Table of contents for 11 April 2026 in New Scientist

SOMETHING very bad is going to happen in the near future unless we change course. Researchers know what will cause it and roughly when it will happen, and have ideas to mitigate it. Yet policy-makers may not do enough to avert it in time. This could be describing climate change, or perhaps the early days of the covid-19 pandemic. Now, it also applies to something more esoteric: quantum computers. As we report on page 7, two separate papers, including one from Google, have discovered that the threshold for a quantum computer to threaten the encryption that keeps our data safe is far lower than expected. The knowledge that quantum computers will one day be able to quickly solve the maths problems that underpin our security isn’t new – it is…

A VIRUS that ordinarily affects marine animals has caused glaucoma-like symptoms in a small but growing group of people in China. This is the first known time that a virus that originates from aquatic animals has infected people and caused ill health. “That this virus can infect invertebrates, fish and mammals is pretty remarkable,” says Edward Holmes at the University of Sydney, Australia. Cases of a condition called persistent ocular hypertension viral anterior uveitis (POH-VAU) have been increasing in China. It is defined as inflammation and high pressure within the eye, similar to glaucoma, which damages the optic nerve and can cause vision loss. To understand why cases are increasing, a team of researchers – including scientists at the Chinese Academy of Fishery Sciences in Qingdao – recruited 70 people…

BUMBLEBEES have learned to recognise Morse code-like sequences of flashing lights and vibrations, demonstrating a sense of rhythm that has never been seen in such a small-brained animal. The ability to recognise flexible, abstract rhythms – when, for example, the same melody is played at a different tempo in different ways – has only been demonstrated in a few birds and mammals. Andrew Barron at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and his team ran a series of experiments to see whether buff-tailed bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), which have far less complex brains, could also recognise a range of different rhythms. First, the bumblebees learned to choose between two artificial flowers consisting of flashing LED lights. One flower produced long flashes and the other short pulses, like dashes and dots in Morse code.…

EVIDENCE is mounting that long covid can be caused by the immune system turning on the body. Four studies suggest autoimmunity, in which the immune system damages healthy tissue, is a factor in at least some cases, particularly if pain is a primary symptom. This could lead to treatments, which are sorely lacking for long covid. “We have to take the antibodies away in patients and see if the symptoms go away,” says Niels Eijkelkamp at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. While most people infected by SARS-CoV-2 recover within a few days, some develop symptoms that can last months or even years. The most common of these include fatigue, pain, brain fog and post-exertional malaise, in which even mild activity leads to exhaustion. Researchers have identified a host of mechanisms…

WE HAVE all absorbed the message by now: olive oil is good for us. It lowers “bad cholesterol”, fights inflammation and protects against various chronic diseases. More recently, evidence has been piling up that suggests its benefits extend beyond the body to the brain. I wanted to know what that really meant. Which aspects of my cognition could it influence? And just how much do I need to consume to make a difference? The answers are more promising than I expected. First though, the usual caveats. All nutrition research is notoriously difficult to do well. Studies often require participants to keep food diaries, and I probably don’t need to tell you how easy it is to “misremember” what we’ve eaten. Nevertheless, observational studies can offer clues, particularly when backed up…

Human cells’ energy-generating mitochondria were independent bacteria before their symbiotic union with our ancestors made complex life possible. But as Lane writes, their otherness still shapes our destinies in all kinds of ways. We are all mutants, Leroi writes. Babies can be born with a single eye in the middle of their head, for example. Sadly, cyclopia is fatal. However, such conditions help us learn about our development. Is old age always the end? Not in Old Man’s War, an enormously enjoyable science-fiction romp. No spoilers, but I highly recommend it – and, amazingly, the sequels are just as good, if not even better.…

ROBOTS and whether they will one day deserve to be treated like people – or destroy humanity, or both – have interested writers for well over a century now. In the real world, the robot threat appears to involve the uses of artificial intelligence in misinformation and more direct forms of warfare such as drone attacks. In the world of literature, however, many writers focus on individual robots. Maybe giving the AI a body and a face simply helps tell your story better to creatures with bodies and faces. Fictional robots have a lot going for them. They can be funny, cool or sexy. They can be nerdy and a bit depressed. Some represent “the other”, a test of how humane we are. They can also help us think about…

The Navier-Stokes problem is one of the Clay Mathematics Institute’s seven Millennium Prize Problems. It concerns equations describing the flow of fluids, from water in a pipe to air swirling in a storm. These equations are non-linear, meaning the motion of a fluid field feeds back on itself: eddies create other eddies, and small disturbances can cascade across scales. Mathematicians can show that fluid motion remains smooth for short periods of time. The open question is whether, in three dimensions, this smooth behaviour always persists – or whether it can instead “blow up”, with quantities such as the fluid’s velocity becoming infinite. The puzzle echoes the Yang-Mills mass gap problem, another system in which a field interacts with itself (see main copy). Both sets of equations must grapple with extremely…

As well as early stars (see main story), astronomers think they have spotted a type of explosion produced by a dying star called a dirty fireball. When a massive star runs out of fuel, it can collapse and explode in several ways. If a black hole is produced in the collapse, an extremely powerful jet of radiation can burst through the star, producing a flash of high-energy light called a gamma ray burst. But astronomers still don’t know exactly how this works or how variations between different massive stars affect the jet. Physicists have hypothesised that we might see something different if the jet somehow gets contaminated with heavier matter from the star, such as protons and neutrons. These particles would act as a sponge, slowing the jet down and causing…

A SINGLE drug has been found to inhibit a range of common viruses in lab studies, including coronaviruses, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), norovirus, and influenza and hepatitis viruses. It will be tested in a clinical trial next year, raising hopes that the pill could one day be taken at home to relieve unpleasant symptoms. “As far as we can tell, this is the first drug that’s ever demonstrated activity across all these viral families,” says Daniel Haders, co-founder of Model Medicines, the California-based company leading its development. If it is approved, Haders envisages it being a pill that people could take if, for example, they have a flu-like illness but don’t know if it is influenza, covid-19, RSV or something else. The drug was originally developed as a breast cancer…

PLANETARY scientists agree that Mars used to have liquid water on its surface and a water-rich atmosphere, far different from its current arid state. But an accounting of all the sources of water to the Martian surface and all the ways it could have been taken away has found a major discrepancy – we simply don’t know where all that water went. The period when Mars is thought to have had liquid water, between about 4.5 billion and 3.7 billion years ago, is known as the Noachian Period. Based on our best estimates of how water could have arrived at the Martian surface, there should have been enough surface water at the end of this period to cover the entire planet in an ocean between 150 and 250 metres deep.…

Book Beyond Inheritance Roxanne Khamsi Riverhead Books (21 April) THERE are around 30 trillion cells in your body and about 1 per cent of them get replaced every day. But this process is far from perfect. The DNA in new cells contains many mistakes, or mutations: there may be trillions of new mutations in your body every day. “You are a slightly different genetic version of yourself today from yesterday, and will be different yet again tomorrow,” writes Roxanne Khamsi in her book, Beyond Inheritance: Our ever-mutating cells and a new understanding of health. These mutations range from a change in a single DNA letter to the loss of an entire chromosome, such as the X or Y. A lot of mutations are lost when cells die, but many are…

Editor’s pick Wrapping our minds around the pluriverse 21 March, p 28 From Paul Ellson, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, UK “In the eyes of the beholders” is one of the best articles that I have read in New Scientist. And, because it mentions information often, I am moved to write that the Greeks had at least two words for knowledge: doxa and gnosis. Through doxa, we come to conclusions based upon information. Doxa can be rated (a doxa-rate?) and, through the careful study, evaluation and application of information, a doctorate can be acquired and a scientific career launched. But an important point is made: “Growing evidence suggests we don’t experience the outside world directly, but as a personal and continually updated model, or prediction.” That seems an ideal case for gnosis. Its…

Going places Earth is a big planet with a lot of people on it, which means that even the most niche of interests can find their expression somewhere. Feedback has a sneaking fondness for those peculiar tourist attractions to be found along the many winding highways of the US, like Nebraska’s gloriously literal-minded World’s Largest Collection of the World’s Smallest Versions of the World’s Largest Things. But we weren’t prepared for science historian Richard Fallon to draw our attention to the world’s one and only (as far as we know) sculpture park dedicated to foraminifera. If you don’t know what foraminifera are, they are single-celled organisms, mostly found in the sea, which often have a hard external shell, or test. These tests have been fossilised in huge numbers, so the…

INTEREST is growing in using the brain’s waste-disposal system to delay or ease Alzheimer’s disease. Now, a technique that helps clear toxic clumps of Alzheimer’s-associated proteins from the brains of mice has shown promising results. The build-up of misfolded proteins known as amyloid plaques and tau tangles in the brain is widely thought to trigger Alzheimer’s disease. Drugs can remove amyloid clumps, but this hasn’t translated into a large improvement in symptoms. Efforts are increasingly pivoting towards other approaches, such as boosting the glymphatic system, which clears waste from our brain. Jia Li at Guangzhou Medical University in China and his team have homed in on a receptor embedded in the membrane ofcells that seems to enhance glymphatic action. DDR2 (discoidin domain receptor 2) is being investigated by Jin Su…

A NEW speed record has been set for data transmission through an existing, commercially installed fibre-optic cable, with 450 terabits per second – or 450,000,000,000,000 bits per second – being beamed through a pair of cables underneath London. Polina Bayvel at University College London and her colleagues achieved the record using existing fibre-optic cables running from their laboratory in Bloomsbury to a data centre in Canary Wharf, then back again. That rate of data transmission would be enough for around 50 million movies to be streamed simultaneously. Bayvel says that the rate achieved is around 10 times faster than is seen in current commercial networks, meaning that if it were widely rolled out, we could see an increase in internet bandwidth equivalent to adding nine new cables alongside each existing one,…

Thomas Lewton Features editor London Eating earth (geophagy) is classified as a mental health condition by the American Psychiatric Association – unless it’s part of cultural practice. We can explore this paradoxical relationship further as the Museum of Edible Earth comes to London’s Somerset House (until 26 April). Visiting the exhibition (pictured), I found 600 or so samples of soil routinely ingested worldwide, collected by the museum’s founder masharu. There’s red ochre from South Africa (a source of iron), and black nakumatt clay used by pregnant women in India to ease nausea. Only two are officially available for tasting, as they are accredited UK food supplements. Luvos Healing Earth, for digestive issues, is dished up like chocolate sprinkles, yet tastes more like the grit in unwashed leeks. I preferred Mexican…

AS YOU read this, every atom in your body is desperately trying to tear itself apart. In fact, that goes for every atom, everywhere, since the beginning of time. Thankfully, those efforts have failed. These self-destructive tendencies relate to the nucleus, a tiny knot of matter at the centre of every atom. Inside, protons are packed shoulder to shoulder, each one bristling with positive charge and frantic to get away from its companions. If atoms obeyed only electricity and magnetism, the universe would have been a brief, bright firework. Instead, something else intervenes, a force so strong it makes electromagnetism look feeble. This maintains the solid furniture of reality by keeping the building blocks of atoms glued together. But the deeper physicists have probed this force, the stranger it has…

JOHN PENDRY’s kitchen is dominated by a huge photograph of what looks like the view through a kaleidoscope: dizzying shards of purple, green, yellow and white. Given that Pendry is famous above all else for inventing an invisibility cloak – a device that can bend light around objects – I wonder if I am looking at something related to that. But no, he tells me, the image simply shows crystals of vitamin C magnified many times. All that invisibility-cloak stuff is in the past, he says, and he has moved on to “more exciting things”. It is a throwaway remark, but it reveals something of why I have always found Pendry, who is based at Imperial College London, so interesting. This is someone who invented a device 20 years ago…