by the New Scientist picture desk

NASA/muratart/Shutterstock/Adobe Stock

A sudden, mysterious burst of bright light in the sky could be from a black hole devouring a vast, unusually bare star.

In 2018, astronomers spotted a new kind of cosmic explosion that became brighter more quickly than any other. The flash, called AT2018cow or “the Cow” for short, took only a few days to reach its peak brightness, rather than the weeks that are required for typical supernovae.

There was no initial obvious explanation for such a burst, and in the years since the Cow was first discovered, we have seen only a handful of other explosions like these, which are collectively called fast blue optical transients (FBOTs). Their origin remains a mystery.

Now, Jialian Liu at Tsinghua University in China and his colleagues think that a recent cosmic flash, which is the brightest of any FBOT so far, must be the result of an exotic star, more than 30 times the mass of our sun, that has lost its outer layers of hydrogen, being feasted on by a black hole.

This explosion, called AT 2024wpp, or “the Whippet”, was first spotted by the Zwicky Transient Observatory at the end of 2024, and quickly became around 10 times brighter than the Cow. Liu and his team then observed the explosion with several different telescopes, including the Swift X-Ray Telescope and the Australia Telescope Compact Array, in the weeks after its initial discovery to build up a complete picture of the different wavelengths of light it produced.

The light’s spectrum suggested that the explosion responsible must have been more than six times hotter than the surface of the sun and blasted out plasma at around a fifth of the speed of light. They also found that around a month after the first burst of light, there was a fresh burst of X-rays, which had never been seen in a previous FBOT.

The best explanation for these observations, Liu and his team argue, is an unusual star called a Wolf-Rayet star, which has an exposed stellar core lacking an outer gas layer. The researchers say that the Whippet is the result of such a star being devoured by a black hole 15 times the mass of the sun.

The initial merger of the two would have produced the first burst of light, while some of the star’s leftover material, which was orbiting the black hole, later fell back towards the black hole, producing the second burst of X-rays. This is a convincing argument for what happened, says Ashley Crimes at the European Space Agency. “Of all the different explanations that have been put forward, this one probably has the least problems.”

One of the most compelling pieces of evidence for this scenario is the fact that the event appears to be coming from a young galaxy, where short-lived extreme stars, like Wolf-Rayet stars, are more common, says Crimes. “These are the kinds of environments that you’d expect to see this kind of event, and then, in addition, you see this bump at late times, which could be material falling back after a merger. It’s promising.”

Journal reference

arXiv DOI: 2602.20523

HUMANS | MAR 10, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Human populations evolved in similar ways after we began farming

An analysis of ancient and modern DNA suggests the extent of convergent evolution in different peoples around the world is even greater than we thought

By Michael Le Page

The advent of farming led to new evolutionary pressures on humans

CHRISTIAN JEGOU/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

A study combining the growing number of ancient genomes with those of living people has given us our best picture yet of how humans have evolved over the past 10,000 years or so. It shows that people in different parts of the world evolved in similar – and sometimes even identical – ways after we adopted farming.

“Some of the same traits and the same genes are under selection in different populations,” says Laura Colbran at the University of Pennsylvania.

Evolution occurs when a genetic variant becomes more common in a population – usually, but not always, because it provides an advantage. By comparing human genomes, then, we can find signs of recent human evolution.

The genomes of long-dead people are especially helpful, says Colbran. “Ancient DNA lets us look at genetic history live, as it were, whereas a lot of other methods tend to try and infer that.”

Studies of recent evolution have focused on Europe because that’s where researchers have collected the most ancient and modern genomes. But Colbran’s team has taken advantage of the growing number of genomes from outside Europe to take a wider look, based on more than 7000 ancient and modern genomes. The ancient genomes mostly come from within the past 10,000 years, while the modern ones are from living people.

The team essentially used the ancient genomes to predict what modern genomes should be like if there were no evolution, and then looked for differences – signals of selection. They found 31 altogether, and many of them were shared – that is, peoples in different parts of the world were evolving in similar ways, most likely because of the independent adoption of farming around the world at around the same time.

For instance, less than a quarter of the most ancient people had a genetic variant that boosts the expression of the FADS1 gene. The FADS1 enzyme converts short fatty acids of a kind common in plants into the longer ones common in meat, so making more of the enzyme is thought to benefit people with more plant-based diets. The FADS1-boosting variant is now present in more than three-quarters of people in Europe, Japan and northern China. In Europe, the strength of selection has remained constant over the past 300 generations, the team found, but in East Asia it has increased over the past 100 generations.

Then there’s the enzyme alcohol dehydrogenase 1B, encoded by the gene ADH1B. It’s well known that a variant of ADH1B that rapidly turns alcohol into acetaldehyde, producing unpleasant symptoms such as facial flushing, has become common in East Asia. It is thought this variant has been selected for because it discourages drinking. “It’s the strongest signal for selection you see in East Asia,” says Colbran.

This variant didn’t exist in ancient Europeans, but her team still found evidence of strong selection involving the ADH1B enzyme. “There’s something that’s changing the amount made, or how it’s responding,” says Colbran. Further work is going to be required to pin down the precise variant involved, and what it does, but it is almost certainly an adaptation to alcohol drinking.

The team even looked at traits that are affected by multiple genetic variants, such as the ratio of a person’s waist to their hips. An increase in the waist-hip ratio is linked to higher fertility, so you might think there would be selection for this.

Instead, the team found that there appears to be strong selection that keeps the female waist-hip ratio within certain parameters. “It is a really interesting one in that we do see stabilising selection,” says Colbran.

The waist-hip ratio does vary in different populations, but the findings suggest there is an optimum value somewhere in the middle, she says. “Population to population, it might shift depending on the precise context.”

It’s an exciting study that includes a lot of ancient DNA that hasn’t been analysed before, says Alexander Gusev at Harvard University. “The authors find that variants under selection in one population are significantly enriched for being under selection in other populations,” Gusev says. “I take this to mean that selection is likely to be parallel across populations. This has been hypothesised but not shown before.”

Yassine Souilmi at the University of Adelaide, Australia, says the team’s approach was able to identify regions of the genome that weren’t known to be under selection before, in addition to previously identified regions. “Their new method takes full advantage of the large amount of ancient DNA available now,” Souilmi says.

The results are the tip of the iceberg, says Colbran. As more genomes are sequenced – especially more non-European ones – we’ll find much more evidence of recent evolution.

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2026.01.07.697984

Discovery Tours: Archaeology, human origins and palaeontology

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ENVIRONMENT | MAR 9, 2026, 3:11 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why is black rain falling on Iran and how dangerous is it?

US-Israeli strikes on oil facilities have caused black rain to fall on Tehran, but the black smoke filling the air is likely to be a bigger health risk

By Alec Luhn

Black smoke rises after fires broke out following US-Israel attacks targeting oil storage facilities in Tehran, Iran, on 8 March

Fatemeh Bahrami/Anadolu via Getty Images

The skies in northern Iran were dark with smoke on 8 March as the US and Israeli bombing campaign against the country continued, and black rain even fell on the capital Tehran.

The catastrophic scenes have raised concerns about threats to civilian health in Iran and other countries.

What happened?

Overnight on 7 and 8 March, US-Israeli strikes hit Iran’s oil facilities for the first time since the war started a little over a week ago, igniting large fires in four oil storage facilities and an oil transfer centre in Tehran and the nearby Alborz province.

Flames loomed over Tehran in the night, and black smoke billowed over the city during the day. Soot covered the streets and cars and filled up people’s balconies. Most alarmingly, thick black raindrops fell onto roofs and streets in the capital, which until recently was experiencing a long drought.

The authorities warned of acid rain, and local people complained of their throats aching and their eyes burning.

The black rain was probably caused by the smoke from the oil facility fires. When precipitation falls through such polluted air, it can wash soot and other particles out of the smoke and carry them to the ground in the form of black raindrops.

That could have serious environmental and health impacts, but scientists are missing key details, starting with the chemical composition of the smoke, says Anna Hansell at the University of Leicester in the UK.

What’s in the black rain?

Unlike burning petrol in your car, much of the oil would probably have been thicker and less refined, and the combustion process would have been much less thorough. As a result, smoke from the fires could have carried aloft a hugely varied mix of burnt and unburnt particles, most of which would be harmful to humans if ingested in large enough amounts.

“It’s going to be quite a nasty toxic moisture,” says Hansell.

First of all, the smoke would have contained partially and fully burnt carbon, or soot, as well as polyaromatic hydrocarbons. Oil also contains sulphur and nitrogen, which, when combusted, forms sulphur and nitrogen oxides. Those can react with moisture in the air to form acid rain.

These substances are probably creating a smog that’s even thicker than the smog that blanketed London in much of the 20th century, most infamously in 1952. “This is potentially several orders of magnitude larger than the London smog,” says Hansell.

Because missiles were hitting buildings, the smoke is probably carrying tiny particles of materials like concrete, glass and plastics as well. Finally, the explosions may be throwing droplets of oil into the air that are then raining out.

“I’m not clear if the blackness is solely caused by burning diesel, where you get this sort of greasy black smoke that’s being carried in the raindrops, or whether you’ve actually got some very small droplets of oil as well,” says Hansell.

Will it be harmful to people?

If black rain gets into the water supply and people drink it, it could cause gastrointestinal symptoms, depending on its quantity and chemical make-up. People could experience stomachaches, heartburn or diarrhoea.

More worryingly, if nitrogen and sulphur dioxide are forming acid rain, that could irritate the eyes and throat, similar to what some residents have already reported.

But the biggest threat may be the smoke rather than the black rain. Simply inhaling large amounts of small particles can severely impact health, while the specific chemical composition is often a secondary concern.

“If you get raindrops on your skin, yes, there will be some potentially carcinogenic compounds on your skin, but you can wash that off,” says Hansell. “If they get into your nose and mouth, they might persist for longer, but very fine smoke particles in the air can penetrate deep into the lungs and potentially get into the bloodstream.”

High levels of particles in the lungs can raise all-cause mortality and cause a variety of conditions such as cardiovascular disease, lung cancer, chronic lung disease and diabetes.

The bioaccumulation of toxins in the environment could also contaminate fish, farm animals and crops, potentially causing long-term health problems.

Could it threaten other countries?

Oil droplets and larger particles tend to fall out of the atmosphere relatively quickly. But small particles can travel hundreds or even thousands of kilometres on the wind, such as dust particles from the Sahara that are currently reaching the UK. Particles lofted by the Iran strikes could even potentially reach Washington DC, although they would probably be in very low concentrations at that point.

But smoke from the fires is more likely to reach other parts of Iran and countries in the Middle East, depending on the wind and atmospheric conditions.

People in Iran should minimise their exposure by staying indoors, Hansell advises. If they do go outside, they should wear a face mask of some sort and goggles to keep acid rain from getting into their eyes.

They should find a different water source, such as bottled water, if they detect a funny taste or black particles in their drinking water.

People abroad can be on the lookout for similar signs, but health authorities in other countries are likely to issue an alert if winds are delivering particles from Iran in large quantities.

“Any large-scale environmental damage that you do like this, it doesn’t recognise borders, so what’s going into the water system, what’s going into the air, it’s going to be carried elsewhere,” says Hansell.

Technology

- The 3 things you need to know about passwords, from a security expert (paid): 2026 Mar 13

- How an intern helped build the AI that shook the world (paid): 2026 Mar 7

- The moment that kicked off the AI revolution (paid): 2026 Mar 7

COMMENT TECHNOLOGY | MAR 13, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The 3 things you need to know about passwords, from a security expert

There are a few simple things you can do to make your digital life much more secure, says cybersecurity expert Jake Moore - follow these tips to tighten up your passwords

By Jake Moore

Passwords are both a curse and a blessing

tete_escape/Shutterstock

Passwords occupy an odd place in our lives. They’re both a blessing – keeping our data and information safe from anyone intruding into our IT systems and accessing them – and a curse, in that they’re often difficult to manage and tricky to remember. Cybersecurity expert Jake Moore at ESET, a European cybersecurity firm, is here with three tips to help you rethink your relationship with passwords – and hopefully keep hackers at bay.

1. Use a password manager, even if it feels counterintuitive

I’m a big fan of password managers, and I think they’re wildly underused. Depending on where you are in the world, and who’s doing the study, only around one-third of people use password managers. That to me seems a criminally low number. They’re a gamechanger. They give you the ability to create long passwords for your account and to store them securely. They’re so good at generating the passwords for you, you don’t have to think of one.

That’s important because we know that when people are asked to come up with their own passwords, they tend to rely on things or words they know – all of which could be information a hacker or bad actor could have on you, and could make you vulnerable. They also nullify another big risk, which is people reusing passwords across accounts. If a password is used by someone else, even just one person, and that person’s account is breached, it can end up in the tables of vulnerable passwords that are used to try and probe and test getting access to accounts.

I sometimes wonder why people don’t use password managers more. It might be that they misunderstand how password managers work, thinking that storing passwords online somewhere that can be unlocked with a single password is insecure. But it’s not. The vault in which the passwords are stored isn’t just a simple list of passwords sitting on a server: your data is encrypted on your device with a strong key derived from your master password, and what’s stored online is the scrambled cipher text, which even the password manager provider can’t read without that key.

2. Multi-factor authentication is an absolute must

Even with the strongest password in the world – and national cybersecurity agencies recommend that a combination of between 14 and 16 different characters is enough to dissuade drive-by attacks – it’s still possible to fall victim to hackers. Multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds a layer of friction for hackers to make sure that any login you make is approved by you, the user.

It’s an extra layer of security, such as a code to your phone. It can be done via SMS text message, but that’s not as a secure as the other levels. Authenticator apps are to me a wonderful next level in MFA, and it’s a shame people aren’t forced to use it. If we think about Instagram, for example, they only inform once you hit 10,000 followers about the need to use MFA. It’s as if they’re thinking, ‘Well, if we enforce it at 10,000 followers, they’re going to do it because they don’t want to lose their 10,000 followers. But if we enforce them to do that at signup, when they have zero followers, they might get bogged down by it and not open an account.’ That to me is absurd.

We shouldn’t be putting people’s ease of use ahead of security, and until we enforce it, we will still see people frantically worried about their social media accounts or any of their accounts being compromised. So turn on MFA wherever it is offered.

3. Where you can, avoid passwords entirely

Passwords are far from perfect – and handily, there’s a more modern, secure alternative that’s being adopted with increasing pace. We’re moving towards a passwordless society, and that’s a move in the right direction.

This alternative is passkeys, and the beauty of them is they remove a lot of the human error from the equation. Instead of typing in a password, you sign in using your device or a secure key stored on your phone, often with a fingerprint. Behind the scenes, cryptographic keys do the hard work, but the user doesn’t see that – it stays simple. The simplicity is why they’re such a gamechanger: they take away the temptation to reuse an old password or add a predictable number on the end of something familiar.

In some ways, they’re too easy. When I talk to people they’re suspicious of passkeys because they seem too simple. If it feels simple for them, they assume it must be simple for a criminal too. But that’s not how it works – the tech behind the scenes is working far harder than you need to.

Passkeys aren’t yet available everywhere, and there are still pain points, especially if you lose a device. But overall, passkeys are a major step forward because they remove one of the oldest and weakest links in security – the password itself.

As told to Chris Stokel-Walker

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 7, 2026, 1:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

How an intern helped build the AI that shook the world

Chris Maddison was just an intern when he started working on the Go-playing AI that would eventually become AlphaGo. A decade later, he talks about that match against Lee Sedol and what came next

By Alex Wilkins

AlphaGo’s victory braodcast on TV

Im Hun-jung/Yonhap/AP Photo via Getty Images

In March 2016, Google DeepMind’s artificial intelligence system AlphaGo shocked the world. In a stunning five-match series of Go, the ancient Chinese board game, the AI beat the world’s best player, Lee Sedol – a moment that was televised in front of millions and hailed by many as a historic moment in the development of artificial intelligence.

Chris Maddison, now a professor of artificial intelligence at the University of Toronto, was then a master’s student and helped get the project off the ground. It all began when Ilya Sutskever, who later went on to found OpenAI, got in touch…

Alex Wilkins: How did the idea for AlphaGo first come about?

Chris Maddison: Ilya [Sutskever] gave me the following argument for why we should be working on Go. He said, Chris, do you think when an expert player looks at the Go board, they can pick the best move in half a second? If you think they can, then that means that you can learn a pretty good policy to pick the best move using a neural net.

The reason is that half a second is about the time it takes for your visual cortex to do one forward pass [a round of processing], and we already knew from ImageNET [an important AI image-recognition competition] that we’re pretty good at approximating things that only take one forward pass of your visual cortex.

I bought that argument, so I decided to join [Google Brain] as an intern in the summer of 2014.

How did AlphaGo develop from there?

When I joined, there was another little team at DeepMind that I was going to work with, which was Aja Huang and David Silver, that had started working on Go. It was basically my charge to start building the neural networks. It was a dream.

There were a bunch of different approaches that we tried, and a lot of the initial things we tried failed. Eventually, I just got frustrated and tried the dumbest, simplest thing, which was to try to predict the next move that an expert would make in a given board position, training a neural network on a big corpus of expert games. And that turned out to be the approach that really got us off the ground.

By the end of the summer, we hosted a little match with DeepMind’s Thore Graepel, who considered himself a decent Go player, and my networks beat him. DeepMind then started to be convinced that this was going to be a real thing and started putting resources towards it and building a big team around it.

How difficult of a challenge was it seen beating Lee Sedol?

I remember in the summer of 2014, we practically had Lee Sedol’s portrait on our desk next to us. I’m not a Go player, but Aja [Huang] is. Every time I would build a new network, it would get a little bit better, and I would turn to Aja and I’d say, OK, we’re a little bit better, how close are we to Lee Sedol? And Aja would turn to me and say, Chris, you don’t understand. Lee Sedol is one stone from God.

You left the AlphaGo team before the big event. Why?

David [Silver] said we’d like to keep you on and really drive this project to the next level, and, in retrospect, this was maybe one of the stupider decisions I made, I turned him down. I said I think I need to focus on my PhD, I’m an academic at heart. I went back to my PhD and loosely consulted with the project from that point on. I’m a little proud to say it took them a while to beat my neural networks. But then, ultimately, the artefact that played Lee Sedol was the product of a big engineering effort and a big team.

What was the atmosphere like in Seoul when AlphaGo won?

Being there in Seoul at that moment was hard to express. It was emotional. It was intense. There was a sense of anxiety. You go in confident, but you never know. It’s like a sports game. Statistically speaking, you’re the better player, but you never know how it’s going to shake out. I remember being in the hotel where we played the matches and looking out the window. We were at a high-enough level that you could look out onto one of the major city intersections. I realised there was a big screen, sort of like Times Square, that was showing our match. And then I looked along the sidewalks, and people were just lined up standing looking at the screen. I had heard numbers like hundreds of millions of people in China watched the first game, but I remember that moment as like, oh God, we’ve really stopped East Asia in its tracks.

How important has AlphaGo been for AI more generally?

A lot has changed on a surface level about the world of large language models (LLMs), they are now quite different in some ways from AlphaGo, but actually there’s an underlying technological thread that really hasn’t changed.

So the first part of the algorithm is to train a neural network to predict the next move. Today’s LLMs begin with what we call pretraining to predict the next word, from a big corpus of human text found largely on the internet.

For the second step in AlphaGo, we took the information from that human corpus that was compressed into these neural networks, and we refined it using reinforcement learning, to align the behaviour of the system towards the goal of winning games.

When you learn to predict an expert’s next move, they are trying to win, but that’s not the only thing that explains the next move. Perhaps they don’t understand what the best move is, perhaps they made a mistake, so you need to align the overall system with your true goal, which in the case of AlphaGo was winning.

In large language models, it’s the same after pretraining. The networks are not aligned with how we want to use them, and so we do a series of reinforcement learning steps that align the networks with our goals.

In some ways, not much has changed.

Does it tell us anything about where we can expect AIs to succeed?

It has consequences in terms of what we choose to focus on. If you’re worried about making progress on important problems, the key bottlenecks that you should be worried about are do you have enough data to do pretraining, and do you have reward signals to do post-training. If you don’t have those ingredients, there’s no amount of clever – you know, this algorithm versus that algorithm – that’s going to get you off the ground.

Did you feel any sympathy for Lee Sedol?

Lee Sedol had been this idol over the summer of 2014, this unachievable milestone. To then suddenly be there in person, watching the matches, his stress, his anxiety, his realisation that this was a much worthier opponent than maybe he had thought going in, that was very stressful. You don’t want to put someone in that position. When he lost the match, he apologised to humanity, and said, “This is my failing, not yours.” That was tragic.

There is also a custom in Go to review the match with your opponent. Someone wins or loses, but you review the match at the end, unwind the game and explore variations with each other. Lee Sedol couldn’t do that because AlphaGo wasn’t human, so instead he had his friends come in and review the match, but it’s just not the same. There felt something heartbreaking about that.

But I didn’t appreciate all the man-versus-machine narratives around the match, because a team of people built AlphaGo. That was the effort of a tribe building an artefact that could achieve excellence in a human game. It was ultimately the artefact that all our blood, sweat and tears went into.

Do you think there is still a place for humans in the world as AI accomplishes more human thinking work?

We are learning more about the game of Go, and if we think that game is beautiful, which we do, and AIs can teach us more about that beauty, there’s a lot of inherent good in that as well. There’s a difference between goals and purposes. The goal of the game of Go is to win, but that’s not its only purpose – one purpose is to have fun. Board games are not destroyed by the presence of AI; chess is a thriving industry. We still appreciate the intrigue and the human achievement of that sport.

TECHNOLOGY | MAR 7, 2026, 1:00 AM EST | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The moment that kicked off the AI revolution

It's been 10 years since Go champion Lee Sedol lost to DeepMind's AlphaGo. Has the technology lived up to its potential?

By Alex Wilkins

Lee Sedol faced AlphaGo in 2016

AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon/Alamy

The first time that AlphaGo revealed its full power, it prompted a visceral reaction. Lee Sedol, the world’s greatest player of the ancient Chinese board game Go, had grown visibly agitated at the artificial intelligence’s prowess. The hushed crowd in downtown Seoul, South Korea, could barely contain its gasps. It was quickly dawning on Lee, and the tens of millions watching at home, that this AI was different to those that had come before.

It wasn’t just beating Lee, but it was doing so with an almost human-like aptitude. “AlphaGo actually does have an intuition,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told New Scientist in 2016, shortly after AlphaGo went 3-0 up. “It makes beautiful moves. It even creates more beautiful moves than most of us could think of.”

The series ended with Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo system winning 4-1. Lee said he was “in shock”.

It is now a decade since this defining moment for AlphaGo and AI at large. Marvelling at AI is a commonplace experience with the success of large language models like ChatGPT. AlphaGo was, in many ways, our first glimpse at what was to come. Ten years on, what is the legacy of AlphaGo and has the technology lived up to its potential?

“Large language models are now quite different in some ways from AlphaGo, but there’s actually an underlying technological thread that really hasn’t changed,” says Chris Maddison at the University of Toronto, who was part of the original AlphaGo team.

That underlying technology is neural networks – mathematical structures inspired by the brain and written into code. Historically, creating a game-playing machine would involve a human writing down the rules it should follow in different situations. With a neural network, the machine learns by itself.

But even with a neural network, cracking Go was a tall order. The ancient Chinese game, which sees two players moving black and white counters to gain territory on a 19-by-19 board, allows for 10^171 possible positions. By comparison, there are only 10^80 atoms in the entire observable universe.

The breakthrough came from Maddison and his colleagues trying to recreate the intuition of a human player by training a neural network to predict the next strongest move based on millions of moves from real games. Human players, of course, wouldn’t need to play so many games to build up their intuition, but they also never could – a distinct advantage for AI.

AlphaGo also wasn’t restricted to learning from human players; it could play millions of games against itself to hone its skills. “By learning through these games, it could discover new knowledge and could go beyond human-level players,” says Pushmeet Kohli at Google DeepMind.

The final system that beat Lee was more complex than Maddison’s early models but the overarching message was simple: neural networks worked. “AlphaGo definitively showed that neural nets can do pattern recognition better than humans. They can essentially have intuition that surpasses humans,” says Noam Brown at OpenAI.

Other alphas

So what happened next? After AlphaGo, Google DeepMind and AI researchers set to applying that fundamental lesson to real-world applications, like in mathematics and biology. One of the most striking examples of this was AlphaFold, an AI that could predict how proteins would look in three-dimensional space from their chemical make-up far better than any human-designed program, and which won the team behind it the Nobel prize in chemistry.

More recently, another neural network-based AI, AlphaProof, performed at a gold medal-level in the International Mathematical Olympiad, a prestigious maths test for students, stunning mathematicians. “Not only can you get this beyond-human-level intelligence in a game, but you can get that experience in important scientific applications,” says Kohli.

The logic behind both the AlphaGo-style of AI and that used for large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT is similar. The first step, called pretraining, involves feeding a neural network a large amount of human data, such as complete Go games, or the entire internet in the case of and an LLM. The second step, called post-training, then sees the network improve through a technique called reinforcement learning, which shows an AI what success looks like and lets it figure out how to achieve it.

For AlphaGo, this meant letting it play against itself millions of times until it found out the best winning strategies. For AlphaFold, it was about telling the AI what a successfully folded protein looked like and letting it figure out the rules. For ChatGPT, it’s telling the model which answers people like better, a process called reinforcement learning from human feedback, or giving it a solution to a defined problem, such as in maths or coding, and letting it work out how best to “reason” towards a solution by feeding its output back to itself, akin to how humans think out loud.

But this comes with drawbacks too. Neural networks are, in many ways, a black box. Despite efforts to find out how they work, many of them are too large and complex to understand at a basic level.

When AlphaGo made its now famous move 37, spectators initially thought the AI had gone mad, but it was only as the game progressed that it was clear it was a strategic masterstroke. However, Google DeepMind’s engineers couldn’t ask AlphaGo why it had made that move, and it could have just as easily been a mistake, which we would equally have been none the wiser about its reasoning for.

“These models will come up with answers and we will not know whether they are genius insights or hallucinations,” says Kohli. “We are still all actively working on trying to resolve those sorts of questions.”

A large part of AlphaGo’s achievement was that there was abundant data to initially feed the model and a clear definition of success. It makes sense, then, that the areas that AI is having the most success today are in fields where both of those conditions are also true, says Maddison, such as mathematics and programming, where it is easy to define, and verify, what is correct or incorrect. “The similarities between these approaches are telling us something, and it’s telling us what are the raw necessary ingredients for progress.”

Space

- What is a galaxy? That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer (paid): 2026 Mar 10

- SETI may have missed alien signals because of space weather (paid): 2026 Mar 9

COLUMNIST SPACE | MAR 10, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

What is a galaxy? That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer

Figuring out what really counts as a galaxy could give us insights into dark matter and potentially shake up astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics, says columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

The globular cluster NGC 1850 lies inside the Large Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy of the Milky Way

Copyright: NASA, ESA and P. Goudfrooij (Space Telescope Science Institute); Processing: Gladys Kober (NASA/Catholic University of America)

When is a collection of stars just a collection of stars and when is it a galaxy? This sounds like a nerdy joke or riddle of some kind, but it is instead an actual scientific question that the astronomy community is struggling over.

Those of us who aren’t professional stargazers are so used to thinking of galaxies as easy-to-identify, complete objects, almost like finished works of art. When I use telescopes in my backyard to look at galaxies, I see spirals emitting the bright light of billions of stars – in some cases 100 billion of them or more. From my own research as a theoretical particle cosmologist, I know that these galaxies are permeated and surrounded by an invisible halo of dark matter that extends well beyond their visible regions. From my graduate training, I also know that not all galaxies have a spiral shape. Some of them are ellipticals, shaped like spheres that have been squished from the top. With this point of view, the question of what a galaxy is feels very straightforward.

But, as I wrote a few columns ago, how we organise our understanding of galaxies is always a work in progress. For example, while it is easy to categorise something that has a clear spiral structure and billions of stars, what about something that looks spheroidal and has millions of stars? Is that a galaxy? Actually, what I have just described is the basic definition of a globular cluster. These are collections – jumbles, if you will – of between tens of thousands and millions of stars that are gravitationally bound in a formation that is just a few light years across. Importantly, they live inside galaxies.

The fact that globular clusters are only found inside galaxies would seem to suggest they are obviously a distinct cosmic phenomenon from galaxies themselves. Besides, globular clusters are compact and galaxies are diffuse, more spread out across space. This is true even in the case of dwarf spheroidal galaxies that are gravitationally bound to the Milky Way. They are smaller than our galaxy, but still, relatively speaking, big and spread out. They also tend to have a more diverse range of stars, while globular clusters are comprised of more homogeneous populations. We also now know that dwarf spheroidals are contained in their own dark matter halos, while globular clusters aren’t.

Imagine a nesting doll of galaxies surrounded by dark matter. There is the Milky Way, with one big halo, and then smaller dwarf spheroidals in their own little sub-halos inside of it. That is the general picture at work here. In fact, for some astronomers, this is the thing that really separates the two categories: to be a galaxy is to be full of dark matter.

Until around 2005, this boundary seemed to work well, but then the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) released its first dataset. The SDSS, tasked with scanning over a quarter of the night sky, was cataloguing a plethora of never-before-seen objects. Within that data, astronomers found observations of very faint, hard-to-see collections of stars near the Milky Way. These ultra-faint Milky Way satellites challenged the narrative that it is easy to distinguish between globular clusters and galaxies.

In some cases, follow-up observations made clear that the cosmic object in question was indeed a galaxy, chock full of dark matter. That work continues and isn’t always straightforward. Their inherent faintness makes these satellites an observational challenge. These confusing objects are said to live in a “trough of uncertainty”, as Blair Conn, then at the Australian National University in Canberra, and his colleagues called it in a 2018 paper. They aren’t obviously galaxies, but they aren’t obviously not galaxies.

Ursa Major III contains just 60 stars

CFHT/UNIONS/S.Gwyn

Though we may have expected more data to shrink the trough of uncertainty, in some ways it has deepened. Recent sky surveys have muddied the waters further by revealing a population of even more faint objects, and we now know better than to presume that they aren’t galaxies. And we aren’t all in agreement about what is what: for example, a 2023 paper from a team led by Simon Smith at the University of Victoria in Canada declared the discovery of Ursa Major III, which the researchers called “the least luminous known satellite of the Milky Way”. As confident as this declaration may be, the authors face something of a battle making their case because observations count only 60 stars in the galaxy! That isn’t a typo – 60, not 60,000, 60 million or 60 billion. Just 60.

Small as Ursa Major III might be, it could have a big impact. Last year, a research team claimed that if it is indeed a galaxy, then it can be used to rule out a class of dark matter models. Figuring out whether Ursa Major III and other compact, ultra-faint Milky Way satellites like it are actually galaxies thus has the potential to shake up astrophysics, cosmology and particle physics.

Progress is being made on this question. Last month, William Cerny at Yale University and his colleagues published a report containing the first extensive investigation of a large group of these objects. Their conclusion? They are a mix of types, but more observations are needed. I have nothing certain to tell you about what we know, which is an exciting place to land. Our current position is mid-research excitement, the part where we stand at the edge of what we know and push past it.

What are you reading?

Poets, especially Cortney Lamar Charleston’s collection It’s Important I Remember and Camonghne Felix’s manifesto Let the Poets Govern.

What are you watching?

Too much Alfred Hitchcock!

What are you working on?

I’m getting ready for the US launch of my book The Edge of Space-Time on 7 April!

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and astronomy at the University of New Hampshire. She is the author of The Disordered Cosmos and the forthcoming book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, poetry, and the cosmic dream boogie

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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SPACE | MAR 9, 2026, 7:26 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

SETI may have missed alien signals because of space weather

SETI has spent decades listening for a sharp, well-defined radio signal that could indicate it was sent by distant intelligent life. Now researchers believe that space weather could distort and blur such signals – meaning SETI has been scanning for the wrong thing

By Matthew Sparkes

Is there anyone out there?

NASA/SDO

We may have been missing signals from intelligent aliens because of solar wind. Researchers from the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute say this means we have been watching for the wrong type of signal, potentially failing to spot promising evidence of extraterrestrial life, but the chances of a future discovery are now higher.

The not-for-profit organisation carries out research to help prove the existence of alien life, which includes listening for extraterrestrial radio signals that cannot be explained by natural cosmological phenomena.

Such a signal was previously expected to be a sharp, distinct radio signal in a narrow frequency range. But the new research suggests that such signals that are sent from distant planets may end up being made fainter and wider in the frequency band – essentially blurred slightly – as they pass through the plasma winds of stars.

Vishal Gajjar and Grayce Brown at the SETI Institute calculated the scale of the effect on radio transmissions from spacecraft in our own solar system, then extrapolated that to other stellar environments. They found that a 100 megahertz signal could be widened as much as 100 hertz – enough to “fall below traditional detection thresholds“. A space weather event can similarly increase the amount of broadening experienced by a signal by several orders of magnitude.

Simon George at the SETI Institute says that there is also increasing consensus that looking for narrow radio broadcasts accidentally beamed through space is not the way to spot distant life. “The idea that an intelligent civilisation would send out such signals is becoming dated, especially when you look at how communications and so forth have evolved since the 1960s,” he says. “There has been a dramatic move towards broadband and spread-spectrum techniques as these can carry far more information.”

“One way to view this is to treat Earth like an exoplanet being viewed by an alien civilisation, a theme I often hear around SETI,” says George. “The point is, while Earth was a strong narrowband source in the 1960s, it is much less so now with a continuing downward trend. Of course, if an intelligent civilisation was intentionally sending out a beacon which is designed to be obvious and easy to detect, either for a ‘we are here’ message or some other alien purpose, then that is a different story.”

John Elliott at the University of St Andrews, UK, says he chooses to see the news as the glass being half-full, rather than half-empty: it means previous searches may have missed evidence, but also means that future searches will be more likely to succeed.

“It’s over 50 years that we’ve been actively researching and that’s a blink of the eye, isn’t it, when you think about it,” says Elliott. He says that it’s not just the distortion of signals that hampered previous searches, but inadequate technology to spot and extract signals from the noise – something which is changing as computing power and AI becomes more powerful. “Up until recently, we really haven’t had the equipment, the computing power, to do anything really significant. We’ve been grappling around a bit in the dark,” he says. “Project it forward another 1000 years, which is just another heartbeat, can you imagine what our technology is going to be like? It’s going to be magic.”

Eric Atwell at the University of Leeds, UK, was involved with SETI around the turn of the millennium, and quantifies the discovery as perhaps raising a 0.0001 per cent chance of finding an alien signal to 0.0002 per cent.

“It’s still a very low likelihood,” he says. “I don’t think they’ve wasted their time. They have been trying things, and they’ve got pretty strong evidence that what they’re trying doesn’t work, because they haven’t found anything yet.

“What they’re doing is trying to detect strange signals which can’t be put down to known astronomical features, but that’s still a pretty hit-or-miss way of finding intelligent life,” says Atwell.

He is sceptical that passively waiting for telltale evidence of life, accidentally broadcast, is the correct approach if we want to eventually talk to aliens. “If there really are aliens out there, and they want us to find them, they would send us a much more explicit signal,” he says.

Other groups, such as the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence (METI) organisation, have a different approach to finding alien life. They plan to actively broadcast signals to other planets, in case distant life is listening out for signals as we do.

Journal reference

The Astrophysical Journal DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/ae3d33

Humans

- We’ve only just confirmed that Homo habilis really existed (paid): 2026 Mar 9

- The first apes to walk upright may have evolved in Europe (paid): 2026 Mar 9

COLUMNIST HUMANS | MAR 9, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

We’ve only just confirmed that Homo habilis really existed

Their species name is well known, but until recently we’ve understood very little for certain about Homo habilis. Columnist Michael Marshall reveals what new fossils are telling us about the hominins that have been considered the first humans

By Michael Marshall

Homo habilis lived in East Africa up to 2 million years ago

Natural History Museum, London/Alamy

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.

Homo habilis is a paradoxical species. On the one hand, they have a famous name and hold the status of being the first members of our genus Homo: the first humans, if you like. On the other hand, we have never known that much about them, and what we do know is kind of weird. How can a species be simultaneously well known and little known?

We have to start with the name, if only because it’s one of the few things we can be sure about. The species was given its moniker in 1964 by a trio of palaeoanthropologists: Louis Leakey, Phillip Tobias and John Napier. Though, as they acknowledged, it wasn’t their idea – their colleague Raymond Dart had suggested “habilis” from the Latin for “able, handy, mentally skilful, vigorous”.

They applied the name to a collection of bones and teeth they had found in Olduvai/Oldupai gorge in Tanzania, East Africa. The remains were rather miscellaneous: a lower jaw with teeth, an upper molar, skull bones called parietals and some hand bones. The trio interpreted them as belonging to a single juvenile individual.

Crucially, the researchers asserted that Homo habilis were the makers of Oldowan stone tools, which had been found in the locality. By saying this, they made the broader claim that making tools was a defining feature of the genus Homo. Less “human-like” hominins such as Australopithecus probably didn’t make tools, but Homo habilis and their ever-brainier descendants did, and that was what marked them as special.

That is a lot of interpretation to put on a handful of fossils, but let’s be forgiving. Very few hominin fossils were known at the time and Leakey and his colleagues were doing their best with what they had.

Over the following 62 years, researchers found more fossils that they assigned to H. habilis. However, the additional remains haven’t clarified our understanding of the species. On the contrary, H. habilis has languished.

“It’s what they call a wastebasket taxon,” says Ian Tattersall at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. “Whenever [researchers] found something that they weren’t quite sure what it was, they just chucked it into Homo habilis. And so pretty soon, Homo habilis became a rather unwieldy assemblage of stuff that you would find it very difficult to define.”

So, can we make sense of this crucial species and its place in our origins?

A new find

This has all become relevant again because a new H. habilis specimen has come to light. It was excavated in 2012 and 2014 from the Koobi Fora Formation at Ileret, Kenya. Researchers led by Frederick Grine at Stony Brook University in New York and Ashley Hammond at the Catalan Institute of Palaeontology Miquel Crusafont in Barcelona described the remains in The Anatomical Record on 13 January. Grine and Hammond were unable to talk to me, but Tattersall published a commentary on the find on 24 January and we talked on the phone (both of us struggling with the worst connection ever).

The new specimen is the most complete H. habilis ever found. It includes a collarbone (clavicle), fragments of the shoulder blade (scapula), both upper arm bones (humerus), both of each of the two lower arm bones (ulna and radius) and fragments of the base of the spine (sacrum) and hip bone (os coxae).

There’s still a lot missing: the head, ribcage, spine, hands, legs and feet. But it’s enough to figure out a lot about H. habilis.

The most obvious thing is that H. habilis had relatively long arms. One of the big trends in human evolution is for arms to become shorter: our ape cousins have long arms, relative to their legs, whereas our arms are decidedly shorter. Compared with other Homo species like Homo erectus, H. habilis had long arms.

For Tattersall, this is evidence that H. habilis was still spending a fair bit of time in trees, where long arms are an advantage. Before Homo, earlier hominins like Australopithecus seem to have lived hybrid lifestyles where they spent some time in trees and some time walking on two legs on the ground. “It’s a way of life that has no equivalent in the contemporary world, but obviously it was a very successful one for a long time,” he says. Whereas later Homo species like H. erectus were pretty committed to bipedal walking on the ground, H. habilis still had one foot in the trees.

The skeleton also suggests that H. habilis was fairly slight. The researchers estimated that the individual stood about 160 centimetres tall yet weighed just 30 to 33 kilograms. That’s smaller than most H. erectus specimens, again marking H. habilis as distinct.

There are still lots of things we don’t know. We have very little information about the diet of H. habilis or their social dynamics and group size. It’s also unclear how long the species was around for or how widespread they were.

Still, it does seem like H. habilis’s days of being a wastebasket taxon might be over.

An identity

In his commentary, Tattersall lists the fossils that have been assigned to H. habilis over the past six decades. They include a fragmentary skeleton and cranium from East Turkana in Kenya, a fragmentary skeleton and palate from Olduvai, another palate from Hadar in Ethiopia, a partial lower jawbone from Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia and a single cranium from Sterkfontein in South Africa.

Tattersall calls these fossils a “motley assortment”, and he’s not wrong. There are few H. habilis bones that we have more than one copy of, so we can’t be confident that the ones we have are representative.

This has led to decades of uncertainty. Some of the purported H. habilis fossils might not belong to the species, or even the Homo genus. In particular, the South African one is widely thought to be an Australopithecus, suggesting H. habilis only lived in East Africa.

Some researchers have even argued that the entire species is a sort of mirage: a bunch of bits and pieces of late Australopithecus and early Homo, lumped together for no good reason.

The new specimen suggests we can rule out this most extreme possibility and accept most of the purported specimens. Incomplete as it is, “it seems to have the basic characteristics of most of the other skeletons that have been called Homo habilis”, says Tattersall. Those isolated bits and pieces do, on the whole, match the more complete skeleton.

Olduvai gorge in Tanzania

Yakov Oskanov/Alamy

That’s not to say this clears it all up. Tattersall says everything above the neck is still a bit of a mystery: “The skulls and the teeth make up a rather odd assemblage when you put them all together.” Since the new skeleton doesn’t include anything from the head, it doesn’t help us sort out which ones belong together.

The timeline and range of H. habilis also need clearing up. “Homo habilis is something that we now know, thanks to the new specimen, was around, at least in Tanzania and Kenya, between about 1.8 and 2 million years ago,” says Tattersall.

It’s possible the species was around earlier or later, but that’s less clear. The oldest claimed specimen is a partial lower jawbone from Ledi-Geraru in Ethiopia, dated to 2.8 million years ago. “In my view, it’s not Homo habilis,” says Tattersall. Even though it seems to be more closely related to Homo than to Australopithecus, that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily H. habilis, he says. Tattersall suggests that the group that gave rise to Homo was emerging around that time.

This means it’s an open question whether H. habilis was really the first member of the Homo genus. It used to look like Homo erectus (African specimens of which are sometimes called Homo ergaster) only emerged later. However, recent fossil finds have pushed the species back in time: we now have specimens of H. erectus from at least 1.85 million years ago and even 2 million years ago. Combine that with the uncertainties around the H. habilis fossil record and it’s not obvious which species is older.

Ultimately, what all this means is that the origin of our genus is still something of a mystery. We have fossils that are telling us something about it, but we can’t be quite sure what they’re saying. The “simple” narrative is that a group of Australopithecus evolved into H. habilis and some of those later evolved into H. erectus (aka H. ergaster). But maybe there were a lot of Homo species living in parallel, right from the off. Or maybe something else happened.

If that seems a bit unsatisfying, just remember: we now know that Homo habilis was probably real. Last year, that wasn’t obvious.

Discovery Tours: Archaeology, human origins and palaeontology

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HUMANS | MAR 9, 2026, 8:07 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The first apes to walk upright may have evolved in Europe

A single femur found in Bulgaria appears to represent an ape or early hominin that walked on two legs before any known African hominin, but the evidence is far from conclusive

By Michael Marshall

Illustration of Graecopithecus freybergi, an ape that lived 7.2 million years ago in south-eastern Europe

Velizar Simeonovski, Chicago

Apes may have been walking upright in what is now Bulgaria 7.2 million years ago. So say researchers who have found a leg bone that shows signs of bipedal walking.

The leg bone is older than any known hominin fossils, including all those from Africa. It suggests that bipedality – a crucial step in human evolution – may have evolved in Europe, rather than in Africa.

“The oldest indications for bipedality are found in Europe,” says Madelaine Böhme at the University of Tübingen in Germany.

Böhme and her colleagues have been excavating at Azmaka, near Chirpan in southern Bulgaria, since 2008. The site has a layer of river-deposited sediments that is about 20 metres thick.

In 2016, the team found a single right thighbone or femur, buried in sands known to be 7.2 million years old. The femur is 21.5 centimetres long and is almost complete, with only part of the lower end missing. The team has nicknamed the individual “Diva”.

“It’s a very, very beautiful discovery,” says Clément Zanolli at the University of Bordeaux in France, who wasn’t involved in the study. “This femur is quite well preserved, and that is really, really rare in the Miocene fossil record for hominids.”

In earlier periods, Europe was home to many different apes, but by 7.2 million years ago, many of them had disappeared. Today, our closest ape relatives all live in Africa. Likewise, all the earliest ancient humans, or hominins, are from Africa.

The only ape identified from Azmaka is Graecopithecus freybergi, a little-understood species known only from a damaged jawbone from Greece, a tooth from North Macedonia and, from Azmaka, a single tooth. Böhme’s team therefore suggests that the femur is probably Graecopithecus.

“It’s the most parsimonious choice we can do for now,” says Zanolli, but he emphasises that more fossils are needed before we can be confident.

“The association between these fossils is loose,” says Kelsey Pugh at OCAD University in Toronto, Canada.

Femur bones from Graecopithecus (left), Lucy (Australopithecus afarensis, middle) and a chimpanzee (right). A longer femoral neck (indicated in red) may be associated with upright walking

Spassov et al. 2026

Böhme’s team measured the femur in detail and performed a CT scan. The researchers found several features that, they argue, are evidence that it belonged to a bipedal animal.

For instance, at the top of the bone, a short neck extends out to the side and then expands into a rounded bulb that would have slotted into the pelvis. The neck has a fairly long, straight section – seen in bipedal hominins, but not in knuckle-walking apes – that can support a vertical load. Likewise, the outer layer of bone is thicker on the bottom of the neck than on the top, which also helps it withstand weight.

In addition, there is a ridge on the back of the bone, where the gluteal muscles would have attached. “They are important because they hold the back upright,” says Böhme.

Other researchers are intrigued but unconvinced. “This femur shows a number of features,” says Zanolli. “Some are biped-like, but others are quadruped-like. So, it’s quite difficult to know exactly what was the locomotor behaviour.”

The more we study extinct apes from millions of years ago, the more we discover that bipedality is difficult to diagnose from isolated bones, says Pugh. Many features that were thought to be unique to bipedal hominins have been found in quadrupedal apes. This means researchers have to figure out which features are truly diagnostic, and identify several from each species. “We’re raising the standard of what is required,” she says, and, so far, there isn’t enough from the femur to convince her.

Much of this re-evaluation has come about because of an ongoing row about Sahelanthropus tchadensis. Known from a single location in Chad, this species is the earliest one generally agreed to be a hominin rather than an ape. It lived 7 million years ago, slightly more recently than the Azmaka specimen. One Sahelanthropus femur has been discovered and palaeoanthropologists have been arguing for years over whether it shows evidence of bipedality.

Böhme and her colleagues have spent years trying to establish that key steps in the early evolution of hominins took place in Europe. They have reported evidence of hominin-like features in the Graecopithecus jawbone, which were disputed because the bone is so damaged. They have also described another European ape, Danuvius guggenmosi from 11.6 million years ago, as being able to stand upright and walk along tree branches.

Subsequently, these early hominins could have migrated into Africa – perhaps driven by climatic shifts between 8.75 and 6.25 million years ago, the team has suggested – where they gave rise to all later hominins, including us.

Many other animals moved between Africa and Eurasia, says Zanolli. “If the fauna can do it, why not hominins?”

However, Pugh says we need to firm up the evidence of bipedality in Europe and find more specimens of Graecopithecus, so we can figure out how it is related to other apes and hominins. Without that, it is premature to draw up detailed scenarios, she says.

Journal reference:

Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments DOI: 10.1007/s12549-025-00691-0

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Life

- I was accused of killing over 100 million rabbits across Australia (paid): 2026 Mar 10

- 'Singing' dogs may show the evolutionary roots of musicality: 2026 Mar 9

- Ancient 'weirdo' reptile graduated from 4 legs to 2 in adolescence: 2026 Mar 9

COMMENT LIFE | MAR 10, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

I was accused of killing over 100 million rabbits across Australia

When New Scientist reporter James Woodford was assigned to a story about a virus designed to kill rabbits, he never expected to be accused of spreading it

By James Woodford

New Scientist reporter James Woodford recalls his run-in with rabbits

D.Cunningham/Shutterstock

I was working a Sunday shift when the news came through, and it gave me an instant sinking feeling – the big kind that you hopefully only get once or twice in a lifetime. A potential biocontrol virus that was being tested to deal with Australia’s immense population of feral rabbits had escaped quarantine, jumping about 250 kilometres from the South Australian coast to Yunta, a place so small it is barely a minuscule freckle on the map. Authorities said they knew of only two people who had been to both the new quarantine area at Point Pearce and Yunta – and I was one of them.

All of this happened in October 1995. I was a cub environment reporter, based in Sydney, for one of Australia’s biggest newspapers. There was a lot going on at that time in my round, but one story in particular caught my eye: news of problems with an ambitious plan to wipe out Australia’s immense population of feral rabbits – an alien species that had been introduced from Europe.

The nation’s lead federal science agency, CSIRO, was managing the project. It was testing a lethal rabbit calicivirus disease at a quarantine facility at Wardang Island, a few kilometres off the South Australian coast. There was still work to do before the virus was ready for full-scale release. In particular, the scientists wanted to establish that native animals and the environment wouldn’t be harmed.

But on 10 October, CSIRO issued a statement saying that the virus had spread to two other locations beyond its quarantine area, although, cryptically, it claimed that the virus hadn’t escaped the island. A week later, as I got to my desk in the morning, news was breaking that the virus had somehow jumped from Wardang Island to Point Pearce on the South Australian mainland. I suggested to my editor that a photographer and I should fly to Adelaide immediately and head to Point Pearce.

By early afternoon, the photographer, Peter Rae, and I were in a hire car driving through the parched landscape to Point Pearce for a meeting with the government researchers coordinating the quarantine effort.

A member of the local Aboriginal community met us as we arrived and escorted us the final few kilometres to meet the quarantine team. We were the only reporters and it was clear that a rabbit apocalypse had begun – their bodies were scattered around the paddocks. We interviewed and photographed the researchers, then accompanied them to a shed where autopsies were being undertaken.

Once the enormity of what we had witnessed became apparent to the editors back in Sydney, they asked me to find a follow-up angle about what it would mean if the virus continued its march out of quarantine control. I rang a rabbit meat wholesaler, who, in turn, put me in touch with a shooter supplying the pelts needed to make the fur felt used to manufacture Australia’s world-famous Akubra hats.

The next morning, we drove to Yunta, over 300 kilometres north of Adelaide. Waiting for us was rabbit shooter Clinton Degenhardt, who looked like a character straight out of a Mad Max movie. We talked to him as he sat in his car with his rifle propped beside him, speaking through the windscreen where glass should have been. He and everyone involved in the rabbit meat and fur industry were fearful for their futures.

The next day, the piece ran as a big, front-page picture story and, as far as I was concerned, I had done my job and was heading home. For the next 10 days, nothing happened. Then came that Sunday, and the gut-wrenching news that the virus had made the massive leap to Yunta.

South Australia’s chief vet at the time told reporters that Peter and I may have been inadvertently responsible for spreading the virus, and a press release to the same effect was distributed. My quiet Sunday shift was suddenly a frenzy of meetings as my editors tried to determine how two of their staff had ended up becoming the story.

In the following days, the then-leader of Australia’s National Party, Tim Fischer, addressed the subject in Parliament. He said that, if our involvement were proved, Peter and I should be “put to work on the dog control fence” – the 5600-kilometre-long pest-exclusion fence that separates south-east Australia from the rest of the country.

Thankfully, the scientists responsible for the quarantine soon suggested that maybe it wasn’t us but blowflies that had carried the virus, and the news cycle moved on. It has always seemed odd to me, though, that of all places the virus first reached after Point Pearce, it turned up in Yunta, the exact location we had interviewed the rabbit shooter. Coincidence, conspiracy, cock-up? I never found out.

Competitor news outlets had a field day with the fact that our big scoop had turned into an embarrassment. My friends and colleagues enjoyed teasing me, too. In the first intense weeks after being accused of spreading the virus, I was given a copy of Watership Down, and countless people thought it was hilarious to call me “bunny killer”.

But on the other hand, it was also confusing because almost everyone hated feral rabbits and most Australians were impatient to see the virus unleashed. Farmers, endangered species researchers and conservationists were delighted that one of Australia’s greatest pests was – at least for a time, until resistance began to build – likely to be all but wiped out. And sure enough, in the first two months after that fateful October, at least 10 million rabbits died. Eventually, hundreds of millions more would perish across the continent.

Nearly four years later, I was at the 3000-square-kilometre Erldunda Station, a cattle farm near Alice Springs in Central Australia. Prior to the calicivirus escape, there had been 20,000 warrens on the property. By the time of my visit, there were almost zero rabbits. When the owner, Bernie Kilgariff, found out I was the reporter who had been accused of spreading the virus, he rushed off to find his visitors’ book. He insisted I sign as an honoured guest, above even the governor general’s entry.

LIFE | MAR 9, 2026, 10:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

'Singing' dogs may show the evolutionary roots of musicality

Some Samoyeds adjust the pitch of their howls depending on the music being played, showing a form of vocal ability they might have inherited from their wolf ancestors

By David Robson

Some Samoyed dogs howl along to music

Photography by Adri / Alamy

Scroll through #SingingDog hashtags on social media, and you will find many clips of hounds howling along to their favourite tunes. But can a canine Callas show any real musicality?

That’s the question that psychologist Aniruddh Patel at Tufts University in Massachusetts and his colleagues have attempted to answer with an ear-catching new study, which shows that some doggy divas really are perceiving pitch and adjusting their vocals accordingly.

The researchers were inspired by descriptions of wolves’ howling in a pack. “Howling has some similarities to human singing, in that these are long, sustained vocalisation,” says Patel. Observations from the wild suggest that each individual wolf attempts to hit a different tone. The result is a discordant chorus that might create the illusion of a much larger group, which would help to intimidate potential predators. “And so it had been theorised by some wolf biologists that they were actually paying attention and changing their pitch,” he says.

This is very hard to test experimentally, of course, which is why Patel and his colleagues turned to house pets. They asked a handful of dog owners to record their hound’s harmonies to their personally preferred track – first in the original key, and then in versions that had been transposed three semitones above and three semitones below – to see how they would respond to the change in pitch.

The researchers focused their analyses on two ancient breeds – Samoyeds and shiba inus – that are thought to be more closely related to their wolf ancestors than modern varieties. To increase the statistical reliability of the analysis, each dog had to produce at least 30 howls, lasting at least 1 second each, for each of the transposed versions.

All four of the Samoyeds studied showed some sensitivity to the track’s pitch, consistently adapting their vocalisations to the new key, though in no cases did they match it exactly.

“They’re trying to have some relationship to what they’re hearing with their own voice; they’re not just being triggered to unleash some instinctive and inflexible response,” says Patel. You can see Luna, one of the participants, performing Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper’s song “Shallow” here:

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwHcDmMC2Os

The two shiba inus, in contrast, appeared to be tone-deaf. “It’s possible there’s some genetic variation within ancient breeds, making some more predisposed to howling,” Patel hypothesises – though he admits he might have found more musicality in a larger sample.

The findings might offer some insights into the origins of human music. Some theorists have argued that singing evolved from the fine motor control that comes with speech, which allows us to mimic complex sounds, but the fact that dogs can also control pitch without any other forms of vocal learning suggests that language would not have been a necessary precursor. “It’s possible that our ability and desire to coordinate pitch with others when we sing has very ancient evolutionary roots, and may not just be a byproduct of our ability to imitate complex sounds,” says Patel.

Exactly why dogs feel the need to join in is another question. “From the videos that we watched, it seems like the dogs are really quite engaged with the music,” he says. They weren’t simply looking at their owner for a reward, but gazing intently into the distance. “So I think [the music] is sort of a surrogate howl-like signal to them, and gets them in this social mode of wanting to join in.”

Buddhamas Pralle Kriengwatana at KU Leuven in Belgium, who recently co-authored a review article examining the evidence for musical appreciation in non-human animals, is intrigued by the findings, though she would like to see more varied samples. “It would have been nice for them to have a comparison of ancient versus modern breeds,” she says.

Regarding the dogs’ somewhat discordant efforts, she suggests there may be many reasons for not matching the exact pitch of the sounds. “Who knows, maybe they want their voices to be heard, and to hear themselves singing,” she says.

Journal reference:

Current Biology DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.12.002

LIFE | MAR 9, 2026, 12:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Ancient 'weirdo' reptile graduated from 4 legs to 2 in adolescence

Sonselasuchus cedrus, discovered in fossils from Arizona, was a crocodile relative from the Triassic period that grew into an ostrich-like adult

By Michael Marshall

Artist’s reconstruction of Sonselasuchus cedrus in its environment, 215 million years ago

Gabriel Ugueto

An early relative of crocodiles spent its juvenile years walking on all fours, then stood up on two legs as an adult.

Its arm and leg bones grew at different rates to enable this transition. “The forelimb starts out like 75 per cent the length of the hind-limb, and then it ends up being more like 50 [per cent],” says Elliott Armour Smith at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The finding adds to evidence that crocodile-like animals in the early dinosaur era were extremely diverse, with some even adopting bodies and lifestyles similar to those of modern ostriches.

With Christian Sidor, also at the University of Washington, Armour Smith excavated Kaye Quarry in Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona. It consists of mudstones and sandstones deposited by a river that flowed about 215 million years ago, in the Triassic period.

Armour Smith and Sidor found more than 3000 bones belonging to early relatives of crocodiles called shuvosaurids. “It’s a jumbled mess of individual limb bones that don’t necessarily have an association between the individual animals,” says Armour Smith.

Nevertheless, the pair were able to identify a new shuvosaurid, which they called Sonselasuchus cedrus. Over 950 of the bones belonged to this species. It didn’t resemble a modern crocodile, but instead looked more like a flightless bird or theropod dinosaur. Its arms were short and instead of a mouth filled with teeth, it had a toothless beak.

Other shuvosaurids have similar bodies. “Shuvosaurids are these absolute weirdos that live in the late Triassic,” says Michelle Stocker at Virginia Tech. “They really look like dinosaurs.” They most resemble ornithomimids, which were ostrich-like dinosaurs that lived in the late Cretaceous period, more than 100 million years after the shuvosaurids.

Sonselasuchus cedrus seems to have started life walking on all fours. Bones from younger individuals show the front and rear limbs were relatively similar in size. But in older individuals, the hind-limbs grew much more and also showed signs of bearing more weight. “The larger femurs in the population are rather robust,” says Armour Smith, whereas “even the largest humerus is relatively delicate”.

This is unusual, but not unique. A 2019 study found evidence of two dinosaur species transitioning from quadrupedal to bipedal walking as they grew. One was a sauropodomorph, an ancestor of the huge sauropods like Brachiosaurus, and the other was an early ceratopsian distantly related to Triceratops.

It may be that juvenile and adult S. cedrus lived fairly separate lives and even ate different diets, as some crocodilians do today, says Stocker.

Popular descriptions of the dinosaur era often give the impression that dinosaurs, especially birds, were evolving in very creative ways, while crocodiles pretty much stayed the same. That misrepresents the diversity of pseudosuchians – the branch of the reptile tree that includes crocodiles, says Stocker. “They’re actually doing a lot of the really unique, crazy stuff first, and then dinosaurs are picking it up later.”

Journal reference:

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2025.2604859

Dinosaur hunting in the Gobi desert, Mongolia

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Health

- A daily multivitamin may slightly slow rates of ageing: 2026 Mar 9

HEALTH | MAR 9, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A daily multivitamin may slightly slow rates of ageing

Taking a multivitamin every day might slightly slow the rate of ageing, but the extent to which this is relevant to our health is unclear

By Michael Le Page

Health-conscious people may opt to take a multivitamin, but the jury is out on their benefits

Lenar Nigmatullin/Shutterstock

A daily dose of multivitamins and minerals has already been shown to slightly slow cognitive decline in people over 60. Now, it appears such supplements might also slow ageing more generally.

But this finding relied on an indirect measure of ageing, so it isn’t certain what this means in term of health benefits. We aren’t yet at a point where it could be recommended that all older adults take multivitamins, says Howard Sesso at Harvard University. That said, there may at least be small benefits with very little risk. “There’s been no deleterious effects of a daily multivitamin that we’ve identified so far,” he says.

In the past, it has been claimed that taking individual vitamins can have various benefits, but we now know this can also be harmful. For instance, taking too much vitamin A can weaken bones, excessive vitamin B3 can damage the liver and too much vitamin B6 can lead to a loss of feeling in the arms and legs. The only vitamin that the UK’s health services recommend that everyone take is vitamin D, and then generally only in winter.

Multivitamin and mineral supplements such as Centrum Silver, the type used in this study, usually contain levels that are close to the recommended daily doses. “You’re not mega-dosing,” says Sesso.

To learn more about their potential benefits, Sesso and his colleagues randomly assigned 1000 participants, with an average age of 70, to take the supplement or a placebo. “This was a very rigorous randomised-controlled trial; double-blind, placebo-controlled,” says Steve Horvath at the University of California, Los Angeles, who wasn’t involved in the study. “That alone sets it apart from most of the supplement literature, which relies on observational data full of confounding [factors].”

Blood samples were taken from the participants at the start of the start of the study, after one year and after two years. The DNA of immune cells in their blood was then analysed to look for the presence or absence of epigenetic markers – chemical tags that get added to DNA – at specific sites in the genome.

The patterns of epigenetic markers change in a predictable way as people age, allowing researchers to roughly estimate how old they are from blood tests. A number of different epigenetic clocks of this kind have been developed, which vary based on which sites on the genome they look at.

Sesso’s team used five epigenetic clocks, which all suggested that the people taking multivitamins aged slightly less than those on placebo, but the results were only significant for two of the clocks. “The statistically significant results were for the second-generation clocks that other groups have shown to be the most reliable and sensitive for evaluating longevity interventions,” says Horvath, who develops epigenetic clocks.

The first-generation clocks are good at predicting a person’s age but many of the epigenetic markers they look at aren’t directly relevant to health, says Horvath. The second-generation clocks are based on markers linked to deteriorating health and the risk of dying. “I should note, however, that the effect sizes are modest,” he says. “This is not a fountain of youth.”

“The difference was very small relative to the variation observed in the trial participants prior to intervention,” says Daniel Belsky at Columbia University in New York.

The researchers claim that the slowing of epigenetic clocks they found is equivalent to about four months over the two-year period, but this may be misleading. One of the many issues with epigenetic clocks is that their estimates of how a slowing of the same magnitude translates into normal time vary widely between them, says Belsky.

Sesso acknowledges that it isn’t clear what these epigenetic measures mean in terms of people’s health. “We just don’t know how to translate clinically an improvement of four months of biological aging,” he says.

Most of the participants were of European descent, so it also isn’t clear if this slight slowing of epigenetic ageing will happen in non-European people, or in younger individuals. Nor do we know if the same results will occur with other types of multivitamins or if they will continue over periods longer than two years.

The study, which has now ended, also evaluated the effects of cocoa extracts, with some participants getting these in addition to multivitamins or instead of a placebo. The cocoa extracts had no significant effects on any of the epigenetic clocks.

Journal reference:

Nature Medicine DOI: 10.1038/s41591-026-04239-3

Table of Contents

New Scientist: 2026 Mar 13

Features

Frailty sets in far earlier than you’d expect, but you can reverse it (paid): 2026 Mar 9

Why a Peruvian mountain is becoming an 'impossible' particle detector (paid): 2026 Mar 11

News

Our extinct Australopithecus relatives may have had difficult births (paid): 2026 Mar 13

Single-celled organism with no brain is capable of Pavlovian learning (paid): 2026 Mar 13

We don’t know if AI-powered toys are safe, but they’re here anyway (paid): 2026 Mar 13

Parkinson's disease may reduce enjoyment of pleasant smells (paid): 2026 Mar 11

The race to solve the biggest problem in quantum computing (paid): 2026 Mar 13

How worried should you be about your BMI? (paid): 2026 Mar 12

Can species evolve fast enough to survive as the planet heats up?: 2026 Mar 12

Chemistry may not be the 'killer app' for quantum computers after all (paid): 2026 Mar 12

Why drug overdose deaths have suddenly plummeted in the US (paid): 2026 Mar 12

Undisclosed ads on TikTok skirt ban on profiling minors (paid): 2026 Mar 12

A miniature magnet rivals behemoths in strength for the first time: 2026 Mar 11

Mathematics is undergoing the biggest change in its history (paid): 2026 Mar 10

King penguins are thriving in a warmer climate, but it may not last: 2026 Mar 11

Why the world's militaries are scrambling to create their own Starlink (paid): 2026 Mar 11

Start-up is building the first data centre to use human brain cells (paid): 2026 Mar 10

Orcas may be to blame for some mass dolphin strandings: 2026 Mar 11

Sharing genetic risk scores can unwittingly reveal secrets (paid): 2026 Mar 10

Mystery 'whippet' space explosion is the brightest of its kind (paid): 2026 Mar 10

Human populations evolved in similar ways after we began farming (paid): 2026 Mar 10

Why is black rain falling on Iran and how dangerous is it?: 2026 Mar 9

Technology

The 3 things you need to know about passwords, from a security expert (paid): 2026 Mar 13

How an intern helped build the AI that shook the world (paid): 2026 Mar 7

The moment that kicked off the AI revolution (paid): 2026 Mar 7

Space

What is a galaxy? That's a surprisingly difficult question to answer (paid): 2026 Mar 10

SETI may have missed alien signals because of space weather (paid): 2026 Mar 9

Humans

We’ve only just confirmed that Homo habilis really existed (paid): 2026 Mar 9

The first apes to walk upright may have evolved in Europe (paid): 2026 Mar 9

Life

I was accused of killing over 100 million rabbits across Australia (paid): 2026 Mar 10

'Singing' dogs may show the evolutionary roots of musicality: 2026 Mar 9

Ancient 'weirdo' reptile graduated from 4 legs to 2 in adolescence: 2026 Mar 9

Health

A daily multivitamin may slightly slow rates of ageing: 2026 Mar 9