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- Can cloud seeding save us from water bankruptcy? (paid): 2026 May 12

- Where did the laws of physics come from? I think I've found the answer (paid): 2026 May 11

- Red-light therapy does have health benefits but not the ones you think (paid): 2026 May 6

ENVIRONMENT | MAY 12, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Can cloud seeding save us from water bankruptcy?

We’ve long tried to control the weather by engineering rainfall. Now such cloud-seeding efforts are escalating, creating conflict between countries and stoking conspiracy theories. But do they work?

By Alec Luhn

John Sirlin/Alamy

On a cold, windy night in November 2025, a quadcopter drone took off from a farm field at the foot of the Bannock mountain range north of Salt Lake City, rising 4000 metres into thick clouds. A fan with anti-icing propellers kicked into action, blowing yellow dust out of a cannister attached to the back of the drone. Cloud-seeding company Rainmaker was trying to fight dust with dust, spreading silver iodide powder to encourage precipitation and end the deadly dust storms plaguing Utah’s capital.

The Great Salt Lake, which is fed by snowmelt from the Bannock mountains and nearby ranges, has roughly halved in area since 2012. Wind blows toxic dust from the dried lakebed towards Salt Lake City, exposing millions of people to “forever chemicals” and heavy metals like arsenic. But cloud seeding “can refill the lake”, Rainmaker, which is contracted by the state, has promised on billboards.

Drought in the south-west US is symptomatic of an era of global water bankruptcy, with over 50 countries now collectively investing hundreds of millions of dollars in cloud-seeding technology. Yet the jury is still out on whether rainfall can be engineered in any meaningful way. “What we don’t know about cloud seeding is how effective it is,” says Kaveh Madani at the UN University Institute for Water, Environment and Health. “But when you’re desperate, it sounds very good.”

These realities may matter less than perceptions. The notion that humanity can control the weather is fuelling cross-border claims of water theft and spurring conspiracy theories about deadly flash floods. So, will cloud seeding replenish freshwater reserves, or merely distract from taking climate action?

Controlling clouds

We have dreamed of mastering the weather since ancient times, when, according to Greek mythology, Phaethon, the mortal son of the sun god Helios, took the reins of the sun chariot from his father. During the 1930s Dust Bowl, when severe dust storms raged across the American Great Plains, so-called pluviculturists – also known as rain wizards – promised to break droughts with vats of vaporous chemicals. But even when rain did come, a question always lingered: was it due to the rainmaking, or just a change in the weather?

An accidental discovery in 1946 revealed a potential scientific basis for rainmaking. Vincent Schaefer, a researcher at General Electric’s House of Magic laboratory in upstate New York, tried to cool down a freezer on a hot July day by dropping dry ice into it. To his surprise, the freezer filled with floating ice crystals as the blast of intense cold froze tiny water droplets suspended in the air. These supercooled droplets can remain liquid at temperatures as low as -35°C (-31°F).

Since many clouds contain supercooled droplets, the General Electric research team began dumping dry ice from aeroplanes. As water would condense onto the newly frozen droplets, they would gain mass and begin to descend, colliding with still more droplets. Eventually, they would get heavy enough to fall out of the cloud and reach the ground as snow, or melt into rain on the way down.

Vincent Schaefer (right) creates artificial clouds using dry ice at General Electric’s laboratory in upstate New York

Schenectady Museum/Hall of Electrical History Foundation/Corbis via Getty Images

That same year, Schaefer’s colleague Bernard Vonnegut discovered that silver iodide particles, which have a hexagonal structure that is similar to ice, could serve as seed crystals to “fool” droplets into “explosive ice growth” at warmer temperatures than dry ice, he wrote in his lab notes. The finding partly inspired Vonnegut’s brother Kurt to write his 1963 science-fiction novel Cat’s Cradle, in which the world is threatened by a substance called “ice-nine” that can freeze water on contact.

Seeing the battlefield potential of what the General Electric team described as “the control of weather”, the US military took over their research. The following year, the scientists attempted to redirect a hurricane by bombing it with dry ice. Unfortunately, the storm, which had passed over Florida and was heading out to sea, turned around and slammed into the coast a second time – although it’s unclear whether they bore any responsibility.

“ If China is redistributing water to the extent that it claims to be, it could spark conflict “

Other countries, including China and the Soviet Union, started their own cloud-seeding programmes, with little accountability. “He who controls the weather will control the world,” soon-to-be US President Lyndon Johnson said in 1962.

But the exposure of the secret US cloud-seeding operation to bog down North Vietnamese military supplies on the Ho Chi Minh Trail caused public outrage and soured opinions in Congress. In 1977, the US and the USSR spearheaded an international ban on environmental modification for military purposes, and research funding began to decline. Ultimately, the US government abandoned cloud seeding because there was no convincing scientific proof that it actually worked.

Water bankruptcy

In more recent years, growing drought and shrinking rivers and aquifers have sparked a cloud-seeding renaissance. Due to global warming, urbanisation and agriculture, most regions are overdrawing their annual income of rainwater and snowmelt and beginning to run down their long-term savings of groundwater. Four billion people – almost half the people on Earth – face water shortages at least one month a year.

“We are seeing desertification, sand and dust storms. We are seeing declining groundwater tables. We are seeing sinkholes. We are seeing land subsidence. We are seeing shrinking lakes, rivers,” says Madani.

Utah’s Great Salt Lake drastically shrunk in area between 1985 and 2022

USGS/contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2022), processed by ESA

Consequently, weather-modification programmes have popped up on every continent except Antarctica. In Iran, where dried-up reservoirs and sputtering taps helped fuel protests last year, both the civilian authorities and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard have begun aircraft cloud-seeding campaigns in an attempt to break the five-year drought. Countries including India, Thailand and Saudi Arabia now conduct large-scale cloud seeding.

In these hot, dry regions, water droplets in clouds are often too warm to freeze on contact with silver iodide, so scientists disperse salt particles, which absorb moisture from the air, essentially building raindrops around themselves. As the downward pull of gravity overcomes the uplift of air currents, they begin to descend, bumping into and accumulating smaller droplets until they fall out as rain.

Small aircraft in the United Arab Emirates, which faces extreme water stress, fly hundreds of missions with salt flares under their wings each year. The country has also spent tens of millions of dollars on research. “Operational [cloud seeding] may not always work or work very well, but water is an emotional type of thing if you don’t have a lot of it,” says radar expert Roelof Bruintjes, who consulted the UAE programme.

An aeroplane releases salt flares during a cloud seeding mission over the United Arab Emirates

New York Times/Redux/eyevine

China, where water insecurity threatens more than 50 million people, has the world’s largest programme. It resembles not so much an experiment with cloud formations as a full-scale attack on them. Besides rockets and planes, it has deployed thousands of anti-aircraft guns and cannons to fire salt and silver iodide into the sky to try to boost irrigation and hydropower, rinse pollution from the air, prevent hailstorms and regrow melting glaciers. China claims its cloud-seeding operations extend over 5 million square kilometres, covering more than half of the country.

Since 2016, China has even been trying to divert water from the Indian monsoon to the cities and farms of the Yellow River basin, thousands of kilometres to the east. For this so-called Sky River project, it has installed hundreds of “burning chambers”, essentially remote-controlled chimneys that combust silver iodide, to intercept atmospheric rivers and precipitate their moisture into the headwaters of the basin.

To what extent do these ambitious cloud-seeding projects actually pay off? “What most people want to know when they ask that question is: can you produce enough precipitation… to have some impact towards the mitigation of drought?” says Jeffrey French at the University of Wyoming. “That’s a much more difficult question to answer.”

A variety of trials have claimed to increase precipitation by as much as 20 per cent. But because no two clouds are the same, there’s no control to determine whether precipitation is due to cloud seeding or natural variability. To get around that, researchers in Wyoming burned tanks of silver iodide on the ground underneath clouds passing over one mountain range, while leaving a nearby range untouched for comparison. They randomly selected which of the two ranges to seed and operated from 2007 to 2014 to try to account for annual fluctuations in snow. Underwhelmingly, precipitation increased by 1.5 per cent, which is statistically insignificant.

It was only in 2017 that French and his colleagues became the first to show without a doubt that cloud seeding can produce precipitation. The SNOWIE experiment dropped silver iodide flares from an aircraft on clouds over the Sawtooth mountains in Idaho. The aircraft deliberately flew north and south, perpendicular to the wind, so that the slowly falling flares formed a zigzag pattern as they were carried eastward by gusts.

About 30 minutes later, among the snow banks and pine trees, truck-mounted radar systems observed ice crystals forming in a similar pattern. “It pops up very much in this sort of zigzag fashion. And that’s just not something that naturally would ever happen,” says French. “Is it possible to alter the natural evolution of a cloud? I would say, definitively yes. We showed that.”

Although cloud seeding can generate precipitation, the amount varies hugely depending on the location, the season and atmospheric conditions, says Katja Friedrich at the University of Colorado Boulder, who led the SNOWIE study. Some clouds simply don’t contain enough moisture to produce rain.

China routinely fires rockets to try to engineer rainfall across large swathes of the country

Xinhua News Agency/eyevine

Yet cloud-seeding claims have led many to suspect that governments are playing God with water flows on a massive scale. If China is redistributing water to the extent that it claims to be – or if other countries suspect that it is – it could spark conflict, suggests James Fleming at Colby College in Maine, author of Fixing the Sky. Such far-reaching plans verge on the kind of global interventions against climate change known as geoengineering, like spraying tiny seawater droplets into clouds so they will reflect more sunlight away from the ocean. In India, officials have publicly claimed that China’s weather modification caused floods in states downriver of Tibet. In a similar vein, Iran has accused Israel and Turkey of “cloud stealing” precipitation that was on the way to Iran.

It might seem intuitive that if more rain falls on one place, less will fall on other places downwind. Rainfall isn’t a zero-sum game, however. Clouds often precipitate only a small percentage of their moisture, or they rain over the ocean. If anything, cloud seeding speeds up the natural water cycle, says Friedrich.

Conspiracy theories

Nonetheless, a 1996 US Air Force report on “owning the weather”, with techniques including cloud seeding, birthed the idea that aeroplane contrails are government “chemtrails” for weather or population control. This conspiracy theory, which isn’t backed by scientific evidence, is now supported by a third of the US population. In 2024, the UAE’s cloud-seeding programme was blamed by many for floods in Dubai, and rumours emerged that US President Joe Biden’s administration had caused hurricanes Helen and Milton to hit Donald Trump-supporting southern states through cloud seeding or other nefarious technologies.

Similar suspicions arose after social media users noticed that Rainmaker, contracted by the state, had been operating in a different part of Texas two days before extreme rainfall caused deadly flooding in Kerr county in 2025. Marjorie Taylor Greene, then a member of the US House of Representatives, held a congressional hearing and proposed a law against weather modification. Three states have banned “weather modification”, even though there is still no evidence cloud seeding can have large-scale impacts. “We can generate precipitation, but not to the degree of a flooding event,” says Friedrich.

Still, Rainmaker, whose founder Augustus Doricko was inspired by the SNOWIE experiment, claims it can make water-bankrupt regions solvent again. Doricko, who is also the company’s CEO, says that within six years, the company will have stopped the drying of the Great Salt Lake and potentially the Colorado river, too, a crucial source of water for Utah and six other states.

Already, Rainmaker has raised more than $31 million and has contracts with five states for cloud seeding. The idea is to use radar, satellites, weather balloons and artificial intelligence to identify pockets of supercooled water and then sell an exact quantity of precipitation to clients. “This is what is going to move cloud seeding forward and take it out of the land of ‘you’re a snake-oil salesman’ to ‘no, this is exactly what we did’,” says Kaitlyn Suski, Rainmaker’s head of research.

Cloud-seeding company Rainmaker claims its drones can stop Utah’s Great Salt Lake from drying up

Rainmaker

Other projects are also trying to find cheaper, more effective ways to engineer rain. In February, start-up Rain Enhancement Technologies said it boosted snowpack in a Utah mountain range by electrifying natural particles. Idaho Power is misting liquid propane fuel into clouds. Researchers in the UAE are firing lasers into them.

These efforts won’t get close to refilling large bodies of water, according to Friedrich, but it could help lessen the impacts of drought, especially by building snowpack that will melt gradually in spring and summer. “It’s not the Holy Grail that solves all the problems,” she says.

What’s more, cloud seeding might distract from simpler and more effective solutions. Over-consumption is the primary cause of water scarcity, such as the “use it or lose it” policy that encourages farmers to take their full allocation of Colorado river water. Restricting water can hurt agriculture and the economy, while other conservation measures, like repairing leaky infrastructure or switching from canals to drip irrigation, can be expensive. “That’s why they get crazy about cloud seeding,” says Madani. “Other solutions are very hard.”

Boosting water supply through techniques like cloud seeding may even increase consumption, an example of a phenomenon known as the Jevon’s paradox. For instance, when tunnels and canals doubled the flow in the Zayandeh-Rud river in Iran, water-hungry industries expanded, and farmers switched from livestock to peaches and almonds, leading again to scarcity and conflicts between regions. Without measures to limit demand, cloud seeding could become a “fix that backfires”, says Madani.

Fleming thinks we could learn a lesson here from Phaethon. When he attempts to drive his father’s sun chariot, he loses control of the horses and scorches the planet, forming the world’s deserts. The history of cloud seeding – from botched military operations to chemtrail conspiracy theories – echoes this legend about the perils of hubris, says Fleming. “This idea of the big lever, big fix, controlling the world’s weather… it’s fraught with a lot of unanswered questions.”

PHYSICS | MAY 11, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Where did the laws of physics come from? I think I've found the answer

The rules governing gravity and other laws of nature seem like eternal truths, but cosmologist João Magueijo has always questioned their origins. Now, he has a bold new proposal

By João Magueijo

Ryan Wills for New Scientist; HiddenCatch/Getty Images

Throw a pebble into a lake and it, obligingly, sinks. Smash particles together and they fall apart in certain patterns. Flick a switch and let there be light. Reality, for all its glory and cosmic drama, seems to operate in a consistent, predictable fashion.

Physicists like me often put this happy fact down to what we call the laws of nature. These laws apply in the same way everywhere: the same force of gravity that bends the light from distant stars also keeps your feet on the ground. Moreover, they don’t change – they are valid from the big bang to happily ever after. All this is assumed in physics to the point that few ever question it.

To be fair, there are good reasons why. Bluntly asking “Where did the laws of physics come from?” can feel like smuggling philosophy into the lab. It can also lead us into risky territory – we might end up expecting stars to burn differently or atoms to fall apart.

But I believe the origin of the laws of nature is a question we can’t ignore, one I’ve been pondering for the past few years. Many previous attempts to explain how these laws arose have foundered because they ended up introducing deeper “meta-laws” along the way. Finally, though, I think I have something better: a framework that explains how the rules of science varied wildly at the start of the universe before settling into what we see today. If I’m right, then the “laws of nature” may not be fundamental at all.

What do I mean by the laws of nature? I am talking about the key equations of physics, like Isaac Newton’s laws of gravity; James Clerk Maxwell’s equations, which govern electricity and magnetism; and Albert Einstein’s field equations, which explain the workings of space-time. These come served with what we call fundamental constants, numbers that are embedded in the equations and describe properties of the universe that we’ve observed – things like the strength of gravity or the charge of an electron. The equations and constants aren’t just convenient summaries of reality, they are the load-bearing beams that support the entire theoretical edifice of physics.

However, if we are going to ask where the laws of nature come from, we must entertain a more unsettling possibility: that once upon a time, there were no laws at all. There was a period before particles, before geometry, before even the notion of time. Reality would have been a chaotic mess.

The visionary physicist John Wheeler called this state of Wild West lawlessness “higgledy-piggledy”. This wasn’t a throwaway line. When I first encountered Wheeler’s remark, my English didn’t quite extend to higgledy-piggledy, so I looked it up. One synonym was “helter-skelter”, which I associated with the Beatles song with that title. That felt about right: a cacophonous universe – guitars badly out of tune, no agreement on rhythm or key.

Many cultures have depicted the formless chaos that existed before the creation of matter. This 16th-century design in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo, Italy, shows a strange being surrounded by flames

Lorenzo Lotto, Giovan Francesco Capoferri

At the time, I was a cosmologist surrounded by conformist bandwagons – inflation, dark matter and dark energy, which theorists package into the so-called lambda-CDM model of our universe. This doesn’t seek to explain why we have the laws that we do, but says they simply just are and have always been. Perhaps for no other reason than in reaction to this, I was trying to carve out alternatives, like cosmological theories that allow the speed of light to vary in the early moments of the universe. The wilder the idea was, the better.

Wheeler’s higgledy-piggledy idea was intoxicating to me, and immediately alarming. If the laws of physics themselves can change, even chaotically, then what anchors reality at all? Is this even a question that physics can hope to answer, or is this just philosophy, dressed up in a lab coat?

Most physicists prefer not to ask. But there is a sense in which we don’t have that luxury. Physics, at its core, is the attempt to explain why the universe is the way it is, rather than some other way. And that project feels unfinished if we simply take the laws themselves as given. Push this line of questioning far enough, and you are led somewhere more radical: a time when there were no laws at all.

The fundamental laws of nature

Most physicists feel a Pavlovian electric shock when confronted with the concept of a lawless universe. But there are good reasons for this. Part of it, as I’ve already said, is that these laws are integral to the structure of modern physics. Hence, the instinct that they should be eternal, perfect, immutable. I also suspect that some of this dates back to a time when science and religion were deeply intertwined, and ideas about natural laws echoed divine law: timeless, universal and not open to negotiation. Even after science secularised, the reverence remained.

But there is something else at play here that is even more important: symmetry. In geometry, a shape has symmetry if you can carry out some operation, like a rotation, and the shape looks the same. Physics has a similar kind of symmetry. Perform an experiment here or there, today or tomorrow, facing north or south, and the outcome is the same – or at least, we assume it is.

The implications of that assumption are massive. They were first unveiled in 1918 by Emmy Noether, a mathematician whose work permanently rewired theoretical physics, despite her career being obstructed for years by institutional sexism. Noether showed that every continuous symmetry – a symmetry that holds under a smooth shift, such as moving through space or time – comes with a conserved quantity. She showed, mathematically, that if the laws of physics are the same everywhere, it logically means that momentum has to be conserved, meaning the total amount of momentum shared between all objects – for example, between balls in a game of pool – doesn’t change. The conserved quantities can be exchanged between objects, say in a collision, but the sum remains fixed.

One symmetry, however, plays a special role. If the laws of physics are the same from one moment to the next – they obey what we call time-translation invariance – this implies energy can’t be created or destroyed. On its own, that’s fine. The trouble is, the reverse is also true. If you believe that the laws of physics can change with time, then energy conservation is violated. Break one and the other bleeds. This is a big problem for many of my colleagues because, as tenets of physics go, the conservation of energy is just about the most sacred.

Taming a lawless universe

Yet some physicists were undaunted. The forefather of this rebellion was Paul Dirac, best known for unifying quantum mechanics and special relativity. Dirac was famously eccentric and, true to form, he wrote one of the most radical papers of his career while on his honeymoon in Brighton, UK, in 1937.

In the paper, Dirac made an audacious proposal that the constants of nature, those important numbers that appear in our fundamental laws, actually reflect the age of the universe. If this were true, then the constants aren’t “constant” at all and instead themselves evolve in time. The laws of physics, in this view, are no longer timeless.

Decades later, my friend Lee Smolin pushed the idea of evolving laws much further. Lee’s proposal, known as cosmological natural selection, begins with a simple unorthodoxy: black holes might not be cosmic dead ends. Instead, each black hole gives birth to a new expanding universe on the other side of its horizon, a kind of cosmic offspring. This idea isn’t pure fantasy. General relativity allows for extreme rearrangements of space-time inside black holes, and some solutions can be read as bridges to new regions.

Crucially, Smolin suggested that the laws and constants aren’t copied perfectly in this process. Each new universe inherits slightly mutated constants, tiny changes in particle masses or force strengths. Some universes are better than others at seeding black holes, and therefore better at passing on their constants. Over many generations, universes with “successful” constants come to dominate. Strange as it may first sound, this idea still stops short of Wheeler’s total higgledy-piggledy. In Wheeler’s vision, it isn’t simply that the constants plugged into the equations evolve. The equations themselves are in flux, too, if it even makes sense to speak of equations at all.

But wait, what about that major snag that had been staring at us since Noether’s day: the idea that if you allow the laws of nature to change, you give up on energy conservation? For a long time, this was taken as a reason not to pursue evolving laws, but over the past two years, I eventually realised that it was actually the complete opposite. I saw a massive window of opportunity.

How to create a universe

Here’s the thing: in some circumstances, the fact that energy can’t be created or destroyed is troublesome. Take the big bang itself. Currently, physicists are forced to believe that all the matter and energy we see today had to be present at the start of the universe, which forces it into a point of infinite density. But we don’t know how to interpret what this really means and infinities break our equations. If we relax that condition, however, then the creation of matter in the universe can become not an event, but a process: something extended, contingent, fallible.

In principle, that overcomes a big problem. But there is another side to this story. If matter and energy can be created, they can also be destroyed. The same mechanism that giveth with one hand taketh with the other. So, we need some way of explaining how this process leaves us with something – the universe we see around us – rather than nothing.

In a paper published last year, my PhD student Paolo Bassani and I borrowed tools from evolutionary biology and financial mathematics, disciplines that study systems that never sit still and allow genuine randomness within evolving laws. In our picture, nothing is dependable in the earliest phase of the universe before stable laws emerged. Constants fluctuate wildly. Conservation laws rudely fail. Matter is created, but also destroyed, at random. Positive energy is as likely as negative energy, creation as probable as annihilation. Any matter you gain from one throw of the dice may be lost on the very next throw.

The forces we experience today, such as gravity, might have wildly fluctuated near the birth of reality

NASA

The universe is effectively gambling, maybe building up a surplus on a good run, before losing it just as quickly. As long as the laws keep mutating, whatever gains are made in the form of matter are never secure. A single bad fluctuation can wipe everything out. To get anything that lasts, you need a way for the process to stop and for whatever gains the universe has made to be locked in.

Fortunately, random systems like our chaotic universe – but also like many models of genetic mutation, stock markets or chemical reactions – have a built-in feature whereby they can stumble into configurations that they can’t escape from, known as an absorbing state. Take a mutation that has spread through an entire population, a company going bankrupt and vanishing from the market or a chemical reaction that has run to completion. In each case, the system has reached a state from which the dynamics offer no further moves, so the random process of change effectively grinds to a halt.

In our case, the absorbing state is the built-in point in chaotic evolution where the laws are forced to crystallise, their random mutation effectively switching off. With that, the dual hand of creation and destruction is turned off as well. Some universes arrive there empty-handed or in severe debt. Others arrive after a lucky run. And since the dual hand of creation and destruction has now been turned off, they get to keep their gains. We are those gains.

Cosmologists attempt to understand the evolution of our universe by using tools like gravitational waves, but they usually assume the laws of physics are fixed

dpa picture alliance/Alamy

In this picture, order isn’t selected because it is beautiful or true, but because it lasts and holds on to what it has built. Seen this way, several long-standing puzzles, like why our constants take on the values they currently do, look less mystical. The values of the constants need not be unique, only compatible with longevity.

Testing this will be difficult, but far from absurd. The cleanest place to look is in ultra-precise measurements of time. Atomic clocks – incredibly reliable devices that use the vibration of atoms to keep time – are now so stable that they can detect extraordinarily small drifts in fundamental constants. Because different clocks depend on those constants in different ways, any variation would cause them to slowly fall out of sync – a telltale signal that the laws themselves are shifting. So far, current measurements are so precise that any present-day effects must be tiny. But that is precisely what makes this a promising test. With clocks this precise, even a minute residual jitter in the laws would have nowhere to hide.

All this work takes me back to a broader lesson I learned back in 2003 when I shared a house for a couple of years with Lee Smolin. At the time, we were both researchers at the fledgling Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Lee kept a remarkable library, with philosophical classics and not-so-classics stacked everywhere.

Before I met Lee, I was a fairly standard-issue scientific philistine when it came to philosophical matters, believing that physicists had no business doing metaphysics – that worrying about the nature of laws or explanations was someone else’s problem.

But it was in Lee’s library that I was first exposed, among much else, to the work of philosopher Paul Feyerabend. He advocated for a demolition of dogmatic science and a pluralism – not only in human culture, but in the methods and theories of science itself. This spirit informed my scientific discussions with Lee, in which we often changed sides at random, simply to see where the reasoning led. This isn’t a weakness but a strength. Proposing scientific theories isn’t like supporting a football team: unruly polygamy is acceptable.

Seen this way, the universe itself may follow a similarly Feyerabendian pluralism, chaotically trying out all theories, backing every football team at random, until some prove stable enough to endure. In the process, it discovers what works, not because it is elegant or ordained, but because it survives long enough to be mistaken for destiny.

HEALTH | MAY 6, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Red-light therapy does have health benefits but not the ones you think

Red-light therapy promises to treat everything from acne and hair loss to depression and chronic pain. Many of these claims are overhyped, but evidence suggests it can have healing powers

By Graham Lawton

George Dagerotip/Unsplash

Better sleep, boosted mood, fewer wrinkles – these are just a handful of the supposed benefits of red light, delivered onto your skin via laser or light-emitting diodes (LEDs). Indeed, if the wellness industry is to be believed, simply bathing in a rosy glow for a few minutes a day can cure a whole host of ailments, from hair loss and acne to chronic pain and depression, and that is just scratching the surface.

Given the hype, you would be forgiven for thinking this is just an expensive fad. After all, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

While evidence for most of these claims is thin at best, there is another world of red-light therapy that is far more exciting than the prospect of a glow-up. Emerging evidence finds it may mitigate cognitive decline, and researchers are now trialling the technology for conditions such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, with many more applications in the pipeline. “It’s slowly starting to get traction,” says John Mitrofanis at the University of Grenoble Alpes in France, who has been working on red-light therapy for 15 years. “When I started, there might have been 10 or 20 publications a year, but now there are thousands.”

Lighten up

Using electromagnetic radiation is commonplace in medicine. Doctors routinely deploy X-rays to peer at bones and ultraviolet light to ease certain skin conditions. Yet unlike these, red light falls within the visible spectrum, the narrow band of wavelengths detectable by the human eye. Its wavelengths are longer than other visible lights, like blue or green light, spanning between around 650 and 750 nanometres. This allows it to pass through the dead outer layer of our skin, penetrating a few millimetres beneath. The longer the wavelength, the deeper it travels.

Once consigned to dermatologist offices and spas, red-light therapy is now readily available via consumer devices such as face masks and full-body panels. Influencers peddle it on social media, and the US Food and Drug Administration has cleared devices for acne and hair loss, though they aren’t yet approved as clinically effective.

Yet research on red-light therapy goes back to 1960, with the invention of the laser. Biomedical researchers quickly wondered whether these narrow beams of light had medical applications. They soon got their answer.

In 1967, the physicist Endre Mester at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary, shone red lasers with a wavelength of 694 nanometres onto shaved mice to see if it triggered skin cancer. It didn’t – instead, it caused their fur to grow back more vigorously.

Mester later discovered the lasers enhanced wound healing and started using them to treat ulcers and other intractable wounds in people. A new branch of medicine, which Mester called low-level laser therapy (LLLT), was born. Other scientists discovered the light doesn’t have to be visible: near-infrared with wavelengths between 700 and 850 nanometres, just beyond the visible spectrum, also had healing effects. LEDs could also be used instead of lasers.

The science behind LLLT – now rebranded as photobiomodulation – isn’t fully understood, but we have the basics, says Glen Jeffery at University College London. When red or near-infrared light strikes the skin, it acts on specialised structures in underlying cells called mitochondria. It is here – the power packs of cells – that the light does its scintillating work.

Mitochondria contain light-absorbing molecules called chromophores. One, cytochrome c oxidase, is especially important. It is a key component in the pathway that cells use to produce the energy-carrying molecule ATP. Absorbing red or near-infrared light stimulates cytochrome c oxidase, speeding up the process and producing more ATP.

This is beneficial for several reasons. As we get older, mitochondria’s efficiency dwindles, and with it, their ability to produce sufficient energy. “By the time you reach middle age, you’ve generally got an ATP deficit,” says Jeffery.

This has another downside: the overproduction of reactive oxygen species – volatile chemicals that wreak havoc on nearby cells, spurring inflammation. “By the time you’re 30, you’ve got systemic inflammation, and systemic inflammation is one of those things that’s going to kill you in the end,” says Jeffery. It contributes to all manner of chronic illnesses, including diabetes, heart disease and cancer.

Red light speeds up the process by which cells produce energy

Bakhrom Tursunov/Alamy

Stimulating mitochondria with red light makes up the ATP deficit and dials down reactive oxygen species – in other words, it rejuvenates. It also stimulates natural anti-inflammatory molecules, such as prostaglandins. “Unquestionably ATP goes up,” says Jeffery. “Unquestionably inflammation goes down.” It’s win, win.

The process also appears to boost a mechanism by which cells heal one another, called the biophoton effect. Cells produce light, particularly in their mitochondria, and use it to communicate with each other. “Cells in distress issue ultraviolet or blue light. But if it’s happy and healthy, it’ll be red and near-infrared,” says Mitrofanis. “They use this light to repair each other. If a cell is dying, it communicates this, and then nearby cells give it red and near-infrared light.”

Exogenous light can profoundly affect energy metabolism. In 2024, Jeffery and his colleague Michael Powner at City St George’s, University of London, shone red light onto a small area of the upper backs of 15 people without underlying health conditions. The participants then drank sugary water and underwent periodic blood-sugar testing over the next 2 hours. On average, blood sugar was nearly 28 per cent lower in this group than in a separate group of 15 people who hadn’t received red light, indicating the light had stimulated their mitochondria, helping them to more efficiently convert sugar into ATP.

The research also suggests that the effects spread beyond the light-soaked mitochondria, as the small patch of skin cannot account for the large impact, says Jeffery. This may be related to the mysterious abscopal effect, a rare phenomenon in cancer radiotherapy where irradiation of a primary tumour can shrink secondary tumours located elsewhere, he says.

Healing at home?

Consumer companies touting red-light therapy for wellness have seized on this scientific explanation. In the early 2000s, plastic surgeons began using it to aid post-operative wound healing, and word spread of its healing powers. Clinics started offering it to people who hadn’t undergone surgery, and the first at-home devices soon followed.

Red-light therapy is now a booming business. According to fashion magazine Vogue, the global market was worth around $520 million in 2021 and is forecast to reach $800 million by 2031. Salons, spas and gyms increasingly offer it alongside massages and facials. Consumers can buy at-home devices, ranging from hand-held wands and face masks to helmets and blankets, the cheapest of which cost around £100 ($135), but some go for thousands.

Companies market the products as an easy route to wellness and cosmetic improvement. The list of concerns they are purported to help with includes, but is not limited to, wrinkles, hair loss, acne, stretch marks, inflammation, pain, insomnia, obesity, athletic performance, erectile dysfunction, menstrual cramps, depression, brain fog, infertility and age-related deterioration.

Given the general rejuvenating and energy-burning effects of red light, these claims seem plausible. But in fact, most of them are “highly dubious”, says Jeffery. However, there are some bright spots.

In 2025, a team led by dermatologist Michelle Pavlis at Duke University in North Carolina reviewed 59 studies – encompassing more than 1880 people – on using red-light therapy to treat skin conditions, from actinic cheilitis to acne. When it came to cosmetic use, “the strongest evidence is for acne, including with some home-use LED devices”, says Pavlis.

Pavlis found the therapy can be as good as, or sometimes better than, standard acne drug treatments. For instance, one study showed 12 weeks of red-light therapy reduced pimples by 79 per cent, on average. In comparison, an oral antibiotic paired with topical adapalene – a standard acne treatment – led to just a 69 per cent reduction. Acne-specific devices often emit blue and red light, as both wavelengths can kill off pimple-causing bacteria.

The review also found the treatment evened out skin tone in people with psoriasis – an autoimmune condition – or rosacea, where skin becomes ruddy and bumpy. Both use cases, however, have been tested in only a single clinical trial.

What of wrinkles and general skin rejuvenation? Here the evidence is mixed. In the most successful study, 60 per cent of participants saw fewer wrinkles and an improvement in overall skin tone, as evaluated by a dermatologist. But two other studies found no significant improvement at all.

Some studies suggest that red-light therapy may prevent and even reverse hair loss

Martin Parr/Magnum Photos

Hair growth is another area with promise. At any one moment, around 15 per cent of hair follicles are dormant, which precedes hair falling out. The vigorous fur regrowth Mester observed in his shaved mice was probably from hair follicles getting a red-light energy boost, jolting those that would have been resting into action.

The same appears true in humans. In a 2020 trial, researchers in South Korea used a helmet to beam red light onto the scalps of 30 adults with androgenetic alopecia, the most common form of hair loss. Participants used the device every other day for 25 minutes, while a separate group of 29 people did so with a mock version. After 16 weeks, hair density in those who got the real deal increased more than 57 per cent, on average, compared with the control group. Their hair strands also thickened, whereas those in the control group thinned. But it isn’t known how long this effect lasts.

Mester’s other application, wound healing, also has some backing. Many studies have found red and near-infrared light can help heal burns, scars and diabetic foot ulcers. However, most of them included just a handful of participants, meaning the evidence isn’t definitive. Which wavelength works best also isn’t known, though some research points towards the 630-to-660-nanometre range.

Studies have even shown that the therapy may assist with weight loss, especially when combined with diet and exercise. Yet almost all of them had fewer than 100 participants. And claims that red-light therapy can remove fat from specific areas – known as “spot fat” reduction – are questionable. In 2016, researchers at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland illuminated one side of 24 people’s bellies with a consumer red-light device, leaving the other side untouched. After six sessions, there was no difference in fat tissue between the two sides.

As for the rest of the purported benefits, forget it. The evidence simply doesn’t exist.

So, does that mean that at-home red light therapies have got the, er, green light? Not necessarily. Even in cases where evidence backs red light, devices vary in how they deliver it, using different wavelengths for different durations, and research hasn’t settled on which combo is best.

More importantly, consumer devices are, on the whole, too powerful, says Jeffery, emitting an order of magnitude more power than the few milliwatts needed to nudge mitochondria. Consumer devices typically deliver 60 milliwatts per square centimetre. But the optimal power is around a tenth of that – and Jeffery has seen effects at less than 1 milliwatt per square centimetre.

Face masks have become a popular way of delivering red-light therapy

Juli Konia/Alamy

“The [wellness] industry just loves the concept of more and more power,” says Jeffery. And, in the case of red light, more isn’t better. Turbocharging cellular energy production can gum up the whole system, with potentially serious consequences, including a build-up of those havoc-wreaking reactive oxygen species, he says.

Such an influx might explain why red-light therapy seems to lessen wrinkles. Because these molecules cause inflammation, they may temporarily plump up skin. Jeffery worries that people who use powerful red-light devices regularly are storing up trouble. “We don’t know what’s going to happen in 10 years’ time,” he says. “Maybe your face is going to drop off.”

When it comes to buying your own red-light device, Jeffery’s advice is: don’t bother. “You’re doing more harm than good, and you’re wasting money.”

Beyond aesthetics

The hype around these potential cosmetic uses has outshone the ways red-light therapy is advancing into mainstream medicine.

More than 200 clinical trials have tested the tech for treating 15 illnesses. A 2025 review found it showed promise for 12 of them, with the strongest evidence for fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis and cognitive impairment.

Fibromyalgia is a poorly understood condition characterised by widespread muscular and skeletal pain, leading to insomnia, fatigue and depression. It has few treatments. Yet the review found red-light therapy can help alleviate its symptoms, including the primary one, pain. It also reduces pain and disability in knee osteoarthritis and, to a lesser degree, improves burning mouth syndrome, neck pain, diabetic foot ulcers and some kinds of tendinopathy. But for six conditions – rheumatoid arthritis, plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendinopathy, fractures, carpal tunnel syndrome and tinnitus – there is no effect.

Perhaps most surprisingly, it may slow age-related cognitive impairment. A 2023 review of 11 clinical trials, mostly involving people with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, but also some with traumatic brain injuries, found transcranial near-infrared light most promising. With this in-clinic treatment, light passes through the skull, into outer brain regions. “We’re talking 20 to 30 millimetres, and that’s certainly enough to get to our best piece of brain,” says Mitrofanis, referring to the cerebral cortex, which carries out functions such as planning and short-term memory. Red-light therapy can’t cure or even halt cognitive decline, but it could potentially decelerate its progression, probably through boosting energy production in struggling brain cells.

While positive, the evidence remains uneven, with studies ranging from single sessions up to 72, each lasting between 30 seconds and 30 minutes. This underscores the need for larger, more standardised trials, some of which are already under way.

Mitrofanis and his colleagues are trialling an optical fibre that delivers near-infrared light deep into brain regions affected by Parkinson’s disease. He is also investigating its treatment potential for traumatic brain injury, stroke, Lewy body dementia and depression, and preliminary results are encouraging. “The patients felt better, their get-up-and-go was better, they had less fatigue, their mood was better,” he says. “But there is a long way to go.” The technology must still undergo multiple clinical trials, and researchers must pinpoint the best delivery method for each condition.

If that pans out, in the long term, the sky may be the limit. “This thing will potentially help any cell that’s in distress as long as it’s not too far in distress,” says Mitrofanis. “If mitochondria are too damaged, nothing will save [them]. But if you’ve got early signs of distress – the mitochondria are starting to get a bit wobbly – then you can save it.”

In other words, red-light therapy might help any condition in which cells are struggling – which is many of them. It may not be too long before we are all basking in a red glow, not because of social media hype, but because it is doctor’s orders.

News

- Carbon credits are flawed, but they can still help save forests (paid): 2026 May 12

- A new tectonic plate boundary could be forming in southern Africa: 2026 May 12

- Can floating data centres meet AI's huge energy demand? (paid): 2026 May 11

- Huge study of ancient British DNA reveals only minor Roman influence (paid): 2026 May 11

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ANALYSIS: ENVIRONMENT | MAY 12, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Carbon credits are flawed, but they can still help save forests

Carbon credits bought by companies to offset their emissions really have reduced deforestation, but not by as much as credit developers claim, according to a rigorous analysis

By Alec Luhn

A logging yard in the Amazon rainforest

Tarcisio Schnaider/Getty Images

In 1986, an energy CEO heard a briefing about climate change and felt guilty that his company was building a coal-fired power plant in Connecticut. The company eventually paid to plant trees for timber in Guatemala so farmers would stop cutting down intact forest, in theory compensating for the coal plant’s carbon emissions.

The idea would develop into markets that allow companies to offset their emissions by buying “voluntary” carbon credits that help avoid deforestation, among other measures. Advocates say land users should be paid to leave a forest standing. Critics say maybe the land users weren’t going to cut down the forest anyway.

So who’s right? Both, according to a growing body of research. Last month, one of the most rigorous studies yet found that most early projects did successfully reduce deforestation. But they sold credits for almost 11 times more forest on average than they actually saved.

Historically, forests have absorbed about half of humanity’s fossil fuel emissions, and tropical forests are particularly important, holding back global warming by about 1°C. But they are mainly in lower-income countries that are rapidly clearing trees to expand agriculture like cattle ranching and palm oil plantations.

“Forests are seriously under threat, and they do need financial mechanisms that can pay for them,” says Tom Swinfield at the University of Cambridge, who led the study. “Carbon finance is one of the best of a bad set of options for protecting forests.”

Although tropical forest loss slowed in 2025, more than 40,000 square kilometres of trees were still cut or burned. A gap of $216 billion per year of additional financing must be filled to achieve a global goal of halting deforestation by 2030.

Before the COP30 climate summit last November, Brazil launched the Tropical Forests Forever Facility, an investment fund that will pay its returns to countries for each hectare of forest they leave standing. But only $6.6 billion has been donated towards its $125 billion goal.

Carbon credits have been failing to live up to their promise as an answer to the shortfall in government funding. A 2023 investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial found that 90 per cent of rainforest credits issued by the largest credit certifier were largely worthless. As a result of that and other research, the market value of voluntary credits collapsed by 60 per cent that year and, for the most part, never recovered.

In response, Swinfield and his colleagues analysed 44 projects started after United Nations guidelines for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) were developed in the 2010s. Thirty-six of them resulted in at least slightly less deforestation than would have been expected if the project didn’t exist, and only one resulted in significantly more deforestation.

At the same time, only about 1/11th of the credits were justified. But that average was inflated by the eight projects that didn’t reduce deforestation, which also issued the largest number of credits. Excluding the nine top credit sellers, about one-quarter of credits were legitimate.

The over-crediting was largely caused by two main errors, which may have been unintentional, says Swinfield. To estimate how much forest in a project area would have been cut down if it hadn’t been protected, credit developers looked at how much had already been chopped down in a similar, unprotected “reference area”. They then modelled how much more deforestation might occur in the future on top of this.

But developers selected reference areas that were more exposed to deforestation because they were closer to a road or on gentler terrain. And they tended to pick the worst-case scenario for future deforestation, rather than a more likely middle-of-the-road one.

The study cited a project in the Amazon rainforest in Peru designed to create an alternative income source to slash-and-burn agriculture for 18 local communities. The French company that developed it selected a patch of rainforest around the project area as the reference area. But this reference area was on average lower, less steep, less heavily forested and about half as far from the nearest road, meaning it was likely to suffer greater deforestation than the project area in any case.

“Many of these projects may have been good, but the methods used to work out how much credit should have been generated were often bad,” says Swinfield.

If developers, credit certifiers and ratings agencies hold projects to the more accurate methodology outlined in the research, it would cut down on over-crediting. But it would also increase the price of carbon credits, since there would be fewer credits, and development costs would be higher. So companies should also pay more for carbon credits if they want to claim to have net-zero emissions, says Swinfield’s collaborator Julia Jones at Bangor University, UK.

“The era of companies being able to offset their carbon emissions by buying really cheap emissions [credits] that claim to slow deforestation in poor countries, I think that is over,” she says. “You can’t deliver equitable and effective forest conservation for a low price.”

An avoided deforestation credit, which is supposed to represent 1 tonne of avoided CO2 emissions, can still be purchased for as little as a few dollars. From high-quality projects, it can cost tens of dollars.

Meanwhile, a different type of credit for actively removing carbon from the atmosphere, either through tree planting or novel techniques like direct air capture machines, costs hundreds of dollars at least.

“There needs to be a market for high-quality carbon credits that genuinely do what they say on the tin in terms of avoided deforestation,” says Jones.

While avoided deforestation credits do prevent some emissions, as the study shows, they are incompatible with the Paris Agreement goal of reaching net-zero emissions, says Danny Cullenward at the University of Pennsylvania. That’s because companies are buying them to offset rather than actually reduce their emissions.

If they truly wanted to help forests and the climate, they would buy high-quality credits and not “retire” them against their emissions budget, says Cullenward. Or they would simply donate funds to forest conservation. Either way, it is important to quantify deforestation risk more accurately.

“We need to protect tropical forests, and if we know how to measure impact, we can pay for and quantify those benefits without making an offsetting claim,” he says. “We can do so with or without carbon credits.”

EARTH | MAY 12, 2026, 1:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A new tectonic plate boundary could be forming in southern Africa

Gases collected from boiling mineral springs in Zambia contain the chemical signature of having come directly from the Earth’s mantle, a sign of a rupture in the tectonic plates and the possible beginning of a new continental boundary

By James Woodford

Aerial view of the Kafue Rift southern boundary fault zone. The hot springs where researchers sampled gases lie in the green thickets

Michael Daly

The African continent may have begun tearing itself apart in a new location. Gases emerging from an arc of hot springs in Zambia appear to be coming from deep below Earth’s crust, in a sign that a new tectonic plate boundary could be opening up.

There are many rift valleys around the world where continents have been pulling apart for tens of millions of years, including the East African Rift valley, which runs from the Red Sea to Mozambique. Over millions of years, rifting can lead to a tectonic plate splitting in two, but it is unusual to find a site where this process may be just beginning, says Rūta Karolytė at the University of Oxford.

The Kafue Rift in Zambia is part of a 2500-kilometre-long rift zone stretching from Tanzania to Namibia and possibly out into the Atlantic Ocean. Geologists think the area may be showing signs of being in the early stages of forming a new boundary between continental plates, because of the geography, low-gravity anomalies, high sub-surface temperatures and low-level seismicity. But, until now, there has been no geochemical evidence.

Karolytė and her colleagues have now analysed gas samples collected from five hot springs and three geothermal wells in central Zambia. The team found that helium and carbon isotope ratios in the gases are the same as those that exist deep beneath Earth’s crust, suggesting that fluids from the mantle, up to 190 kilometres below the springs, are making their way to the surface. This implies a tear in the region’s tectonic plates.

“What our data confirms is that this system is currently ‘awake’ and geologically active,” says Karolytė. “Having an active rift developing doesn’t necessarily mean that in 100 million years you’re going to have an ocean there. But it is a possibility.”

The earliest stages of continental rifting release gases that have accumulated in the rocks for millions of years. Among these is helium, a critical resource for high-tech industry and medicine. In the Kafue Rift, this process has created concentrations of helium of up to 2.3 per cent in the fluids reaching the surface – high enough that the region is already attracting interest from industry.

“It’s hard to find these tectonic conditions that are just right to concentrate and release helium in a way that it can be captured,” says Karolytė.

Patrice Rey at the University of Sydney, Australia, says, despite the absence of active volcanoes and significant seismicity, he agrees there are many signs in the region that the landscape is tectonically active.

The new geochemical evidence from the hot springs reveals that the Kafue Rift is an early-stage continental rift where mantle fluids rich in primordial helium-3 are rising through faults, he says. “It is reasonable to think that the Kafue Rift may evolve into a plate boundary sometime in the future.”

Journal reference:

Frontiers in Earth Science DOI: 10.3389/feart.2026.1799564

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

Can floating data centres meet AI's huge energy demand?

A US start-up is putting autonomous data centres in the ocean, powered by wave energy, but experts warn that the harsh environment could make maintenance challenging

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez

A prototype of Panthalassa’s floating data centre

Panthalassa

The data centres powering the AI boom already use more electricity than some small countries, and the International Energy Agency projects that their demand could reach 945 terawatt-hours a year – more than Japan’s entire electricity consumption – by 2030. AI is so power-hungry that companies are exploring the idea of putting data centres in space, where they could draw on constant solar energy. But one start-up thinks the solution is here on Earth – just not on land. Panthalassa is building autonomous floating data centres that will put computing power out in the middle of the ocean.

The Oregon-based company, which announced $140 million in funding last week, says its platforms could bypass overwhelmed electrical grids and deliver carbon-free computing in international waters. But beyond the technical and engineering challenges involved, it is unclear whether moving computing power offshore would actually ease data centres’ biggest bottlenecks – doing so may just replace familiar problems with far more expensive ones.

“Wave power is an old technology and it can work, but the ocean is a harsh environment,” says Jonathan Koomey, a former researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and an expert in data centre energy consumption. “The salt and the waves are effective at causing trouble for machinery.”

Shaped like a golf ball sitting on a tee, Panthalassa’s floating data centres are 85 metres tall – about the height of Big Ben – and made of plate steel. They are hauled into the water by a boat, then self-propel to their designated locations. There, they generate their own electricity and run AI workloads without a grid connection, emissions or engines.

The “tee” portion of the platform contains a long tube that is open at the bottom. As waves lift and drop the structure, sea water is pushed through the tube and up into the “ball” portion, which is hollow and mostly filled with air to make it float. The moving water spins turbines that generate electricity, which powers onboard graphics processing units, other computing hardware and satellite communications equipment.

Ordinary data centres use vast amounts of water to cool their AI hardware. Since Panthalassa’s servers are housed in sealed modules below the water surface, the container wall itself will act as a heat exchanger, with heat dissipating into the surrounding cold water. Ocean currents and mixing will disperse the waste heat, though potential effects on nearby marine ecosystems remain unclear.

Panthalassa is attempting something few data centre operators have tried before: running critical computing infrastructure beyond the easy reach of human technicians. “Our data consistently names power and networking as the top two root causes of data centre outages,” says Jacqueline Davis at the Uptime Institute, a global authority for data centre performance. “These can each be uniquely difficult to manage in a remote environment with little to no staff.” Panthalassa didn’t respond to New Scientist’s questions before this article went to press.

According to Davis, automation in data centre environments is largely limited to monitoring and analytics, with human physical intervention still being quite common, “especially in abnormal incidents, like when cooling compressors require manual restarts”.

This could prove to be one of Panthalassa’s biggest challenges. Latency will be another. The data processed in the floating platforms will be transmitted back to users on land by Starlink satellites, which offer limited bandwidth and higher latency compared with fibre-optic cables. This makes the nodes most practical for AI workloads that receive a job, let it run for hours or days, then return the result – like training advanced models or running scientific simulations. But most AI applications used by consumers, like chatbots and search assistants, depend on fast response times and constant network communication.

“Today’s power constraints are landing most acutely on the large AI training data centres,” says Davis. Panthalassa’s approach will be more viable if the total power needs of running trained AIs grow enough to rival those of AI training, she says. Until that happens, floating data centres are likely to have a hard time competing with those on land.

Although Panthalassa’s technology is unique, its idea of moving data centres off land isn’t. Aikido Technologies is developing floating data centres integrated into offshore wind platforms, and Mitsui O.S.K. is studying ship-based computing systems powered by marine energy sources. Earlier experiments, including Microsoft’s underwater Project Natick, tested whether placing servers in or near water could improve cooling and efficiency.

For now, though, offshore computing remains largely experimental. Beyond the engineering challenges, companies must still prove that ocean-based systems can compete economically with conventional data centres connected to power grids and fibre networks. “There are economies of scale to building data centres, which is why they are getting so large nowadays,” says Koomey. “They build big ones to spread fixed costs over more compute. It’s a lot harder and more risky to build big compute installations on the water than on land.”

HUMANS | MAY 11, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Huge study of ancient British DNA reveals only minor Roman influence

Genetic analysis of 1039 people buried in Britain between the Bronze Age and the Norman conquest highlights the impact of the Romans, Anglo-Saxons and Vikings on the island’s ancestry

By Chris Simms

Boudica led an uprising against the Romans in around AD 60, as depicted in this Victorian-era chromolithograph

Popperfoto via Getty Images

Despite the Romans’ huge cultural and social impact on Britain, the genetic trace they left behind was surprisingly small, according to a study of more than a thousand ancient genomes.

“The Roman conquest was much less impactful in genetic terms than perhaps historically we have been led to believe,” says Rachel Pope at the University of Liverpool, UK, who wasn’t involved in the work.

Marina Soares Da Silva at the Francis Crick Institute in London and her colleagues analysed the genomes of 1039 people in Britain spanning from 2550 BC, in the Bronze Age, to AD 1150, after the Norman conquest. Roman occupation began in AD 43, immediately after the Iron Age, and lasted until 410.

They found that most people who lived under Roman rule in Britain traced 100 per cent of their ancestry to Iron Age Britain, with only 20 per cent carrying detectable ancestry from outside Britain.

“Evidence of only 20 per cent outside influence on the genetic structure, given the massive transformations to the way people lived, organised their lives, built their buildings and consumed material in the Roman period, is a surprise,” says Duncan Sayer at the University of Lancashire, UK, who wasn’t involved in the work. “I would have expected it to be bigger and to be more diverse.”

“This suggests that the Roman conquest isn’t really a conquest of biology, but a conquest of lifestyle,” he says. “What they’re doing is turning Britain into a series of exploitable markets and a small number of people were able to drive that transformation.”

The findings chime with earlier work that showed a low Roman genetic input in rural communities.

One key area where the Romans seem to have had an effect is in burial practices. In pre-Roman Britain, there is evidence that women in some areas were relatively empowered and remained in their ancestral homes while men moved in from other communities, a practice called matrilocality.

This means that people from such areas with Iron Age British blood tended to be buried according to their mother’s lineage, for example by resting alongside maternal kin, rather than spouses.

Silva and her colleagues identified further sites showing evidence that matrilineal burial continued until the late Iron Age in what is now south-west England.

“That was a surprise to me. The fact that we are seeing it even further west is really interesting,” says Pope.

However, in Roman-period cemeteries, Silva and her colleagues saw no clear patterns in family relationships, suggesting that Iron Age burial practices – and ways of life – were modified or abandoned.

Pope says it is no coincidence that the tale of Boudica, the queen of the British Iceni tribe who led an uprising against the Roman Empire in about AD 60, has survived. “It’s about a woman protesting that women were no longer able to inherit property.”

After the Romans left, however, the genetic picture changed dramatically. As part of a period of migrations across Europe between about AD 400 and 600, a collection of Germanic tribes, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, established control over what is now England. The Anglo-Saxons, as we now know them, ruled until the Norman conquest in 1066.

Silva and her colleagues identified a widespread influx of ancestry associated with groups who probably spoke Germanic languages by the 6th century in over 70 per cent of individuals in southern Anglo-Saxon Britain.

This is very similar to the level identified by Sayer and his colleagues in a smaller sample of genomes from that period, around 76 per cent.

This led to a clustering of ancestry profiles, creating a population that Silva’s team calls early medieval Britain I. From the 8th to the 10th centuries, this early medieval Britain I ancestry became less prevalent, with many individuals instead carrying ancestries associated with central and southern Europe.

The team also found that the population-level genetic impact of the Vikings was limited, despite the establishment of a region in eastern Britain under Danish Viking control, the Danelaw, between the 9th and 11th centuries. Only 4 per cent of people in England between the 8th and 11th centuries retained ancestry thought to be from Iron Age Scandinavia.

This might be explained by the two phases of Viking Britain, says Sayer. In the first, the Vikings raided, taking people from Ireland and Britain back to Scandinavia as slaves, so the genetic impact is more likely to be seen in Scandinavia. Then, in the later invasion phase, the genetic mix of the people coming back to invade is very varied. “They’re coming into spaces where there are already individuals with the same sort of ancestries,” he says.

Silva and her colleagues found that the 69 genomes from after the Norman conquest revealed a similar lack of genetic influence following this invasion, but most of these genomes came from a single site in Leicester that was within the Danelaw region, so it might not be representative of the rest of the country.

Pope says the findings show how genetic input has always been coming into Britain from peoples all over Europe and beyond. “What is it to be English?” she asks.

“Perhaps we are driving ideas of ethnicity ourselves and it’s not something that’s so relevant in the past,” says Sayer.

Reference:

bioRxiv DOI: 10.64898/2026.04.28.721361

Walking Hadrian's Wall and Roman innovation: England

Follow in the footsteps of the Romans on this immersive walking tour along Hadrian’s Wall, one of Britain’s most iconic, ancient landmarks and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Read more

TECHNOLOGY | MAY 10, 2026, 3:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Tiny 'metajets' could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel

Minuscule silicon wafers propelled by lasers could be used to steer light sails, helping them travel beyond the solar system

By Leah Crane

An artist’s impression of a light sail

RICHARD BIZLEY/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Interstellar travel propelled by light just got one step closer. Light sails, which are huge sheets pushed along by light that bounces off of them, may be the best way to travel enormous distances through space, and now we may have a way to steer them.

“We knew already that any light or laser can impart momentum transfer, but now we can control the direction as well,” says Kaushik Kudtarkar at Texas A&M University. He and his colleagues created a tiny device called a metajet that uses refraction of light, not just reflection, to move in more than one direction at once.

The device is a material called a metasurface, an extremely thin sheet textured to manipulate light. In this case, the researchers flipped that on its head, using the light to manipulate the metasurface. A series of tiny pillars on the material steers the light that hits it, with the size and pattern of the pillars controlling the strength and direction of the momentum that the light imparts on the entire device as it moves through. The whole thing is about 0.01 millimetres across.

To test it, the researchers dropped the silicon device in water and shone a laser on it, watching it with a microscope to track its motion. They found that the metajet both levitated and moved horizontally, reaching a maximum speed of about 0.07 millimetres per second.

The metajet moving forwards, captured every 10 seconds

Kaushik Kudtarkar et al. 2026

“Now that we know about the forces on this device, you can change the metasurface design and then you can steer it in any way you want,” says Kudtarkar. There are metasurfaces that change their shapes over time, and such a material could be used on light sails to steer them through space, he says.

“For space, you can expand it, but you can keep it the same size and use it for biomedical applications as well: these devices could literally push drugs to a specific location,” says Kudtarkar. Lasers can already be used to do this, but their heat can damage the molecules, and with metajets, the drugs would not be directly exposed to the heat and light of a laser beam.

The researchers are now looking to make their device work with different wavelengths of light, especially the broad spectrum of sunlight to make them more compatible with the type of light sail that would be used for space travel. “It’s all a bit sci-fi,” says Kudtarkar.

Journal reference

Newton DOI: 10.1016/j.newton.2026.100471

ENVIRONMENT | MAY 8, 2026, 10:08 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

There has been a sudden increase in the rate of sea level rise

Satellite measurements show that in the early 2010s sea level rise suddenly accelerated to a rate of 4.1 millimetres per year, possibly in response to an increase in the rate of global warming

By Michael Le Page

Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam is increasingly vulnerable to flooding because of rising sea levels

Getty Images

There has been an abrupt change in the rate of sea level rise as measured by satellites. Around 2012, it suddenly accelerated and has remained higher ever since.

It is possible that the sudden jump is mainly due to natural variation. However, it could also be a response to the accelerating rate of global warming, says Lancelot Leclercq at the University of Toulouse in France.

The average global sea level has already risen by more than 0.2 metres over the past 15 years as a result of global warming. This has been caused by a number of factors: as well as increasing melting of mountain glaciers and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica, the oceans are expanding as they warm.

Satellite measurements of sea level began only in the 1990s and the rate of rise was thought to have been fairly steady, at around 3.6 millimetres per year. But, as more satellite data has come in, Leclercq’s team has spotted a sudden step change around 2012, with the average rate jumping from 2.9 mm/year before 2012 to 4.1 mm/year since then.

“It’s not a huge signal,” says Jonathan Bamber at the University of Bristol in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the study. “We’re not talking about centimetres a year [of] difference or anything like that.”

That said, when the change in the trend in satellite data is viewed alongside tide-gauge data going back around a century, it is clear that the rate of sea level rise is accelerating, he says.

The team’s analysis suggests this jump is likely to be due to changing trends in several of the underlying causes of sea level rise, rather than just one. Not only are ice sheets melting faster, but less fresh water is being stored on land, meaning more is ending up in the oceans.

Since around 2010, the rate at which the planet is warming has also sped up, and this has been largely driven by falling levels of aerosol pollution from countries such as China. Aerosols have a cooling effect overall and high pollution has been counteracting the effects of rising carbon dioxide levels.

The acceleration of sea level rise could also be a result of this drop in air pollution, Leclercq told a meeting of the European Geosciences Union (EGU) in Vienna on 5 May.

“The trend change we found around 2012 seems to be linked with an increase in anthropogenic radiative forcing, resulting – at least partly – from a reduction of aerosols emissions,” says team member Anny Cazenave, also at the University of Toulouse. The findings were published earlier this year.

Another study presented at the EGU meeting suggests that ocean waters deeper than 2 kilometres have started to warm and expand in the past decade, which could also be contributing to this acceleration.

Before 2016, all the known causes of rising sea level added up to explain the observed rise in average global sea level, Chunxue Yang at the National Research Council in Italy told the meeting. But since then, these factors have no longer accounted for the whole observed rise.

That suggests we are missing something, said Yang, and the most likely candidate is the deep oceans – we don’t have systematic, ongoing measurements of sea temperatures more than 2 kilometres below the surface. There is a global array of nearly 4000 robotic probes that measure sea temperature at various depths, but these don’t descend below 2 kilometres.

Yang and her colleagues have used ocean models to show that warming of the oceans below 2 kilometres can explain the gap in the budget. Their findings suggest that much of this deep warming is occurring in the North Atlantic Ocean off the US East Coast.

“In our sea level budget study, we see emergence of deep ocean warming around 2016,” says Cazenave, who also worked on the research. “Further investigations need to be done to check whether there is a link with the early 2010s trend change.”

The team estimates that deep ocean warming is now adding 0.4 mm to sea level every year, which would mean it is now responsible for around 10 per cent of sea level rise.

ENVIRONMENT | MAY 9, 2026, 3:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

A vast dam across the Bering Strait could stop the AMOC collapsing

If a key ocean current collapses it could plunge northern Europe into a big freeze. Now researchers are weighing up a drastic intervention – building a 130-kilometre-wide dam between the US and Russia

By Joshua Howgego

The Bering Strait separates Alaska and Russia

Ocean Color/OB.DAAC/OBPG/NASA

It would be an engineering project on a truly epic scale, but we may one day need to consider building a dam between Alaska and eastern Russia. The audacious proposal would be designed to stave off the worst consequences of the collapse of a vital ocean current, and researchers have been mulling it over this week at a major conference.

The idea comes from Jelle Soons and his colleague Henk Dijkstra at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, who study the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation or AMOC. This current system, which includes the Gulf Stream, is a major reason why northern Europe has a relatively mild climate for its latitude.

However, we know the current is weakening. There is huge uncertainty about what would happen if it collapses, but some models suggest it could see temperatures in northern Europe drastically plunge.

Soons thought a dam could be a possible intervention after hearing about how during the Pliocene Era, from roughly 5.3 million to 2.6 million years ago, sea levels were lower and there was a land bridge where we now find the Bering Strait. Simulations of the Pliocene climate show the AMOC was stronger then, mainly thanks to that land bridge. “I was like: ok, could we do this again?” says Soons.

To investigate the effects of building such a dam, Soons and Dijkstra ran simulations of the AMOC, varying both the date when the dam would be built and the exact amount of fresh water present.

Fresh water is a key part of the equation because it currently flows from the Pacific through the Bering Strait into the north Atlantic, which weakens the AMOC. Building a dam would stop or slow the flow.

In work published a few weeks ago, Soons and Dijkstra obtained mixed results: in some scenarios the dam appeared to strengthen the AMOC, but in others it had the opposite effect. However, those results came from a relatively simple and low-resolution model.

On 5 May at the European Geosciences Union general assembly in Vienna, Austria, Soons presented work that repeated the simulations on a supercomputer using a much more advanced climate model. This indicated that closing the Strait would strengthen AMOC, especially if the dam were built early – by at least 2050. “I was surprised at how strong the recovery was,” says Soons.

The Bering Strait is only 59 metres deep at its deepest point and there are two small islands in the middle, meaning any barrier could conceivably be built in two halves. Ed McCann, a past president of the Institution of Civil Engineers and now at Expedition Engineering says the best way to do this would be to avoid concrete and instead use floating machinery to build a barrier of rock and dredged sand. “This sort of construction is pretty simple, just very big and very expensive,” he wrote in an email.

Jonathan Rosser at the London School of Economics says that the work is interesting but that because we don’t fully understand the AMOC, we can’t be sure of the consequences of such an intervention. “These drastic things really do have big uncertainties attached.”

Soons also acknowledges the uncertainty and says that while building a dam might be helpful to northern Europe, it could create other problems, such as altering rainfall patterns, elsewhere. “Whether you would consider this a serious proposal? I don’t think we’re there yet,” he says.

This is not the first time that researchers have mulled the idea of building a huge sea dam to mitigate climate change. In 2020, Sjoerd Groeskamp at the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research unveiled an idea called the Northern European Enclosure Dam, which would involve building two barriers to hem in the sea between the UK and Europe and prevent rising sea levels from inundating low-lying parts of the continent.

As well as effects on climate, any such dam would have other side effects on things like marine-mammal migrations, tides and shipping to remote communities. Soons says he has toyed with ideas like building half a barrier or having it descend to a depth of only say 10 metres. These are “interesting ideas” he says, although he hasn’t yet had a chance to consider their merits properly.

HUMANS | MAY 8, 2026, 6:11 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Neanderthal 'kneeprint' found next to mysterious stalagmite circle

An impression made in clay around 175,000 years ago could be a kneeprint left by one of the builders of a strange stalagmite circle found deep inside Bruniquel cave in south-west France

By Michael Le Page

Bruniquel cave in France contains circular structures made of broken stalagmites

Etienne FABRE/SSAC

Around 175,000 years ago, Neanderthals ventured deep inside a cave in what is now France, broke off stalagmites and used them to build mysterious circular structures. Later on, bears moved in and obliterated almost all of the footprints and other traces they left on the cave floor – apart from an impression in clay that could be the kneeprint of a kneeling Neanderthal.

“It’s just a hypothesis,” says Sophie Verheyden at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. “To be sure of that, we need a lot of imprints of knees to compare it to.”

The stalagmite circles were discovered in the 1990s in Bruniquel cave, near Toulouse in south-west France, and described in a 2016 paper by a team including Verheyden.

While ancient human footprints are well known and well studied, ancient kneeprints have never been investigated before, as far as Verheyden is aware. To start doing this, she and her colleagues plan to ask people to kneel in a variety of clays to see what impressions are left.

There is no doubt that the cave impression is ancient, says Verheyden. It has been covered and preserved by a thin layer of calcium carbonate – the same material that formed the stalagmites. A bear specialist has also examined it and concluded it isn’t a bear print.

It might even be possible to find conclusive evidence in the form of Neanderthal DNA associated with the impression. Verheyden has just met with Mareike Stahlschmidt at the University of Vienna, Austria, who has shown that DNA can diffuse into calcite – a form of calcium carbonate – and be preserved by it. “For Bruniquel cave, I would say it is worth a shot,” says Stahlschmidt.

Forensic studies of kneeprints have shown that they can contain DNA from skin cells, hair or blood, she says. Normally, this degrades rapidly, but if the kneeprint in the cave was rapidly mineralised, some might have been preserved.

Since Homo sapiens wasn’t in Europe around 175,000 years ago, the people responsible for the stalagmite circles must have been Neanderthal. “We don’t know of any other humans present at that period,” says Verheyden.

A possible Neanderthal kneeprint in the Bruniquel cave, France

Sophie Verheyden

Earlier this year, her team reported that the entrance to the cave collapsed at least 140,000 years ago and remained closed until its rediscovery by cavers in 1990, so researchers are confident all the artefacts within it are Neanderthal in origin.

Some of the broken stalagmites are more than 20 centimetres thick at the base, Verheyden says, so they’re unlikely to have been snapped off by passing bears. What’s more, her team has recently been able to locate the bases of a handful of the broken-off stalagmites and date the breakage to around the same time that the stalagmite circles were built. Both the structures and the broken stalagmites were dated by measuring radioactive isotopes in the calcite growths that cover the rock in the caves.

“The age is a strong argument because it’s simultaneous with the construction of these structures,” says Verheyden, who presented her findings on 4 May at a meeting of the European Geosciences Union in Vienna.

So it appears that Neanderthals went to much effort to break off the stalagmites and then use them to build the circles, the largest of which is around 7 metres in diameter. The obvious explanation is that they were the base of shelters – except that they are found more than 300 metres into the cave, where it is pitch black.

“You need to be sure of your light when you go 300 meters underground,” says Verheyden. Traces of fire suggest the circles were lit, but it still seems unlikely that Neanderthals lived there day to day.

Link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLrAJo6-SH4

The location of the circles has led to speculation that their purpose was cultural or religious, rather than practical. “It’s very attractive to directly go for this explanation, but as a scientist, of course, you look for objective arguments,” Verheyden says.

Her team is developing ways to “fingerprint” the stalagmites based on their mineral composition, so they can see where in the cave the broken ones came from and if, for instance, stalagmites were brought from distant parts of the cave – or even other caves – to create the circles.

For example, it is known that some Mayan peoples collected stalagmites from deep within caves for use in fertility amulets, says Verheyden, rather than simply collecting those near the entrances. So being able to pinpoint the source of the broken stalagmites could reveal clues to the builders’ intentions.

The team is always trying to find ways to look through the layers of calcium carbonate covering parts of the floor. There could be a lot of Neanderthal footprints and impressions that were filled with calcium carbonate before the bears took over the cave.

“We have a lot of hope,” says Verheyden. “Every time we go in the cave, we discover new stuff, even after 10 years.”

Neanderthals, ancient humans and cave art: France

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

Find out more

SPACE | MAY 8, 2026, 2:33 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

US government releases huge batch of UFO files

The US Department of Defense has released hundreds of documents and photographs related to UFOs, some of which have been declassified, in the first of many drops to come

By Leah Crane

Archival imagery from the Apollo 17 mission to the moon. The yellow box contains an enlarged area of the original photo in which three lights are visible above the lunar terrain

US Department of Defense

The US Department of Defense (DoD) released a trove of files on UFOs. The files include images along with government documents and correspondence, some of which were classified until now.

“These files, hidden behind classifications, have long fueled justified speculation – and it’s time the American people see it for themselves,” said US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth in a statement on the government website where the files are displayed.

The images are mostly photographs taken by members of the US military showing small dots or indistinct shapes in the sky. Of more interest are the hundreds of pages of files relating to UFOs, also called unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), from the FBI, Air Force and various other government departments.

Many of the pages are correspondence between the government and concerned members of the public. Some are pamphlets from special-interest groups such as the Amalgamated Flying Saucer Clubs of America or the Fraternity of Cosmic Sons and Daughters, and others are requests from children to the head of the FBI – many to J. Edgar Hoover, who served in the role from 1935 to 1972 – for help with school projects.

Letters from UFO enthusiasts through the years, from the 1940s to now, show remarkable similarities in the sentiments they express: a feeling that UFO sightings have been mounting, that the government must be hiding something and that they are sure to be persecuted for saying as much.

Infrared still image captured of unidentified object over the western US in December 2025

US Department of Defense

The responses to these letters, and the internal government communications that have been released, seem to show something different – many thousands of reports of UFO sightings have been taken seriously and investigated, and there has been no indication that any of them have been extraterrestrial. This mirrors the 2023 results from NASA’s task force on UAPs, which found that normal aircraft and weather phenomena account for most reports, with only a few remaining unexplained due to blurry images and low-quality data.

The documents that have made the biggest splash are images and transcripts from NASA’s Gemini 7, Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 missions, each referencing some bright lights that the astronauts saw in space and could not explain. Most of these sightings have already been investigated and explained as micrometeoroid impacts on the moon or the spacecraft, bits of floating debris, and camera or film defects, although a few have remained unexplained thus far.

The DoD has opened a new investigation into the images that remain unexplained, and has been directed by the administration of President Donald Trump to “conduct separate reporting” on any unresolved UAP cases. According to the website, this is only the first of many rolling document drops expected “every few weeks” as more files are found and declassified.

LIFE | MAY 8, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Doubling their genomes may have helped plants survive mass extinctions

Many flowering plants have duplicated genomes, which could have helped them evolve to deal with extreme stress in times of environmental upheaval

By Jake Buehler

Genome duplication has occurred in many flowering plants, such as the purple gromwell

David Chapman/Alamy

Extra copies of genetic instructions may have helped flowering plants survive mass extinctions, including the catastrophe that saw off the dinosaurs.

New findings suggest that angiosperms – flowering plants like daisies, grasses and fruit trees – may have survived major environmental and ecological upheavals in Earth’s prehistory thanks to accidentally duplicated genomes. Normally, such surplus genomes are an evolutionary burden, but during chaotic periods they may have helped angiosperms flourish into the dominant plant life we see today.

Typically, organisms that reproduce sexually have two copies of their chromosomes, one from each parent. But plants – and especially angiosperms – often have more than two, a condition called polyploidy, resulting from the genome failing to halve in the reproductive cells. Plants like potatoes and some wheat varieties have four copies of their chromosomes. Others might have eight copies or more.

A third of angiosperms today are polyploid, says Hengchi Chen at the University of Göttingen in Germany. But previous analyses of the deep evolutionary history of polyploidy have suggested that old duplications are fairly rare.

“Most polyploid organisms went extinct during long-term evolution,” says Chen.

He and his colleagues wanted to know why many genome duplications in angiosperms dwindled out millions of years ago and why others took root. They analysed the genomes of 470 angiosperm species to develop an evolutionary tree. Across roughly 150 million years of evolution, the team detected and dated 132 occasions when genomes duplicated long ago.

These duplications clustered into nine prehistoric periods between 108 million and 14 million years ago. Almost all of them coincided with major environmental or geological events, such as climate change, changing oxygen levels or mass extinctions – including the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous Period that killed off the non-avian dinosaurs. In times of global chaos, polyploid plants seemed to have a heyday.

Most of the time, polyploidy can be a major disadvantage, stunting growth or making it difficult or impossible to successfully mate with non-polyploid relatives. But times of turmoil may have set the stage for polyploid plants’ unlikely success through multiple factors converging together.

For example, extreme heat or cold may have increased the chances of a misfiring during reproduction, says Chen, encouraging the rate of polyploidy to rise in the first place. Polyploids can also have a boosted resilience to stress factors like drought and salt exposure, and their extra genes might evolve new functions in a rapidly changing world. What’s more, changing ecosystems have new opportunities as competitors vanish.

“The originally minor, polyploid individual that hides in the corner of the population somehow gets access to more resources, and it can also have this fitness advantage for the stress,” says Chen, leading to greater survival.

Angiosperms’ hyper-flexible, redundant genomes may be key to their success as a group, he says.

Pamela Soltis at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville is curious how larger sampling over a wider diversity of angiosperm species might affect the results. “Despite the fact that this analysis is huge compared to previous work, 470 species is still only a very small fraction of angiosperm species,” she says.

The total is close to 400,000, but new genomes are becoming available at “a very rapid pace”, says Soltis.

Journal reference:

Cell DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2026.04.008

ENVIRONMENT | MAY 8, 2026, 11:07 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Fire is spreading in the Chernobyl exclusion zone after drone crash

A drone has crashed in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, causing a fire that has spread to 12 square kilometres of land. Dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines are complicating efforts to bring the blaze under control

By Matthew Sparkes

A forest fire is burning in the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

Associated Press / Alamy Stock Photo

A large forest fire is spreading through the Chernobyl exclusion zone after a drone struck the area yesterday. Though the fire is serious, those on the ground say the risk of radioactive contamination outside the area is minimal.

The Chornobyl Radiation and Ecological Biosphere Reserve (CREBR) wrote in a Telegram post that around 12 square kilometres of land, located to the south-east of the Ukrainian town of Chernobyl and the nuclear plant’s former cooling ponds, are burning due to a drone crash – but didn’t give details on the type or origin of the device. As of Friday afternoon, some 331 people and 75 pieces of equipment are involved in the emergency response.

“It’s really big. Guys who are working on [the] fire line are breathing air with high concentration of radionuclides,” says Denys Vyshnevskiy at the CREBR. “After the shift, they check concentration radionuclides in the body.”

Vyshnevskiy says that 5 to 10 kilometres from the fire, the radiation levels are normal, and there is little risk of contamination outside the exclusion zone.

Other estimates using satellite images seen by New Scientist suggest that the area of the fire has actually grown to 24.4 square kilometres.

Olena Burdo at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Kyiv, Ukraine, was near the site when the fire started, but saw only smoke because the affected area was closed to scientists at the time by the military. She also thinks there is very little risk of radioactive contamination outside the zone.

The State Emergency Service of Ukraine (SES) said in a Telegram post that tackling the fire is complicated by dry weather, strong winds and the presence of land mines. “The fire is rapidly spreading across the territory,” it wrote. Vyshnevskiy says the hope on the ground is that rain expected this evening will aid firefighters.

The SES said that some areas are too dangerous for firefighters to access because of land mines, so are being left temporarily while efforts are concentrated elsewhere.

The Chernobyl exclusion zone is frequently overflown by Russian drones en route to Kyiv and other targets within Ukraine. Last year, a Russian drone struck the New Safe Confinement shelter, which protects the highly radioactive remains of the 1986 disaster, blasting a hole all the way through its multi-layer construction.

Footage from that night shows fire and smoke billowing from a gaping hole – luckily, it was far enough towards the edge of the building that debris didn’t fall onto the fragile reactor or sarcophagus below, which could have caused collapse and stirred up dangerously radioactive material.

MIND | MAY 8, 2026, 8:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Slow breathing can calm the mind without any need for mindfulness

How important is thinking about your breath for calming yourself down? We now know that slow breathing is effective even without conscious involvement

By Caroline Williams

Slow breathing can calm the mind without thinking about it – but conscious breathwork probably helps

Rahul Sapra/Alamy

You don’t need to be a scientist to know that taking slow, deep breaths will calm you down. What’s less easy to explain, though, is how and why it works. The widespread expectation that a deep breath will calm you down raises the possibility that it’s at least partly a placebo effect – that it works because we expect it to, not because of any change in the body’s physiology.

Now, a study presented at the Embodied Minds Summit in Los Angeles on 3 May, has provided an answer. Jack Feldman, a neuroscientist at UCLA, showed that mice trained to slow their breathing rate displayed less fear-related behaviours in standard tests of mouse anxiety. This, says Feldman, shows that you don’t need to believe in the power of breathwork to get the benefits. “It’s not a placebo effect because the mice don’t know it’s supposed to calm them down,” he says.

The study built on Feldman’s 1991 discovery that a small region of the brainstem, the pre-Bötzinger Complex (preBötC) is the master pacemaker of breathing rate in mammals. The preBötC mostly operates automatically, speeding and slowing the rate of breathing depending on the body’s needs. In humans, though, this region is connected to cortical brain regions involved in decision-making, allowing us to intentionally override the pacemaker to change the rhythm of our own breathing – a skill that enables us to talk, laugh and sing.

Mice don’t share the same skill set, so to manipulate their breathing rate, Feldman and his team used a technique called optogenetics, in which a light-sensitive protein is inserted into a specific set of neurons so that they can be activated with pulses of light. By targeting neurons in the preBötC that inhibit inhalation and lengthen exhalation, it was possible to use pulses of light to slow the mice’s breathing rate up to 70 per cent.

Slower breathing, less anxiety

After four weeks of daily optogenetic stimulation, the mice’s breathing rates slowed not only during the sessions but also between them, suggesting that they had been trained to breathe more slowly.

Three days after their last training bout, the mice were put through a series of experiments to measure anxiety-like behaviour. The results showed that trained mice were significantly less likely to freeze in a stressful situation than control mice. They also spent more time exploring open spaces while controls stuck to the dark corners for safety. This, says Feldman, demonstrates that slow breathing doesn’t have to be a deliberate choice to induce calm – it’s a happy side effect of the way the brain is wired.

The finding is important, says Andrea Zaccaro, a neuroscientist at the “G. d’Annunzio” University of Chieti-Pescara, in Italy because “it isolates a low-level or bottom-up component of the breathing–emotion relationship.” But, he adds, that doesn’t mean that mindful attention to the breath is a waste of time. “While slow breathing itself may have physiological effects, mindful attention to the breath could plausibly amplify, stabilize, or contextualize those effects,” he says.

So, while you don’t have to believe the meditating hype to get the benefits of slow breathing, you might find your inner calm a little faster if you do.

Reference

bioRxiv DOI: 10.1101/2024.12.09.627565

HEALTH | MAY 7, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

PCOS postpones perimenopause and allows pregnancies at older ages

Only 3 per cent of those with polycystic ovary syndrome reach perimenopause by the age of 46, which may allow them to conceive when older

By Alice Klein

An MRI scan of polycystic ovaries (green)

GUSTOIMAGES/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is notorious for disrupting hormones and fertility, but it may have some surprising benefits after the age of 40. Ageing seems to naturally reshape the affected ovaries, often making periods more regular, delaying perimenopause and increasing fertility.

“Over the years, we’ve had so many women with PCOS telling us how they thought they would never be able to get pregnant without ART [assisted reproductive technology] and then they were so surprised because it happened in their 40s,” says Terhi Piltonen at Oulu University Hospital in Finland. “We call these children who they never thought they would have ‘evening stars’.”

Piltonen and her colleagues studied how PCOS influences the menopausal transition using data from 1849 women who were born in Finland in 1966 and had had regular health checks ever since as part of the Northern Finland Birth Cohort study.

When the women were 31 years old, 380 of them met the criteria for PCOS, meaning they had at least two of three characteristic features: irregular or no periods, high levels of testosterone and elevated anti-Müllerian hormone, which is a hormone produced by small follicles in the ovary.

By the age of 46, only 3 per cent of these women had reached late perimenopause or menopause, compared with 18 per cent of women without the condition. This delayed menopausal transition is consistent with a smaller study in Sweden that found women with PCOS reached menopause four years later, on average, than those without the condition.

Piltonen believes this delayed transition may occur because women with PCOS are born with a larger reserve of eggs, which prolongs their fertile period.

In young adulthood, these extra eggs are problematic because they crowd the ovary and make it “too tight”, says Piltonen. Often, several eggs try to mature at the same time, but get stuck midway because of the crowding. These underdeveloped eggs look like dark spots on ultrasounds and were previously misidentified as cysts, hence the misleading name “polycystic ovary syndrome”, which will soon be formally changed. Because it is challenging for the eggs to reach full maturity and be released, ovulation occurs infrequently or not at all, periods are irregular and opportunities to become pregnant are fewer.

At the same time, the hormone imbalances associated with PCOS can cause weight gain, metabolic problems, acne and excess body hair.

As egg numbers naturally dwindle with age, however, the ovaries of women with PCOS become less crowded and it is easier for their eggs to mature properly and be released, says Piltonen. “This is why women with PCOS often find that their menstrual cycle becomes more regular as they get older,” she says. It also explains why some who previously had difficulties conceiving suddenly find themselves highly fertile, she says.

Piltonen believes that the delayed menopause caused by PCOS is likely to be beneficial because the drop in oestrogen that occurs at menopause is associated with weaker bones, thinner skin, higher risks of heart disease and other complications. One study found that women who reached menopause after the age of 55 lived two years longer, on average, than those who reached it before the age of 40.

PCOS may even have had evolutionary advantages in our ancestors when food resources were limited and childbirth was riskier, says Piltonen. Being able to store extra energy by carrying more weight, having longer gaps between childbirth to recover and continuing to reproduce at older ages may have given women with PCOS an edge, she says. “PCOS is so common that I think it must have had some benefits.”

Journal reference

Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica DOI: 10.1111/aogs.70198

HEALTH | MAY 7, 2026, 12:40 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Hantavirus outbreak will not cause a covid-style pandemic, says WHO

The World Health Organization sought to quell worldwide fears over the hantavirus outbreak on the cruise ship MV Hondius and reassure the public that the risk of widespread transmission is low

By James Woodford

Medics escort a person with a suspected hantavirus infection to an ambulance after being flown to Amsterdam, the Netherlands

Peter Dejong/Associated Press/Alamy

The outbreak of hantavirus on board the cruise ship MV Hondius is unlikely to become an epidemic, the World Health Organization announced today.

In a press briefing, a panel of WHO scientists sought to quell worldwide fears over the outbreak and reassure the public that we aren’t about to see a repeat of the covid-19 pandemic. The panel also said it intended to stay until all journalists’ questions were answered and expressly stated that it was important that people not be alarmed by the cluster on the ship.

“This is not covid; this is not influenza,” said WHO scientist Maria Van Kerkhove at the briefing. “This is not the start of an epidemic; this is not the start of a pandemic.”

So far, there have been five confirmed cases of hantavirus and three more suspected cases. Three of those who fell ill have died.

Two patients in hospital in the Netherlands and a person in intensive care in South Africa are all reported to be improving, the WHO said.

Hantaviruses are a group of viruses carried by rodents that can cause severe disease in humans. People usually get infected through contact with infected rodents or their urine, droppings or saliva.

Tests in South Africa carried out on two passengers from the ship have identified the pathogen as Andes virus, the only known hantavirus that can spread from human to human.

It is also one of the hantaviruses known to cause a severe illness in humans called hantavirus cardiopulmonary syndrome, with a mortality rate of up to 50 per cent.

Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director general of the WHO, said in a press briefing that because the incubation period of the virus is six weeks, it is possible more cases will be reported in coming weeks

However, the public health risks remain low because the virus requires close physical contact to transmit between people, and careful contact tracing and international cooperation will break the chain of transmission, said Ghebreyesus.

So far, every nation called on to assist in managing the crisis has cooperated fully, he said.

“There’s no need to panic the entire population,” said Abdirahman Mahamud, also at the WHO.

He said only symptomatic, infected people should be isolated. Those who may have been exposed to the virus will only require “active monitoring”.

Mahamud said the current situation is most analogous to an outbreak of Andes virus in Argentina between November 2018 and February 2019 that infected 34 people and caused 11 deaths. That began at a birthday party with approximately 100 guests. While the outbreak was serious, the virus didn’t go on to spread widely in the community.

“The main concern is the possibility of limited person-to-person transmission,” Luis Marcos at Stony Brook Medicine in New York state tells New Scientist. “However, such transmission appears to be inefficient and can typically be managed with standard isolation and quarantine precautions.”

“Overall, the risk of widespread transmission remains low, and the current level of concern may be greater than warranted,” he says.

Marcos suspects a maximum of 10 to 15 people who were on the cruise will end up being infected. Quarantine of people from the cruise will be enough, he says, and there is “no pandemic potential at all”.

Luis Escobar at Virginia Tech warns that the threat posed by hantaviruses should be taken seriously. “I believe hantavirus has pandemic risk, especially hantavirus causing respiratory syndromes,” he says.

He and his team published a study in 2025 reporting that there were more hosts of the virus than previously known. They analysed over 14,000 blood samples for hantavirus from 49 species at 45 field sites, finding 296 positive samples across 15 rodent species, including six new species not previously reported as hosts. The team identified Colorado, Virginia and Texas as particular hotspots for the virus.

However, Escobar believes the public health measures being taken will mitigate the pandemic risk from the current outbreak.

HEALTH | MAY 7, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Coffee's mood-boosting effects aren't just down to caffeine

A comprehensive study exploring coffee’s physiological effects finds that some of its benefits are down to polyphenols and their influence on gut bacteria

By Alessio Cozzolino

Coffee can influence our mood and microbiome

Artem Varnitsin / Alamy

Both caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee can lead to improvements in mood and cognitive performance, possibly through their effects on the gut microbiome.

Scientists have long known that coffee can influence digestion, cognition and mood, thanks partly to interactions with gut microbes. But while most research on coffee’s effects has focused on caffeine, coffee is also one of the richest sources of polyphenols – plant-derived compounds that gut microbes convert into biologically active molecules. These metabolites have been linked to anti-inflammatory effects and may influence brain function.

To get a clearer view of these interactions, John Cryan at University College Cork in Ireland and his colleagues recruited 62 healthy participants, half of whom were regular coffee-drinkers and half of whom were non-coffee-drinkers. After an initial comparison, regular drinkers abstained from coffee for 14 days, followed by a 21-day reintroduction phase in which participants were randomly assigned to consume either caffeinated or decaffeinated coffee.

The researchers collected blood, saliva, urine and stool samples to assess physiological responses to coffee-derived compounds. They also assessed the participants’ mood, cognition, stress, sleep and behaviour.

Compared with non-coffee-drinkers, consuming caffeinated coffee was associated with lower anxiety and improved attention, whereas decaffeinated coffee was linked to improved scores in memory tests and better sleep quality. Both kinds of coffee were associated with lower ratings of stress and depression.

When coffee was removed and then reintroduced, the participants’ microbiomes changed rapidly, with both regular and decaf coffee being linked to higher levels of beneficial gut bacteria. “We were surprised by how dynamic the system is,” says Cryan.

The analysis suggests that coffee’s effects on cognitive scores are caused by polyphenols, not caffeine, since these scores correlated with the measurements of certain metabolites derived from polyphenols in the participants’ urine.

Team member Daniele Del Rio at the University of Parma, Italy, says a key next step will be to determine how different types of coffee affect the microbiome. “Not all coffee is the same: even the degree of roasting profoundly influences its chemical composition.”

Nicola Segata at the University of Trento, Italy, says the work sheds light on a relatively underexplored area, but warns against overinterpretation. “The study’s relatively small sample size may limit how broadly the results can be applied,” he says.

“This study is interesting because, by examining the effects of coffee consumption on microbiota composition, it suggests that the human gut ecosystem may have helped humans adapt relatively rapidly to different diets and environments without requiring genetic change,” says Telmo Pievani at the University of Padua, Italy.

Journal reference:

Nature Communications DOI: 10.1038/s41467-026-71264-8

PHYSICS | MAY 7, 2026, 2:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Pressure from individual particles measured for the first time

A device made using a tiny bead floating in a beam of light can measure extremely small pressures and could help find a mysterious kind of neutrino

By Karmela Padavic-Callaghan

The ultra-sensitive pressure sensor features a 100-nanometre silica sphere held in place by laser light

Thomas Penny/Yale Wright Laboratory

The pressure produced by a single particle can now be measured for the first time, thanks to a device that uses a tiny bead held in place by a laser. It is so sensitive that researchers hope that it could help find elusive new particles, such as those that could make up dark matter.

Pressure is caused by particles hitting an object and collectively exerting a force across its area. Researchers typically think of it as an average effect rather than zooming in on each particle, but when pressure is extremely low, such as in experiments conducted in near-perfect vacuum, tracking every particle is needed to properly account for its effects.

Yu-Han Tseng at Yale University and his colleagues have now built the first device capable of making such measurements. The central component is a tiny silica sphere, half the size of some viruses, held in place with a laser beam thanks to electromagnetic interactions between the two. Whenever a particle hits the sphere, it reflects light which the researchers can then detect.

To test this setup, the team placed the device into an ultra-high vacuum, then systematically sent in particles of three different gases. They measured the device’s motion when hit by these particles, then calculated pressure from those measurements, compared it to mathematical predictions and found good agreement between the two – the device was doing exactly what they designed it for.

“You need to get everything right to get this measurement working,” says Tseng. “When we did everything carefully enough, the measurement turned out to be beautiful.”

Yu-Han Tseng, Thomas Penny and Cecily Lowe work on the pressure-sensing device

Team member Clarke Hardy, also at Yale University, says that the new device could be used to establish a new definition for what counts as an extremely high vacuum where standard pressure sensors would simply read zero. “You could just count the number of collisions, and that would be good enough to give you an estimate of the pressure in these extreme high-vacuum regimes,” he says.

“Individual molecular collisions are rarely observed in real time. Traditionally, their effects are only seen on average, like how a fast-moving object appears blurred in a long-exposure photograph,” says Joseph Kelly at King’s College London.

Animesh Datta at the University of Warwick in the UK says that similar device design, including some that his own team has been developing, could be used in astronomy, for example helping us understand the low pressure spaces between stars better by detecting gas particles that reside there but may have been missed by other sensors.

But the team has another goal in mind – using the device to detect hypothetical so-called sterile neutrino particles, which could resolve decades-old anomalies in particle-physics experiments, explain why particles with incredibly tiny masses exist in our universe and even be a convincing candidate for what dark matter is made of.

Reference

arXiv DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2604.18371

HUMANS | MAY 6, 2026, 4:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Dating over 50 is probably on the rise – but we know little about it

Research into dating has until now almost exclusively focused on younger people, but we’re finally beginning to investigate how romance changes in later life

By Carissa Wong

Research on love has largely neglected romance in later life

Alejandro Munoz/Alamy

We know almost nothing about how dating differs for older adults compared with earlier in life, a scientific conference on love has heard. But despite a lack of data, there are reasons to believe dating in later life is becoming increasingly common, and researchers are now starting to study how romance changes among the over-50s.

“There’s a massive dearth of information,” says Mairi Macleod, who runs Dating Evolved, a programme that helps women aged over 50 find partners. “But it’s really important that over-50s have good relationships; we still want to have sex and all the rest of it,” she says.

Why older dating may be on the up

There are several reasons why dating in the over-50s is thought to be increasing, says Macleod, who co-presented a talk at the Love, actually and in theory conference in Edinburgh, UK, on 5 May. One is that this age group is growing – in the UK, for instance, the number of over-50s increased by 3.1 million people in the 10 years to 2025, and this trend is set to continue over the next two decades.

Divorce rates among older adults are also rising in the UK and other Western nations such as the US, meaning more people over 50 are single, says Macleod, who married her second husband in her 50s. What’s more, it is becoming more socially acceptable to re-partner after a bereavement or relationship breakdown, she says.

A focus on young people

Yet research on dating is almost entirely focused on university undergraduates, who are easy to survey, and people in their 20s and 30s, meaning we know almost nothing about dating after we turn 50, says Craig Roberts at the University of Stirling in the UK, who co-presented the talk.

One reason why later-life dating is so poorly understood is that people tend to view love as a means for reproduction, which generally occurs before age 50, says Divine Charura, a psychologist at York St John University in the UK. Our 20s to 40s are also life stages where people are most economically productive. “It’s capitalism in some ways,” he says. “There is more funding available for studying early, working-age years.”

Society also tends to underestimate the romantic lives of older people. “If I say romantic love, you’re not going to think of my 92-year-old patient who still talks to me about her sexuality and romance meeting someone, and having wild sex,” says Charura.

The pros and cons of dating in later life

Macleod has set up a dating programme for heterosexual women over 50 in the UK, who may find it harder to find partners than older men. “There’s a shortage of men with increasing age after about 50,” she says. “Men just don’t live as long, and more men than women seem to be looking for a younger partner than themselves.”

This means that, with age, women are increasingly competing for a shrinking pool of men their age. “[Anecdotally] men are always in short supply in speed-dating events. A lot of times these have to be cancelled because not enough men turn up,” she says.

So far, Macleod’s programme has provided dating support – via weekly group calls, for six months – to over 200 women. She has gained insights on how dating differs in later life – at least for wealthy, highly educated women in the UK, she says. “There are advantages to dating later in life, things like not having a ticking biological clock and being financially independent,” says Macleod.

“Older women are better able to pick and choose. They generally decide not to have a bloke at all if they can’t find what they deem as a decent one,” she says.

Next, Macleod and Roberts are planning a study that looks at the challenges of dating in later life and identifies practical tips for older singletons.

HUMANS | MAY 6, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Bronze Age Britons fashioned copper-mining tools out of old bones

An analysis of 150 artefacts from a site in Wales shows that the ancient practice of making tools out of bone persisted even after the advent of metal-working

By James Urquhart

Wedges made of limb bones may have been used for splitting soft, copper-bearing rock

O. Zagorodnia

Even with the technology to make metal tools, people in Bronze Age Britain still used animal bone tools alongside metal ones to obtain copper, a practice spanning at least nine centuries between 3700 and 2800 years ago.

A study of 150 bones from the Bronze Age copper-mining complex at Great Orme in North Wales, UK, suggests the bones were deliberately chosen and shaped for specific mining tasks essential for copper extraction, especially in softer rock.

“It’s exciting because it challenges assumptions that Bronze Age mining was dominated by metal and stone tools; instead, we are seeing a more diverse and adaptable toolkit,” says Olga Zagorodnia at the British Museum, London, who conducted the work with Harriet White, an independent archaeologist.

Since the first archaeological excavations at the site in the early 1990s, over 30,000 bone fragments have been discovered. Previous studies focused on species identification, finding that over half belonged to cattle, with others mainly coming from sheep, goats and pigs. But it was suspected some bones were used as tools. A 2011 study identified wear related to use as a tool and technological features on a small number of them.

Now, Zagorodnia and White have taken a close-up look at the wear marks on 150 of the bones’ surfaces with high-resolution microscopy. They then performed experiments that mimicked mining activities with replica bone tools in order to compare the wear marks they produced with those on the ancient bones.

“One of the most striking aspects was how quickly use-wear developed, which helped validate what we were seeing under the microscope,” says White. “When we carried out experiments in splitting bone leading to circular fracture patterns, we could observe those same fractures in the archaeological examples, which really connected us to the past people at the site.”

The results suggested that the bones had been deliberately fashioned into several distinct tool types. These included wedges made of limb bone, possibly used for splitting soft, copper-bearing rock. Intentional tapering and polish on certain bone sections suggested that the implements were attached to handles and used in a similar way to metal picks, a finding that has never been reported before.

Scoops made from scapula or pelvis bones may have been used for raking or handling loose ore

O. Zagorodnia

Meanwhile, ribs were possibly used for scraping soft, sandy limestone. They might also have been used as stirrers or scrapers during processes that used water to separate and concentrate copper from the ore. The team also identified scapula or pelvis-based scoops, which may have been used to rake or shovel loose ore.

“What we may be seeing at Great Orme is not a new invention, but the continuation of a long-standing technological tradition [predating metal-working],” says Zagorodnia. Bone was a readily available material in pastoral societies and it was much less labour- and resource-intensive to make a tool from bone than from metal, according to the researchers.

The findings at Great Orme parallel other prehistoric mining sites in Europe where bone mining tools have also been found. “Communities in Bronze Age Britain and Europe were not simply replacing bone with metal materials; they were used alongside each other,” says White. “It suggests a deep practical understanding of material properties and a flexible approach to technology. It also points to organised mining practices, with specialised tools and likely skilled workers.”

“Both authors have brought a level of scientific discrimination not previously seen to this unique field of artefact study,” says Simon Timberlake, a freelance archaeologist based in Cambridge, UK. “The only way we can understand the people who helped change the technology of the Stone Age to the Metal Age is through the study of the tools they used.”

Journal reference:

Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2026.105751

Human origins and gentle walking in prehistoric south-west England

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

Find out more

ENVIRONMENT | MAY 6, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Deforestation could trigger Amazon tipping point in the 2030s

At least 15 per cent of the Amazon has already been lost, and further destruction could unleash widespread rainforest dieback with as little as 1.5°C of global warming

By Alec Luhn

Large parts of the Amazon rainforest have been cleared for cattle ranching

Paralaxis/Alamy

Destruction of rainforest for cattle ranching is making the Amazon biome more vulnerable to irreversible collapse, which could occur within decades if deforestation continues.

A landmark 2022 study on tipping points found the Amazon would likely suffer widespread dieback at global warming of 3.5°C and potentially as low as 2°C. That’s worrying, as estimates put Earth on track to warm by about 2.6°C to 2.7°C above pre-industrial temperatures by 2100. But the research didn’t include deforestation, which has already resulted in the loss of at least 15 per cent of the Amazon.

Nico Wunderling at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and his colleagues have now modelled Amazon dieback with scenarios involving both rising global temperatures and severe deforestation until 2050. If total forest loss increases to 22 per cent, the Amazon could suffer widespread dieback with as little as 1.5°C of global warming, they found. The world has already experienced 1.3°C to 1.4°C of warming and could hit 1.5°C by the end of this decade.

Deforestation slowed last year, but if it resurges, the Amazon could cross a tipping point as soon as 2031. The timing and extent of dieback predicted by the model varied depending on how much carbon humanity emits, with deforestation rates of 22 to 28 per cent leading to 62 to 77 per cent of the Amazon biome becoming grassland, savanna or scrubby forest.

“We found that there’s this about-2-degree reduction of the critical global warming threshold when deforestation is considered,” says Wunderling. “The reason why deforestation is so crucial is that it undermines this atmospheric moisture recycling feedback.”

Vast atmospheric rivers carry moisture from the Atlantic Ocean across the Amazon. After rain falls on one part of the forest, the trees transpire some of that moisture back into the air, which carries it to another part to repeat the process. Up to 50 per cent of the rainfall in the western Amazon is recycled from the forest itself.

But cutting down areas of the forest reduces this moisture recycling and kills off other areas downwind, which kills off further areas in a domino effect. “It only needs a little bit of a push from global warming to make these cascading transitions possible,” says Wunderling.

While concerning, the findings are based on a high deforestation rate that would eat into areas that are currently protected, according to David Armstrong McKay at the University of Sussex in the UK, who worked on the 2022 tipping point study.

Brazil lost more than 28,000 square kilometres of primary forest in 2024, equalling its previous record. But it nearly halved that rate in 2025, and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has promised to halt Amazon deforestation by 2030. Achieving that would probably avoid the tipping point even if the world keeps warming.

“Stopping all deforestation is probably optimistic,” Armstrong McKay says. “But even if there is some deforestation continuing, it probably won’t meet this worst-case scenario modelled here.”

All the same, Brazil still lost about 0.5 per cent of its primary forest in 2025. And for the past two years, two-thirds of forest destruction has been due to wildfires, which typically start when farmers burn vegetation in deforested areas but then escape into the neighbouring forest.

Once almost unheard of, wildfires can now spread because the rainforest is hotter and drier, conditions that will be worsened by the El Niño climate phase later this year. As a result, the study may be underestimating the vulnerability of the Amazon, according to Dominick Spracklen at the University of Leeds, UK.

“We’re getting these much bigger fires,” he says. “That is worrying if we have moved into a new kind of regime where that can happen more and more.”

Already, the Amazon has shifted from a carbon sink to a carbon source, and widespread dieback could emit enough carbon to heat the globe by as much as 0.2°C. It would also destroy the world’s biggest store of terrestrial biodiversity.

“We really want to be backing away from that threshold, rather than creeping towards it,” says Spracklen.

Journal reference

Nature DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10456-0

ENVIRONMENT | MAY 6, 2026, 9:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Huge landslide in Alaska caused 481m-high tsunami

When the slope of a mountain above Tracy Arm fjord, in Alaska, gave way on 10 August 2025, 64 million cubic metres of rock fell into the fjord, causing a 5.4 magnitude seismic event

By James Woodford

A reconnaissance flight a few days after the tsunami captured this photo of Tracy Arm fjord, showing bare sections of slopes on the far side where the tsunami stripped away vegetation

Cyrus Read/U.S. Geological Survey

A massive landslide in August 2025 caused the second-biggest tsunami ever recorded, with waters rising over 480 metres inside an Alaskan fjord.

The tsunami sped down the fjord at a speed of at least 70 metres per second and created a seiche, or reflecting wave, that sloshed around in the fjord for 36 hours.

Only the 1958 Lituya Bay tsunami, also in Alaska, which spilled over a 530-metre-tall ridge, is known to be bigger.

The region near Juneau, Alaska, is home to stunning landscapes where glaciers break off into waters enclosed by steep-sided fjords, attracting over 1 million cruise ship passengers each year.

But because the tsunami occurred at 5.26am, deep within the Tracy Arm fjord in south-east Alaska, no tourist vessels were close to where the worst of the catastrophic event took place, says Dan Shugar at the University of Calgary, Canada.

“This was a really… terrifyingly big wave,” says Shugar. “If a ship were in the upper part of the fjord, I can’t see how it would survive.”

Shugar and his colleagues reconstructed the event using satellite images, seismic data, eyewitness accounts and computer models. They found that it was almost certainly caused by a retreating glacier destabilising terrain around Tracy Arm fjord, leading to a massive landslide.

Throughout the 20th century and continuing into recent decades, the South Sawyer glacier, which feeds into the fjord, has retreated by more than 10 kilometres and thinned dramatically.

In spite of the massive retreat, there was no significant indication that a huge section of the mountain was about to give way, dropping 64 million cubic metres of rock into the fjord. Only in hindsight did researchers identify small tremors in the days leading up to the landslide.

At 5.45am, a group of kayakers camped 50 kilometres away woke to find their campsite being inundated and their gear being swept away.

The first that Shugar and his colleagues knew about the disaster was within hours, when they were notified that the landslide had triggered a 5.4 magnitude seismic event. However, it was not until mid-October that a team could be sent to the area to study the scale of what had happened.

It could be a harbinger of a future with many more climate-change-driven tsunamis, warns Shugar. “Hopefully this will be a wake-up call to policymakers in places anywhere where we have steep landscapes next to the ocean or lakes – North America or Greenland or New Zealand, Chile – because these tsunamis are a threat that are probably underappreciated.”

“Tsunamis are generally not primarily linked to climate factors, so this is another clear example of how climate change can indirectly trigger even those natural hazards we wouldn’t traditionally associate with it,” says Martin Koehler at the University of Queensland, Australia.

“It’s fortunate that no vessels were nearby at the time, especially given the frequency of cruise ship traffic in the region and the sudden, unexpected nature of the event.”

Journal reference:

Science DOI: 10.1126/science.aec3187

Physics

- Why do particle physicists like spending time in fields? (paid): 2026 May 12

COMMENT PHYSICS | MAY 12, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Why do particle physicists like spending time in fields?

The concept of a field plays a key role in particle physics, but what exactly is it? From its origins in the study of magnetism to the quantum fields of today, columnist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein goes exploring

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

There is more than once kind of field

Bennekom/Alamy

When we were first preparing to launch my column for New Scientist, my editor asked me what I would like to call it. “Field notes from space-time,” I said. This title has a bit of a double entendre that might not be obvious, but was fun for me as a physicist. It is a reference to the scientific idea of taking notes while out in the field – a lab notebook of sorts. Simultaneously, it alludes to a specific concept that is very important in particle physics: the field itself.

You might think that a field is a big open space you find on a farm, but in physics it is more abstract. Essentially, a field is a mathematical relation that assigns a number to each point in space and time. The intention is to characterise some physical phenomenon at that location. For example, when you feel the pull of a fridge magnet close to a refrigerator door, there is a magnetic force working between the two. That force has a magnetic field value at each location in space that gets stronger as the distance between the magnet and the fridge shrinks.

In fact, the first time a physicist used the word “field” in this way was when 19th-century scientist Michael Faraday was studying the magnetism of the element bismuth. While working on my new book, I read his journal entries and saw the first time he invoked the field idea, but I wondered how Faraday arrived at this language. I don’t know for certain, but my own theory is that it is related to the way in which Faraday was unusual for his time. Unlike other physicists of his era, he came from a working-class family. His parents had been born and raised in a village and came from a farming background. In other words, they were people who lived in close relationship to the land. In my mind, I imagine Faraday thinking about the invisible properties of wide-open spaces worked by families like his own.

The field idea didn’t stay in the world of magnetism. One of the most phenomenal innovations of the 20th century was the intersection of fields with the transformative theories of quantum physics, which had already invited scientists to understand particles and waves as having a dual relationship. In other words, particles like electrons are also waves and waves like the electromagnetic field are also particles (which we call photons). Not long after the community got comfortable with the idea of wave-particle duality, it became clear that there had to be a deeper relationship between the quantum and the field.

In the process of developing a complete quantum picture of the photon, fields once again became necessary. But this time, they were quantum fields. Just as the magnetic field quantifies how much magnetic force exists at each point in space, a quantum field determines how many particles can be created or destroyed at each point in space. As a result, we say that all electrons emerge from a quantum electron field, and so on for other particles. We also suspect that dark matter, which seems to be invisible but behaves in all other ways like it is made of particles, has a similar field that we are yet to discover. The universe is full of particles emerging out of the vacuum, thanks to quantum fields. In this sense, whenever I write about anything in this column, I am writing literal field notes, from space-time.

What are you reading?

I am completely obsessed with The Manifesto of Herman Melville by Barry Sanders.

What are you watching?

I am loving the final season of Hacks.

What are you working on?

Having finished launching The Edge of Space-Time in the US, I’m now focused on the UK release!

Technology

- Former Soviet scientific megastructures captured in striking photos: 2026 May 6

TECHNOLOGY | MAY 6, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Former Soviet scientific megastructures captured in striking photos

Eric Lusito crossed the former Soviet Union to explore vast scientific sites, some of which have been deserted for years, for his new book

By Alex Wilkins

The 45-metre-high tower housing the AZT-20 telescope at the Assy-Turgen Observatory in Kazakhstan

Soviet Scientific Institutes, by Eric Lusito, FUEL Publishing, 2026

These colourful photographs capture the remains of what was once a constellation of Soviet scientific megaprojects, all intentionally designed by the state to replace religious objects of worship.

Photographer Eric Lusito gained access to many of these Soviet sites for his new book, Soviet Scientific Institutes. Starting in Ukraine, Lusito spent four years travelling across the former Soviet Union, liaising with scientists and visiting many locations that had remained shuttered since the fall of the Soviet Union.

The first three sites Lusito visited were in Ukraine, in late 2021, before the start of the Russian invasion, and reminded Lusito of comic books from his childhood, such as Edgar P. Jacobs’s Blake and Mortimer and Hergé’s The Adventures of Tintin. “I found these scientific places very exciting and wanted to see more,” says Lusito. “I was drawn to their mysterious beauty, their history and to the way they had evolved over time.”

While many of the sites were in disrepair, some were beautifully preserved and frozen in time, such as the control room for the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope in Armenia (below), which was designed by Soviet scientist Paris Herouni in the 1970s. The beautiful design of rooms like these were no accident; speaking to Herouni’s niece, Lusito learnt that Herouni had to battle against Moscow’s scientific administrators to get it built.

The optical control panel for the Orgov Radio-Optical Telescope in Armenia

Eric Lusito

At their peak, thousands of scientists poured through the hallways and control rooms of these scientific institutions, each of them recording their clocking in on machines like the colourful attendance board in the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (below).

The original Soviet-era staff attendance board in the Institute of Radiophysics and Electronics at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine

Eric Lusito

Some of these were doing important practical research, such as in the high-voltage hall of the building previously known as the Electrotechnical Institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine (below), where scientists produced lightning-like bolts of energy, in order to learn how to protect the country’s first unified grid system. A Soviet-era mural, of a hand grasping a lightning bolt, can be seen on the rear wall.

The high-voltage hall at the Electrotechnical Institute in Kharkiv, Ukraine

Eric Lusito

Others, however, were doing purely fundamental science, such as in the MAKET-ANI experiment in Armenia’s Aragats Cosmic Ray Research Station (below), which measured high-energy particles that fall through the sky and settle on the high-altitude snow-capped peaks of Mount Aragats.

The MAKET-ANI, an experiment at Armenia’s Aragats Cosmic Ray Research Station

Eric Lusito

Many of the scientific sites that Lusito visited in Ukraine had to suspend their scientific operations after the outbreak of Russia’s war in Ukraine, like the Institute of Ionosphere in Kharkiv, which houses several parabolic detectors, including a 100-metre antenna (below).

The 100-metre parabolic antenna at the Institute of Ionosphere in Kharkiv, Ukraine

Eric Lusito

Much of what Lusito saw were derelict or decommissioned, but there were some green shoots. At the Assy-Turgen Observatory in Kazakhstan, Lusito photographed the 45-metre high pavilion housing the AZT-20 telescope (main image), which was originally started in the 1980s but ceased construction after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The project resumed in the 2010s and was finished in 2017, becoming Kazakhstan’s largest telescope and one of the largest in the post-Soviet region.

Humans

- The story of the first human tool: the humble container (paid): 2026 May 11

COLUMNIST HUMANS | MAY 11, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

The story of the first human tool: the humble container

An analysis of ancient human artefacts finds that the container, a simple but critical tool, may have originated 500,000 years ago. Columnist Michael Marshall explores how slings, ostrich eggs and wooden trays helped our ancestors survive

By Michael Marshall

An oil lamp found in Lascaux cave in France

Sémhur CC BY-SA 4.0

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.

In the prehistoric opening of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the first tool is a club: a long limb bone that proves handy for killing prey animals, murdering the leader of a rival hominin group and, finally, for throwing into the air ready for a dramatic jump cut. In this view, the first tool was a weapon.

This interpretation can be neatly fitted onto the earliest stone tools. Rounded rocks were used for hitting things, sharp ones for cutting and stabbing. We imagine that early stone tools were used for breaking things open, for hunting, for killing.

However, early people probably used other kinds of tools as well, ones made of other materials. Plant materials like wood were probably used all the time; it’s just that they are less likely to be preserved. The Stone Age was also the Botanic Age (and if you haven’t read Sophie Berdugo’s 2024 feature on this, I urge you to do so).

This opens up a lot of other possibilities, one of the most thought-provoking being: containers. What if the first tool was an object that could hold something valuable, so you could carry it around or store it?

If you think about it, a container is one of the most useful things you can have. “It solves a lot of problems,” says palaeoanthropologist Marc Kissel at Appalachian State University in North Carolina. “It opens up this new niche.” He and his colleagues have compiled a database of prehistoric containers. There are hundreds of examples, spanning over 100,000 years, but they argue – I think rightly – that this is a tiny fraction of what once existed. Furthermore, the container was one of the most important tools. “It’s one of the things that allow humans to be so successful,” says Kissel.

Back in time

Creating a database of prehistoric containers isn’t easy. Kissel and his colleagues spent over a year scouring the scientific literature for examples. They couldn’t rely on the word “container” or a synonym turning up in the texts, so they had to look for a lot of other terms that represented specific types of container. They called a halt last year, realising that “we have to stop adding stuff”, he says, and recently published a paper describing the dataset in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology on 8 April.

A further challenge was deciding what counts as a container. They chose a deliberately broad definition: “an object which fulfils the basic container principle (that of holding something inside themselves and acting as a barrier, separating that something from the external world) and is transportable via carriage on or by the human body”.

This has the effect of including a lot of objects that you might not, at first glance, think of as containers. One example is spoons, which we think of as utensils, but which hold something and allow you to transport it. There are also a lot of items interpreted as lamps. Each one is a small slab of rock with a divot carved out, into which people could place animal fats and burn them. The most famous example is from Lascaux Cave in France: it was carved from red sandstone and has a handle.

Other containers are made of hollow bones. For instance, tubes made from the wing bones of swans may have been used to carry needles. Ostrich eggs, which are large and sturdy, were used as containers in Africa, perhaps to carry water on long journeys. There are also some examples of rock art that show containers, such as an engraving from Gönnersdorf in Germany showing what looks like a net.

Engraved ostrich eggshells, likely fragments of ostrich eggshell containers from South Africa

Texier et al. 2013

The team ended up with 793 mobile containers. While they tried to find containers from the entire Pleistocene, the period spanning 2.58 million to 11,700 years ago, all the examples they found seem to be from the last 500,000 years.

Nevertheless, this represents a big push into the deep past. Traditionally, archaeologists have thought of containers as arising only within the last 10,000 years or so. The idea was that they were tied to the advent of farming and settled living – the so-called Neolithic revolution – and the invention of pottery. Agricultural societies would produce food surpluses, which needed to be preserved and stored, whereas hunter-gatherers probably didn’t have surpluses, and in a highly mobile society pots would probably get broken anyway.

However, Kissel says this idea had largely been abandoned already, because it presents the Neolithic as a hard break with the past, when in reality it was much more gradual and piecemeal. In line with that, some Indigenous peoples in Australia made pottery more than 2000 years ago (though that gets us into the complicated question of whether they were hunter-gatherers, farmers or – probably more likely – something more complicated in between). Likewise, foragers that settled in the Amazon 10,000 years ago left behind shards of pottery, and there is evidence of pottery in China as early as 18,000 years ago.

This suggests that people developed containers gradually, building up more types over many years. “I think it’s more helpful to see containers on a spectrum,” says Kissel.

The origins of containers lie deep in the past. Perhaps not too far back, though, because non-human primates like great apes don’t use them. “They will occasionally take a leaf, dip the leaf into the water, and have it act as a sponge to get the water to their mouths,” says Kissel. “But they don’t have containers, and that, to me, seems like a foundational difference.”

The oldest container in the database is a tray or dish made of bark. It was found at Kalambo Falls in Zambia and is between 400,000 and 500,000 years old. Kalambo Falls has some incredible preserved wooden objects: in 2023, archaeologists described what seem to be large wooden structures, perhaps houses, from 476,000 years ago. However, the dating of the tray/dish is less clear.

This exemplifies another problem Kissel’s team had, which is that a lot of these objects were excavated a long time ago. This means the information about them is buried in old literature, which is often not online, and the dating methods used would not pass muster today. The tray from Kalambo Falls was excavated in the 1950s by a team led by archaeologist John Desmond Clark. The main source about the tray is Clark’s two-volume book Kalambo Falls Prehistoric Site (1969), which contains a three-page chapter by botanist Timothy Charles Whitmore on “bark and other specimens”. There’s also a 1958 article Clark wrote for Scientific American. That’s not a lot to go on.

Hence, while there are some trends in the dataset, Kissell says they should mostly be understood as reflecting the limitations of the archaeological record, rather than the facts of prehistory.

For instance, 87.8 per cent of the containers in the database were found in Europe. “I don’t think that is showing that Europe is the place where containers began,” says Kissel. Instead, it’s a reflection of the huge amount of archaeological work performed in Europe compared to elsewhere. Also, we just saw that the oldest container in the database is from Africa.

Likewise, of the containers that have dates at all, only two are older than 100,000 years. However, Kissel is explicit that hominins were probably using containers long before this: these objects either haven’t been preserved or haven’t been spotted. (Other researchers have made this same point.)

What we can start to see, Kissel argues, is how ubiquitous containers were. In Europe, which is well studied, there are lots of examples despite the preservation issues. That suggests they were crucial to human survival.

Storage, not wars

We’re still using one of the oldest tools humans invented

Ron Giling/Alamy

One of the earliest uses of containers, Kissel argues, was to carry babies – perhaps in slings. A lot of anthropologists – especially female ones – have suggested this over the decades.

Among great apes like chimpanzees, the babies cling to their mothers, who are helpfully covered with thick fur that serves as a handhold. However, we have lost most of our body hair, and our newborns are so helpless that they can’t cling to anything.

With that in mind, Kissel suggests that baby carriers would have become useful when hominins started routinely walking on two legs, and when they lost most of their body hair. That happened several million years ago. “Australopithecines were probably using slings,” he says. If that’s true, then Lucy, the famous Australopithecus afarensis, was probably carried in a sling as a baby 3.4 million years ago.

One thing Kissel emphasised is that none of these ideas are new. People have been saying things like this for decades, but the ideas are only slowly moving to the forefront, perhaps because they were first articulated in feminist reinterpretations of prehistory, which were unfairly treated as kooky or unrealistic.

In 1976, anthropologists Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman proposed that some of the first tools might have been baskets, which women used to carry things like food. They were pushing back against male-dominated ideas of prehistory, which emphasised activities like hunting of large animals – incorrectly assumed to be primarily male-driven – and paid little or no attention to females.

Feminist journalist Elizabeth Fisher suggested much the same thing in her 1979 book Woman’s Creation: Sexual evolution and the shaping of society, in which she wrote that “Many theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of sling or net carrier”.

Speculative fiction writer Ursula Le Guin cited Fisher directly in her essay The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. “If you haven’t got something to put it in, food will escape you – even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat,” she wrote. Even a simple container will allow you to gather a surplus, which means you can stay inside the next day if the weather is bad.

Le Guin pushed this idea a long way. She said that our ideas about history and prehistory are shaped by action and violence, like the first tool in 2001 and all the heroic stories about killing dragons and bad guys. But, she argued, there are other equally valid stories to tell about gathering and parenting and building.

Many of our stories are focused on “how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki and how the burning jelly fell on the villagers and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire, and all the other steps in the Ascent of Man,” Le Guin wrote. “Lest there be no more telling of stories at all, some of us out here in the wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we’d better start telling another one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one’s finished.”

As I write this, I can feel some of the reader letters being written: the ones that say violence has always been part of the human story and that when it comes to understanding prehistory, we should just follow the data.

The thing is, as best I can, I am following the data. There is growing evidence that the thing that makes our species unusual isn’t that we’re intelligent or creative or aggressive – though we undoubtedly can be all those things – but that we’re friendly and emotionally needy and dependent on each other. For instance, whenever a human population has become isolated from others, they have been at far greater risk of extinction; they had no one to ask for help.

Our survival depends on networking and cooperating. Like, say, sharing some of your stored food with a friend who has come up short, using that handy container you made.

Life

- David Attenborough is one of a kind, for better or worse: 2026 May 6

- New Scientist recommends Attenborough documentary Making Life on Earth (paid): 2026 May 6

- Extinct relative of koalas discovered in Western Australia: 2026 May 6

LEADER: LIFE | MAY 6, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

David Attenborough is one of a kind, for better or worse

People often ask who might replace the nature broadcaster, who turns 100 this week. The truth is that he’s irreplaceable, but a wide range of voices are attempting to fill his shoes.

By New Scientist

David Attenborough on a shoot for The Trials of Life in Wales in 1998

Nick Upton/Nature Picture Library/Alamy

David Attenborough is inarguably one of the UK’s national institutions. He consistently tops polls for the most popular and trustworthy celebrity in the country. There will never be another broadcaster quite like him – but that’s OK.

Attenborough, who turns 100 on 8 May, began his career in nature broadcasting in 1954 with Zoo Quest, in which staff from London Zoo went to tropical countries to capture exotic animals and return them to the UK. It was very much a product of its time, but so was Attenborough. He was at the forefront of a new medium (only a third of UK households had a TV when Zoo Quest was first broadcast) and defined the template for nature documentaries, most notably with his 1979 Life on Earth series.

People often ask who might replace him, but the truth is, the niche that allowed him to evolve – a dominant broadcaster in the BBC and a cohesive culture enforced by a lack of choice in viewing material – no longer exists. Instead, the rise of social media has seen a Cambrian explosion in science communicators, each adapting to their environment.

“ The truth is, the niche that allowed Attenborough to evolve no longer exists “

There are pros and cons to this. From TikTok to YouTube to podcasts, we are now able to find a format that works for us, freed from a linear TV schedule. A far more diverse range of voices have been able to flourish, and people who are turned off by Attenborough (even if they don’t want to admit it in polite company) have many more presenters to choose from.

But this fragmentation also has its downsides. TV editors no longer determine what we see on our screens. They have been replaced by algorithms that often reward dopamine quick-hits rather than more in-depth work. While many science creators are a stickler for facts, like Attenborough, misinformation can also bloom unchecked. Plus, with no one ever watching quite the same thing, we have lost part of our shared culture.

Thankfully, Attenborough’s programmes remain available today, with many still as relevant as ever. Check out this round-up of our favourites, and pick something to watch in celebration of his centenary.

LIFE | MAY 6, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

New Scientist recommends Attenborough documentary Making Life on Earth

The books, TV, games and more that New Scientist staff have enjoyed this week

By Catherine de Lange

David Attenborough during filming for the 1979 Life on Earth series, the making of which is explored in a new BBC documentary, Making Life on Earth

BBC

Today, the style of nature documentary made popular by David Attenborough is so familiar I don’t even need to describe it to you. But it wasn’t always this way. When Attenborough made his series, Life on Earth, which aired in 1979, nobody had ever seen anything like it.

Earlier in his career, Attenborough had been a TV executive, in a trajectory that would likely have seen him sitting behind a desk until becoming Director General of the BBC. But having chosen to follow the path of writing and producing, he went out on a limb with Life on Earth to bring his real love – natural history – to the masses.

He himself wrote the ambitious script for the 13 episodes that would tell the entire story of how life evolved, before even a scene was shot. The production would involve 100 locations around the world, take years to film, and require a gargantuan (for the time) budget of one million pounds. When organising the (now famous) shoot with gorillas in Rwanda facilitated by the primatologist Dian Fossey, it would take three weeks of correspondence to get one letter exchanged. Setting up that shoot took a year and a half. The whole endeavour was a huge gamble, but one he was sure would pay off, not least because colour television was just being rolled out, and what better use of colour than to experience the wonders of the natural world?

I learned all this from a charming new documentary about the making of Life on Earth, produced by the BBC to mark Attenborough’s 100th birthday on 8th May. It goes behind the scenes with unseen footage, extracts from Attenborough’s diaries, and interviews with those involved. It paints the picture of a motley crew doing something groundbreaking, and, essentially, muddling through by the seat of their pants: Attenborough having to charm his way out of a coup, so that they could try to get the first footage of a coelacanth in the wild; or the time when they were kicked out of their hotel in Iraq by Saddam Hussein’s army. Then there was the poor young cameraman who was tasked with watching “Darwin’s frog” day and night to capture the brief moment when it would give birth via its mouth.

David Attenborough with mountain gorillas, on location during filming for Life on Earth

John Sparks

Of course, the risk paid off. Airing twice a week on BBC2, watching the show became an event in itself, with – according to the producers – pubs clearing out as people rushed home to their TV sets. By the end of the series, it was being watched by 15 million viewers.

Making Life on Earth: Attenborough’s Greatest Adventure is funny, deeply nostalgic, and ultimately an unapologetic celebration of the man who brought the natural world into the homes of millions.

LIFE | MAY 5, 2026, 8:01 PM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Extinct relative of koalas discovered in Western Australia

Fossils reveal that there were at least two kinds of koala when humans first arrived in Australia, but one died out about 30,000 years ago when the west of the continent dried out

By James Woodford

An artist’s impression of the Western Australian koala

WA Museum

Australia was once home to a second species of koala that lived only in the west of the continent, where it became extinct around 30,000 years ago.

Today, there is only one koala species: Phascolarctos cinereus. It is found almost exclusively in eucalyptus forests in eastern Australia and is threatened by habitat loss, disease, collisions with cars and predation by introduced species.

Numerous koala fossils, aged between 137,000 and 31,000 years old, have been collected in Western Australian caves over the past century. Until now, however, there wasn’t enough material to conclude that the remains were from a different species.

In the past 25 years, more fossils have become available to researchers, including skulls donated by the family of late speleologist Lindsay Hatcher, who discovered numerous ancient remains during his expeditions in caves in the south-west of Western Australia.

“Amongst the donation was a koala skull in very good condition,” says Kenny Travouillon at the Western Australian Museum. “Upon examination of that skull, we noticed differences with modern koalas that got us to start working on the fossil material in the collection.”

To the untrained eye, the new species, named Phascolarctos sulcomaxilliaris, would have been difficult to distinguish from P. cinereus, but there are subtle differences.

“In short, the Western Australian koalas were same-same but different,” says Travouillon. “They had shorter heads, for sure, and they seem to have less-well-developed chewing muscles than the east-coast koalas. But they simply chewed in a different way by having larger teeth and having a more efficient, shorter jaw to break down the leaves.”

A large groove on the cheek of P. sulcomaxilliaris suggests the animal had a larger muscle attached there that was used to either move a larger lip, with which it perhaps grabbed leaves, or inflate its nostrils to be able to smell leaves over a greater distance. Its skeleton was also less agile, suggesting it spent less time moving between trees.

When the climate dried and Western Australia’s forests disappeared about 30,000 years ago, P. sulcomaxilliaris vanished, along with many other animals that once shared its habitat. “There would have been [Tasmanian] devils, thylacines, giant echidnas, short-faced kangaroos and the giant marsupial Zygomaturus,” says Travouillon.

“Our first peoples in Western Australia would have lived amongst them and they would have been witness to their extinction.”

Tim Flannery at the Australian Museum in Sydney says the study makes a “convincing case for the distinctiveness of the Western Australia koalas as a unique species”. “I look forward to seeing if any DNA can be extracted from the fossils,” he says.

Journal reference:

Royal Society Open Science DOI: 10.1098/rsos.251572

Fossil hunting in the Australian outback

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

Read more

Health

- PCOS has been officially renamed PMOS, and it’s a momentous move (paid): 2026 May 12

- Read the winner of this year’s Young Science Writer Award (paid): 2026 May 6

HEALTH | MAY 12, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

PCOS has been officially renamed PMOS, and it’s a momentous move

PCOS will now be known as PMOS (polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome), and for Alice Klein, who has the condition, it's been a long time coming

By Alice Klein

The “cysts” (light pink) seen in polycystic ovary syndrome aren’t really cysts at all

STEVE GSCHMEISSNER/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) has finally got a new name. Today at the European Congress of Endocrinology in Prague, Czech Republic, endocrinologist Helena Teede announced it will now be known as polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome (PMOS).

This might not sound like much of a change, but it is a boon for those of us with the condition. For one, it addresses a huge misconception about how the ovaries are affected. It also draws much-needed attention to the metabolic and hormonal dimensions of the condition that have nothing to do with our ovaries.

Things have changed enormously since I was diagnosed with PCOS more than two decades ago, in my late teens. I had terrible acne and irregular periods, two common symptoms, and was sent for an ultrasound to investigate. I was appalled to see my ovaries covered in dark spots, so-called “cysts”. I was told I might not be able to have children, and that there was a risk the cysts would burst and require emergency surgery. I was bewildered and devastated.

It was only when I started looking into emerging PCOS/PMOS research for New Scientist that I realised how mischaracterised it had been. I first wrote about the condition in 2018 and it was the most-read article I have ever produced, which told me I wasn’t alone in wanting to understand it better.

The biggest myth that has been busted is the “polycystic ovary” part of PCOS. It turns out those dark spots aren’t cysts at all, nor are they at risk of bursting. Instead, they are eggs that have been unable to mature fully and be released via ovulation. The reason they get stuck at a midway point in their development seems to be because those affected have an overabundance of eggs in their ovaries, making it difficult for each one to grow and squeeze its way out of the crowd. I find this a much nicer way to think about my ovaries – that they are brimming with eggs, rather than riddled with cysts.

Because this crowding disrupts egg development and ovulation, it can cause irregular or absent periods. It can also take longer to become pregnant, because eggs are released less often for potential fertilisation. However, research shows that women with the condition are just as likely to ultimately have their desired family size as those without it, and 80 per cent conceive without medication or IVF. After years worrying that I wouldn’t be able to have a family, I had the three children I wanted, although I did have five miscarriages along the way, which may have been related to my hormonal imbalances.

Another important development is the understanding that the condition affects the whole body, not just the ovaries. It is characterised by high levels of male sex hormones like testosterone, which can cause acne, excess hair on the face and body, and thinning hair on the head. Insulin resistance is also common and can lead to weight gain, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease. Anxiety and depression may emerge too.

On the other hand, there may be some benefits after the age of 40. A recent study found that the higher egg reserve in those with the condition can delay perimenopause and menopause, which is good news, because later menopause is associated with living longer. It may also allow pregnancies at older ages.

Terhi Piltonen at Oulu University Hospital in Finland, who is president of the International Androgen Excess and Polycystic Ovary Syndrome Society, told me that the reason why the condition is so common – occurring in about 1 in 8 women – may be that it had evolutionary benefits for our ancestors. When food resources were scarcer and childbirth more dangerous, there may have been advantages to being able to store energy as extra weight, have longer gaps between pregnancies and continue reproducing at older ages.

Now that we have an oversupply of energy-dense foods and childbirth is safer, the condition tends to come with more problems than benefits. But we also have tools for managing most of the symptoms, which is why it is important that they are accessed. For a long time, the primary focus on the ovaries has meant that help is often sought only for fertility challenges, but the renaming of the condition will hopefully widen this out.

Teede – who works at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia – has spent 14 years leading the campaign for a new name and has worked with 56 patient and professional organisations to come up with one that is scientifically accurate and easy to implement. If it lessens some of the confusion and worry that has often accompanied diagnoses in the past, all the hard work will have been worth it.

COMMENT HEALTH | MAY 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT | VIEW ON NEW SCIENTIST

Read the winner of this year’s Young Science Writer Award

Prize-winning young writer Hasset Kifle, 17, explores how the world of super-competitive running is being transformed by so-called “super shoes” – and what cost this will have on the sport

By Hasset Kifle

Hasset Kifle accepts her award

Mark Lewis/Mark Lewis Photography

The world is moving forward at an unimaginable rate, with the rapid progression of technology leading this bullet train into the unknown. The innate need for humans to constantly find the next best thing has percolated into the world of sports, too, where technological advancements are raising the question: how far is too far?

Running is an integral measurement of our physical and mental capabilities. It is a sport that thrives on immense competition: athlete versus athlete and athlete versus time. It has also become a playground for world-leading brands.

“Technology doping” is a term used to highlight the competitive advantages afforded by high-tech sports equipment, and it has forced a notable perspective shift on what it means to be an athlete. The top 10 fastest marathons by men and by women were all run in the past seven years, apart from Paula Radcliffe’s race in 2003, as were the top 10 half-marathons.

Why is this the case? It is, at least partly, because of shoes – footwear so effective they have been dubbed “super shoes”. Rigorous testing, in the lab and on the world stage, has provided clear evidence of how these shoes enhance an athlete’s performance. Four factors are key: the shoe’s midsole foam, a shock absorber that cushions the feet from the impact of hitting the ground; a curved carbon-fibre plate (a rigid insole in the midsole designed to increase the efficiency of each stride); the overall stack height – the amount of material between your foot and the floor; and the breathable “upper” covering the shoe, intended to keep the foot cool and dry. These different components work together to produce something lightweight, highly cushioned and flexible to maximise the energy returned to the athlete to propel them forwards, all while minimising the amount of energy exerted by the person themselves.

Super shoes have been found to return 87 per cent more energy compared with regular running shoes, greatly improving a runner’s efficiency and speed. They were first popularised in 2016 when Nike released the Nike Vaporfly, which were worn by the top three male finishers in the marathon at the 2016 Olympics. Research, partly funded by Nike, has shown that the Vaporfly can improve how efficiently oxygen is used in your body by 4 per cent, compared with other marathon-running shoes. This means a desired pace can be sustained for longer, resulting in a faster time.

However, shoes like the Vaporfly have also drawn controversy, as a number of records have been broken by athletes wearing them. To combat this, governing body World Athletics has implemented regulations on the features that super shoes can have. The maximum stack height must not exceed 40 millimetres, for example, and the shoes must have no more than one carbon plate.

Critics have also raised concerns that today’s athletes don’t meet the standards of the past due to the huge advantage technology has given them. One proposed solution to this issue is keeping separate lists for technology-assisted records, but this raises the question: who is the major competitor, athletes or the brands producing these innovative technologies?

There could also be psychological effects associated with super shoes, with athletes believing that they need to wear them in order to run a faster time, therefore becoming reliant on their shoes rather than focusing on what they could improve physically.

Of course, athletes want to have their names in the record books and people want to watch records being broken, especially in fast-paced, thrilling events like the 100 and 200 metres, which are full of big personalities like Noah Lyles and Sha’Carri Richardson. But will all of this come at a cost?

At the heart of it, running is the ultimate test of fitness, whether that is muscular strength in short sprints or the cardiovascular strength required in a marathon. It is always a battle between mind and body that begins even before the gun even goes off. As someone who has competed at various distances, from 300 metres to 5 kilometres, and trained with athletes who wear super shoes, it is important for me to have the ability to progress in the sport, but also for the sport to progress with me. If that comes at the loss of its credibility, then it seems that the world has an important choice to make.

The Young Science Writer Award  is run by the Association of British Science Writers (ABSW).

Table of Contents

New Scientist: 2026 May 12

Features

Can cloud seeding save us from water bankruptcy? (paid): 2026 May 12

Where did the laws of physics come from? I think I've found the answer (paid): 2026 May 11

Red-light therapy does have health benefits but not the ones you think (paid): 2026 May 6

News

Carbon credits are flawed, but they can still help save forests (paid): 2026 May 12

A new tectonic plate boundary could be forming in southern Africa: 2026 May 12

Can floating data centres meet AI's huge energy demand? (paid): 2026 May 11

Huge study of ancient British DNA reveals only minor Roman influence (paid): 2026 May 11

Tiny 'metajets' could use light to steer sails for interstellar travel (paid): 2026 May 10

There has been a sudden increase in the rate of sea level rise (paid): 2026 May 8

A vast dam across the Bering Strait could stop the AMOC collapsing (paid): 2026 May 9

Neanderthal 'kneeprint' found next to mysterious stalagmite circle (paid): 2026 May 8

US government releases huge batch of UFO files: 2026 May 8

Doubling their genomes may have helped plants survive mass extinctions: 2026 May 8

Fire is spreading in the Chernobyl exclusion zone after drone crash: 2026 May 8

Slow breathing can calm the mind without any need for mindfulness (paid): 2026 May 8

PCOS postpones perimenopause and allows pregnancies at older ages (paid): 2026 May 7

Hantavirus outbreak will not cause a covid-style pandemic, says WHO: 2026 May 7

Coffee's mood-boosting effects aren't just down to caffeine (paid): 2026 May 7

Pressure from individual particles measured for the first time (paid): 2026 May 7

Dating over 50 is probably on the rise – but we know little about it (paid): 2026 May 6

Bronze Age Britons fashioned copper-mining tools out of old bones (paid): 2026 May 6

Deforestation could trigger Amazon tipping point in the 2030s: 2026 May 6

Huge landslide in Alaska caused 481m-high tsunami: 2026 May 6

Physics

Why do particle physicists like spending time in fields? (paid): 2026 May 12

Technology

Former Soviet scientific megastructures captured in striking photos: 2026 May 6

Humans

The story of the first human tool: the humble container (paid): 2026 May 11

Life

David Attenborough is one of a kind, for better or worse: 2026 May 6

New Scientist recommends Attenborough documentary Making Life on Earth (paid): 2026 May 6

Extinct relative of koalas discovered in Western Australia: 2026 May 6

Health

PCOS has been officially renamed PMOS, and it’s a momentous move (paid): 2026 May 12

Read the winner of this year’s Young Science Writer Award (paid): 2026 May 6