Indholdsfortegnelse for 18 April 2026 i New Scientist

TELL someone you are visiting New York for work and they will be jealous. A Paris summit? Green with envy. But mention you are off to Chernobyl to cover the 40th anniversary of the world’s worst nuclear disaster and you get a different reaction. Some people will earnestly warn you of the cancer risk, others will explain that radiation poisoning is unavoidable, all referencing sensationalist headlines, schlocky films and overly dramatic documentaries. That’s why we sought to gain access to the exclusion zone and dig up the facts. Has contamination faded, or worsened? Is nature mutated, burned and dying, or thriving? Will the area ever be repopulated? Could Russia’s invasion of Ukraine unlock further radiation? Four decades on, there is certainly a lot to explore: engineering efforts to contain radiation,…

BUOY measurements show the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which moderates Europe’s climate, is weakening at four different latitudes, the strongest evidence yet that this system of ocean currents could be heading toward collapse. The AMOC brings warm, salty water from the Gulf of Mexico to the north Atlantic, keeping temperatures in western Europe milder than in Canada or Russia. The dense water then cools and sinks, moving south along the western side of the Atlantic. Analysis of old ocean temperature readings suggests the AMOC has weakened 15 per cent since 1950, and some computer modelling has warned it could shut down within decades. But scientists have been measuring it directly for only about two decades. Now, a study in the western Atlantic has shown more convincingly that the AMOC…

A MYSTERIOUS drug has improved the mobility and balance of mice with Parkinson’s-like symptoms. The drug works by boosting the brain’s waste disposal system to remove toxic protein clumps, but the researchers behind the work aren’t yet revealing what the treatment is, referring to it only as compound X. “We aim to put some [intellectual property] protection around the repurposing of compound X as it has shown significant findings so far, and could become the first disease-modifying treatment for Parkinson’s disease,” says Zhao Yan at the Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Parkinson’s disease, which affects more than 10 million people worldwide, is associated with a loss of nerve cells in parts of the brain that help control movement. This is thought to be due to a build-up of…

A DROP in the number of huge animals 200,000 years ago may have forced ancient humans to abandon heavy-duty stone tools in favour of lightweight toolkits to hunt smaller animals. That’s according to a new study that supports the idea that switching to smaller prey may have boosted our ancestors’ intelligence. For over a million years, several early human species used similar kinds of heavy stone tools, such as axes, cleavers, scrapers and stone balls. Evidence suggests such tools were used for killing and butchering massive plant-eating prey, or megaherbivores, including now-extinct relatives of elephants, hippopotamuses and rhinos. Then, between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago, smaller, more sophisticated tools began to appear alongside heavy tools. Our species, Homo sapiens, emerged in the middle of this period. Around 200,000 years ago,…

CATS that refuse their regular food might simply have become disenchanted by its odour – a discovery that reveals new strategies pet owners can explore to encourage their felines to eat. While cats have a reputation for being picky eaters, tweaking the way their food smells could make mealtimes more enjoyable, says Masao Miyazaki at Iwate University, Japan. “Cats may not be ‘picky’ in the human sense, but instead may lose interest when the smell becomes familiar,” he says. Miyazaki and his colleagues ran a series of experiments with 12 cats – six males and six females, none of which had been sterilised. They offered each cat a variety of commercial dry cat food for 10 minutes and monitored how much was eaten. Then each cat had a 10-minute break,…

Book Radio Universe Emma Chapman John Murray WHEN he was 16 years old, Albert Einstein imagined chasing after a beam of light and, as the story goes, this feat of imagination helped him develop the now famous theory of special relativity. Physicist Emma Chapman also chases a light signal through the known universe and up to its very edges in her new book, Radio Universe: How to explore space without leaving Earth (in the US, its title is The Echoing Universe and it is out on 19 May). But while Einstein wanted to hop onto the light beam and experience the cosmos’s fastest speed, the light Chapman is after plays the role not of a carrier, but of an explorer, guide and messenger. “The universe already speaks the language of…

Editor’s pick An objective look at a subjective problem 28 March, p 30 From Guy Inchbald, Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire, UK In his article “Unlocking consciousness”, George Musser describes the structuralist model of conscious experience. However, he misunderstands the nature of the “hard problem” in the philosophical theory of mind – how subjective experience arises. He assumes that, by developing a structuralist model, “science will be able to explain experience after all – and the hard problem ceases to be hard. Most philosophers who are generally sympathetic to structuralism don’t go that far”. But there is a very good reason why we do not. Structuralism arises from the study of the objective brain signals, and their objective meanings within their objective context. No objective model can possibly address the nature…

A PREVIOUSLY harmonious group of wild chimpanzees has descended into conflict. Researchers say the rift suggests that human wars are a deeply rooted part of our nature, rather than something that emerged as our culture became more complex. Aaron Sandel at the University of Texas at Austin and his colleagues analysed 24 years of social networks, 10 years of GPS-based ranging and 30 years of demographic data on the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Chimpanzees are known to perpetrate horrific violence on each other, but typically this is reserved for outsiders or for infants born of rival males. The Ngogo chimpanzees, with a population ranging from 150 to 200, were among the largest known groups of the primates, which, along with bonobos (Pan paniscus), are the closest relatives…

In addition to treating Parkinson’s (see main story), harnessing the brain’s cleaning system could help find treatments for migraines. Adriana Della Pietra at the University of Iowa and her team found that prazosin – a drug used to treat high blood pressure – relieves facial pain caused by traumatic brain injuries in mice. Such injuries impair the brain’s waste-disposal system, known as the glymphatic system, while prazosin boosts the flow of waste fluid from brain cells through this system. However, some migraine-affected mice they used as a control also seemed to benefit. Investigating this further, they added prazosin to the drinking water of a group of mice for six weeks, while a separate group were given regular water. The team then induced migraines in all of the rodents by injecting them…

A WOMAN who had three different autoimmune conditions has not required treatments for almost a year after her immune cells were genetically modified and used to kill off the rogue cells attacking her body. This woman is one of a growing number of people with autoimmune conditions to be treated this way, and the first to have three different ones treated simultaneously. “The really crazy thing is that you have three autoimmune diseases, and all three of them… you can tackle with one treatment,” says Fabian Müller at the University Hospital of Erlangen in Germany. In response to, say, a viral infection, our bodies generate lots of new immune cells with random mutations. These mutant cells then undergo a screening process to select those that make antibodies that bind to…

Bethan Ackerley Subeditor London I don’t use AI chatbots, so you might wonder what use I could make of Jamie Bartlett’s book, How to Talk to AI. Well, this plain speaking guide makes the compelling case that, despite their popularity, we don’t know how to speak to chatbots properly. Few of us have had adequate training on getting the most out of AI – or on how to protect ourselves from it. That’s where it can all go very wrong, sending us down misinformation rabbit holes or fostering emotional dependence. Mastering the art of prompting a chatbot is about more than AI, says Bartlett. It’s about self-awareness: how much do you know about how it works? How might your questions (and the biases they reveal) affect the output you receive?…

IT WAS 1.23am when disaster struck. A routine safety test led to a catastrophic explosion. Poor design and inadequate safety procedures saw radioactive material scattered around the globe. In just 48 hours, Chernobyl became the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. Forty years later, I have come to Ukraine to learn about its legacy. My first guide is Kateryna Shavanova, an academic who was studying radiation consuming bacteria at Chernobyl when Russia invaded in 2022, but now works for the Ukrainian army’s chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear risk team. A patch on her uniform roughly translates to “It’s not time to drink iodine yet”, an optimistic reference to the emergency treatment for radiation poisoning. As we shelter from the cold in a former family home in the city of…

Doubling up IF THE internet is to be believed (it’s not), a growing proportion of celebrities have been replaced by clones. The latest to allegedly have their body snatched is actor Jim Carrey, star of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and other cinematic miracles. Carrey attended the 51st César Awards in Paris on 26 February, his first public appearance for some time, and he looked a bit different compared with before. One might think that this would be attributed to some combination of ageing and cosmetic procedures, but instead, a conspiracy theory formed that the person wasn’t Carrey, but a clone. Whoever is doing all this celebrity body snatching, they are busy: Carrey’s replacement follows those of Paul McCartney (supposedly dead since 1966 and replaced by a stand-in) and Avril Lavigne…

On top of pinning down the size of the proton (see main story), we may be closer to finding out how particles acquire their mass. According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD), even a perfect vacuum is filled with short-lived disturbances that flicker in and out of existence, known as virtual particles. Among them are quark-antiquark pairs. Usually, these pairs vanish almost as soon as they appear. But if enough energy is injected into a vacuum, QCD predicts they can be promoted into real, detectable particles with measurable mass. The STAR collaboration – an international team of physicists working at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider in Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York state – has observed this for the first time. The researchers smashed together high-energy protons in a vacuum, producing a spray…

As well as being able to reverse time in quantum systems (see main story), we also now have a way to measure quantum entanglement of solids, which could lead to advances in quantum technology. Quantum entanglement is an inextricable link between quantum particles that keeps their behaviours correlated, even when they are extremely far apart. Finding out whether a piece of some material is full of entangled particles is especially important for developing new quantum devices. Allen Scheie at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues pelted a sample of a material with neutrons, which are then collected on a detector. They then analysed the neutrons’ properties to calculate quantum Fisher information, a number that indicates the minimum number of quantum particles within the material that must be…

WHEN I was at uni, I had a biology lecturer who was obsessed with iodine. He urged us to always use iodised salt, telling us it had raised the IQ of whole nations and was one of the greatest public health inventions of all time. I still hear his voice in my head every time I’m in the salt section of the supermarket. However, over time, iodised salt has been crowded out by fancy looking Cornish sea salt crystals, Himalayan pink rock salt, smoked salt flakes and kosher salt. The few remaining containers of iodised salt come in drab packaging and look deeply uncool. This makes me wonder: are we about to undo all the benefits that have come from this unassuming food additive? Iodine is an essential dietary mineral…

Here we have a complex telling of the history and future of our universe from the perspective of an outsider, a dreamer and a musician. Alexander, a working cosmologist and theorist, doesn’t shy away from being inspired by, for instance, experiences at a Zen centre he visited in graduate school, or influences such as the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. This is a book where mathematical tools, such as Feynman diagrams, don’t just coexist but also cross-pollinate with stories from Alexander’s life as a Black man. This is a potent blend of the scientific and the personal from the New Scientist columnist, offering both rigorous detail on phenomena, such as dark matter, and a meaningful analysis of sociopolitical circumstances that have shaped how we talk about the mysteries of modern physics. Notably,…

Film Ghost Elephants Werner Herzog Disney+ FILM director Werner Herzog has always been drawn to the limits of human knowledge – to the places where science meets myth, where discovery shades into obsession. In Ghost Elephants, which premiered at last year’s Venice Film Festival, he follows conservationist Steve Boyes in Angola as he searches for a herd of elephants that may or may not exist. It is both a scientific expedition and a philosophical fable that asks what it means to chase a dream that could easily remain just that. The premise is strikingly simple. Boyes believes that there has been a sighting of a group of unusually large elephants, possibly related to the legendary Fénykövi specimen preserved at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC. Named…