Tabla de contenidos para 23 August 2025 en New Scientist

IT IS difficult to overstate the medical progress made in recent decades. In high-income nations, survival rates for one type of childhood leukaemia have risen from around 10 per cent to over 90 per cent. The HPV vaccine has slashed cervical cancer rates, and the life expectancies of people with HIV are now close to those of the general population, if it is detected early. But you will struggle to find similar examples in treating mental health conditions. Indeed, psychiatry has gained a reputation as a stagnant field, with treatments largely rooted in early psychiatric drugs of the 1950s and 60s. It isn’t for lack of effort. In the 1970s, molecular psychiatry sought to understand mental health at the level of proteins, genes and signalling pathways, aiming to ground diagnoses…

THE planet experienced a record number of dangerously hot, humid days in 2024 as climate change increases global humidity to unprecedented levels. The global average number of “high humid heat days” over land exceeded the 1991-2020 average by 35.6 days last year, 9.5 days more than the previous record set in 2023, according to the State of the Climate report 2024 published by the American Meteorological Society. In hot, humid conditions, people struggle to cool down, as the moist air smothers the evaporative cooling effect of sweating. “Your body starts to really struggle to offload heat, and so it can be really dangerous,” says Kate Willett at the UK national weather service, the Met Office, who worked on the report. Meteorologists measure heat and humidity using a “wet bulb temperature”.…

A NOVEL type of all-carbon molecule has been studied under room-temperature conditions. This marks only the second time this has been done, after spherical buckyballs were synthesised 35 years ago. The breakthrough could lead to extremely efficient materials for electronic and quantum technologies. Cyclic carbons, molecules made up of a ring of carbon atoms, could display bizarre chemical behaviour or conduct electricity in unusual ways. But these rings are so delicate they usually fall apart, or even explode, before researchers can study them. “Cyclic carbons are intriguing molecules, and we’ve been trying to make them for a long time,” says Harry Anderson at the University of Oxford. Doing so has traditionally required extremely harsh conditions to keep the molecules around long enough to be studied. But Anderson and his colleagues found…

REPEATEDLY energising a collection of ultracold atoms should destroy their collective structure, but quantum effects seem to counteract the process. The fate of any physical system ought to be “thermalisation”, a process by which everything becomes even and featureless, like an ice sculpture melting into a puddle of water. We would assume throwing rocks at the sculpture could only speed this up, but Hanns-Christoph Nägerl at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and his colleagues essentially did this to some of the coldest atoms on the planet and did not see them thermalise (Science, doi.org/p2vh). The researchers used about 100,000 atoms of caesium, which they cooled to within billionths of a degree of absolute zero by hitting them with lasers and electromagnetic forces. At this temperature, the behaviour of atoms…

THE polarising impact of social media isn’t just the result of bad algorithms – it is inevitable because of the core components of how the platforms work, AI-based simulations suggest. Petter Törnberg at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues set up 500 AI chatbots designed to mimic a range of political beliefs in the US, based on the American National Election Studies Survey. Those bots, powered by the GPT-4o mini large language model, were then instructed to interact with one another on a social network the researchers had designed with no ads or algorithms. During five runs of the experiment, each involving 10,000 actions, the AI agents tended to follow people with whom they shared political affiliations, while those with more partisan views gained more followers…

AN ARRAY of fungi, some of which have been linked to lung complications, have been collected from e-cigarette mouthpieces. In vapes, a battery-powered coil heats a liquid that typically contains nicotine, producing vapour that is inhaled by users. Health concerns have largely centred on the toxicity of the liquid’s chemical constituents, so no one has tried to understand which microbes may make their way from the devices into users’ airways. To learn more, Borna Mehrad and his colleagues at the University of Florida recruited 25 people who used disposable vapes every day. The team cultured the microbes from the mouthpieces of these devices, comparing them with those in the volunteers’ mouths. Only a small number of the vapes contained bacteria. But according to the researchers, more than half were “abundantly colonized”…

Michael Dalton Assistant mag editor London On a recent trip to New York, I visited the Museum of Modern Art for the first time. What really stood out for me was the installation Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter/Snack Bar by Michael Smith, an artist who satirises life in the US as his character “Mike”. His target here is a real plan from 1983, during the cold war, for a snack bar that doubles as a fallout shelter. It is all set in Mike’s basement, which contains a variety of ways to help pass a nuclear winter. There is even a playable – though crucially, unwinnable – arcade game called Mike Builds a Shelter. It felt like walking onto the set of an amusing yet eerie film, reminiscent of the animation…

GOLAM KHANDAKER’s mother has had arthritis for as long as he can remember. She also lives with depression, and it always struck Khandaker how precisely her arthritis flare-ups coincide with her most severe episodes of low mood. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that these bouts of painful inflammation might cause her to feel low. But as Khandaker, then studying for a PhD at the University of Cambridge, investigated more closely, it became clear there was more going on. In fact, research is revealing the profound effect persistent low-level inflammation has on the brain – which was once thought largely impervious to the fires burning elsewhere in the body – and what this means not only for depression, but for anxiety, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and more. By unpicking the mechanisms driving these…

IN JUNE, at a conference set in the picturesque Italian town of Campagna, south-east of Naples, two physicists in a seemingly endless argument over a long-sought theory of fundamental reality caught my attention. From the sidelines, an unassuming figure politely interrupted them. “I’ve got a slide that might help. Can I put it up?” asked Frank Wilczek. The slide, concisely describing the realms in which this theory may act, swiftly ended the dispute. Among the many luminaries jousting in Campagna, I realised, perhaps only Wilczek had the breadth of expertise to untangle their confusion. Wilczek is one of the most original physicists alive today, whose achievements seem too numerous for a single mind. He revealed the true workings of one of the four fundamental forces of nature. He proposed the…

JUST one weekly puff from an inhaler like those used to treat asthma might one day protect you from the viral infections that make winters miserable – and could even save your life in the event of another pandemic. That is the tantalising prospect raised by promising animal tests of an mRNA treatment that turns on our built-in viral defences. “You can think about this as a universal antiviral,” says Dusan Bogunovic at Columbia University in New York. Realising the full promise of this approach will require further development of the mRNA technology used in vaccines – but last week the US slashed funding for mRNA vaccine development. “I would be surprised if it didn’t have knock-on effects on efforts like this,” says Bogunovic. In addition to our body learning…

MEN who lose their Y chromosome from a significant number of their immune cells are more likely to have narrow blood vessels, a key contributor to heart disease. “Loss of Y is killing a lot of men,” says Kenneth Walsh at the University of Virginia, who wasn’t involved in the study. The loss of the Y chromosome is the most common mutation that occurs post-conception in males. It typically takes place in white blood cells, immune cells that attack and eliminate pathogens, as the rapidly proliferating stem cells that generate white blood cells divide. Cells that lack Y accumulate with age, becoming readily detectable in roughly 40 per cent of 70-year-old cisgender men. In 2014, Lars Forsberg at Uppsala University in Sweden and his colleagues found that older men with…

PEOPLE with traumatic brain injury often experience post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and the psychedelic drug ibogaine seems to alleviate these symptoms – which it may do by slowing down brainwaves. Last year, a study found that ibogaine – a psychedelic substance derived from the African iboga plant – significantly improved mental and physical health in military veterans with traumatic brain injury. But it wasn’t clear how the drug produced these effects. So, Jennifer Lissemore at Stanford University in California and her colleagues analysed brain scans of the original study’s 30 participants, all of whom were men from the US with traumatic brain injury, and most of whom also had PTSD. The participants had received ibogaine at a dose of 12 milligrams per kilogram of body weight during a five-day stay…

IF YOU find yourself endlessly taking your jacket on and off as the sun moves in and out of the clouds, a material that becomes thinner when you sweat could provide a solution. Researchers have previously developed self-adapting materials that cool you down in hot climates by increasing the amount of heat, in the form of infrared radiation, the material lets through. But these materials are poor at keeping people warm in cooler climates. Xiuqiang Li at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics in China and his colleagues have developed a jacket that contains a layer that curves when dry and flattens when wet. This makes the jacket get thicker in cooler environments and thinner in warm ones, triggered by a person’s sweat. The clothing has a similar design to…

Book The Origin of Language Madeleine Beekman Simon & Schuster LANGUAGE is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey such a range and depth of meaning as ours. So how and why did our ancestors first develop language? Evolutionary biologist Madeleine Beekman has spent much of her career studying insects, especially bees. In her first book for a non-specialist audience, she branches out in a big way to propose an explanation for the evolution of human language. Her idea is that it evolved out of necessity, to enable us to cope with the demands of childcare. Compared with other mammals, human infants are exceptionally underdeveloped at birth, needing 24-hour…

IN MY experience, science documentaries tend to fall into two camps that are roughly akin to French and Italian cuisine. (Hear me out before you judge my analogy.) The first kind is more elaborate, using sophisticated techniques to achieve the very best experience – whether it is a well-crafted soufflé or the bells and whistles of animation and virtual reality. The second is simpler and tends to let the ingredients speak for themselves. Both types of documentaries can yield fabulous, if different, results. Human, a five-part BBC series on the origins of our genus, Homo, is firmly of the latter sort. It combines a great story, beautiful visuals and a fantastic presenter in the palaeoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, then leaves you to enjoy a hearty 6-million-year journey through humanity’s past. No…

SEDENTARY BEHAVIOUR More time spent seated or reclining, whether watching TV, sitting in a car or working at a computer, is associated with higher levels of chronic inflammation. This effect is likely to be due to many factors, including reduced activity of an enzyme in load-bearing muscles in our legs and core, leading to abnormal metabolism of fats. DIETARY FIBRE Many studies show that a high fibre intake is associated with decreased inflammation. Fibre covers a broad range of different plant-derived compounds that feed our gut microbiome. This promotes gut bacteria to produce helpful substances called short-chain fatty acids, which help maintain the gut lining and have an anti-inflammatory effect on the body. OBESITY Obesity is a key risk factor for chronic inflammation, due to the pro-inflammatory effect of excess…

“I’VE always prided myself on my can-do attitude,” a reader told me this month. “Recently, however, I’ve started to feel resentful of the amount of work my boss puts at my door compared to colleagues. The more I do, the more he seems to expect of me, and I now feel that I’m cracking under the stress.” Our reader’s frustration is surely justified. A good work ethic should be one of the most highly prized – and rewarded – qualities in an employee. Everyday experience, though, reveals this is rarely the case. Indeed, according to studies by Matthew Stanley at the National University of Singapore and his colleagues, a pernicious bias can lead managers to exploit the very people they should be prizing. In one experiment, a group of managers…

In out in out It’s well-known that the internet is about 60 per cent cats and 35 per cent automated bots, so a cat-themed bot was inevitable. Hence @PepitoTheCat, the X (Twitter) account of a black cat called Pépito who lives in France. His owner, Clément Storck, is an engineer with a fascination for automation, so he created a system that posts to X whenever Pépito goes in or out of his cat flap. The account is not, on the face of it, thrilling reading. Every post is either “Pépito is out” or “Pépito is back home”, with the time marked to the nearest second. These are accompanied by a black-and-white photo of Pépito and a short video showing him coming in or out. And yet @PepitoTheCat has more than…

THIRTEEN hominin teeth have been discovered in Ethiopia in layers of volcanic ash between 2.6 and 2.8 million years old. Researchers think some of the teeth belong to one of the earliest members of the Homo genus, while others appear to be from a new hominin, suggesting both species lived alongside each other. “The evolutionary tree leading to modern humans could be bushier than we thought” “They either shared resources, and everything was hunky-dory, or maybe one of them was marginalised,” says Kaye Reed at Arizona State University. “We just don’t know at this point.” Previous discoveries show that before around 3 million years ago, several species of early hominins in the genus Australopithecus lived in this region, including Australopithecus afarensis, the species to which the famous Lucy fossil belonged.…

JUPITER’S moon Ganymede could be a vast dark matter detector, and upcoming space missions might be able to spot distinctive dark matter craters on its ancient surface. Physicists searching for dark matter usually look for tiny, extremely light particles that interact weakly with standard matter, requiring large and well-insulated underground detectors. Another kind of dark matter particle could instead be very large – from the size of a basketball to that of an asteroid – but also vanishingly rare. To detect one, you would need a detector the size of a moon or planet. William DeRocco at the University of Maryland has proposed that the largest moon in the solar system, Ganymede, might contain evidence of these massive dark matter particles. His work suggests they would form distinctive craters in…

SHARING quantum information the same way we broadcast TV or radio programmes may be impractical, even for mathematical schemes that sidestep the limitations posed by quantum physics. We have long known that quantum copy machines could never exist because the laws of quantum physics forbid any piece of quantum information from being duplicated, a rule called the no-cloning theorem. But then physicists started exploring whether they could avoid breaking this law and still distribute – or broadcast – copies of quantum information to many receivers. To do so, researchers would have to allow the quantum copies to differ slightly and to add new information-processing steps for the receivers. Now, Zhenhuan Liu at Tsinghua University in China and his colleagues have shown that these schemes may be prohibitively impractical. “There’s no…

A STRANGE flash of light from near the beginning of the universe could help astronomers map difficult-to-see gas in between galaxies. Fast radio bursts (FRBs) are extremely short but powerful blasts of radio-frequency light that have puzzled astronomers since they were first spotted in 2007. A leading theory is that they are produced by extremely magnetic neutron stars, called magnetars. But we have only a few thousand examples, so there is much we don’t know about them. Now, Manisha Caleb at the University of Sydney and her colleagues have spotted an extremely distant FRB from a galaxy that existed just 3 billion years after the start of the universe, billions of years before the previous record holder. Caleb and her team first spotted the burst, called 20240304B, using the MeerKAT radio…

TWO unrelated young people buried in cemeteries in England in the Early Middle Ages probably had grandparents from West Africa. The discovery implies that migrants in Anglo-Saxon times were coming from much further afield than previously thought. After the Romans finally withdrew from Britain in AD 410, Britain was invaded and settled by Germanic Angles, Saxons and Jutes. To investigate whether people also arrived from elsewhere, Duncan Sayer at the University of Central Lancashire, UK, and his colleagues have analysed ancient DNA from the bones of people buried in two 7th-centurycemeteries on England’s southern coast. One is in Updown in Kent, where many traded objects from around the world have been found. The people there were often buried with items like cookware or combs. The other is in Worth Matravers,…

HAVING plied their trade in several US and Chinese cities for years, driverless taxis are on their way to London. As a cyclist, a Londoner and a journalist who has spent years covering AI’s pratfalls, I am a tad nervous. Yet, given how often I have been struck by inattentive human drivers in London, part of me is cautiously optimistic. At the end of the day it boils down to this: will I be better off surrounded by tired, distracted and angry humans, or unpredictable and imperfect AI? The UK government has decided to allow firms like Uber to run pilots of self-driving “taxi- and bus-like” services in 2026. Then, in the second half of 2027, things will ramp up fast as the Automated Vehicles Act becomes law, giving the…

Book Clamor Chris Berdik W. W. Norton NOISE is all around us, and it is often imperceptible – until the volume knob is turned way up, or way down. We are used to the thrums, trills and brrs of day-to-day life, with soundscapes becoming as familiar as the sights we see on our walks, drives and other travels. But when those noises change, we notice. While many of us say we want quiet, science journalist Chris Berdik argues that we don’t necessarily mean it; rather, we want less of the noise we don’t like. And as he persuasively argues in Clamor: How noise took over the world – and how we can take it back, sometimes we need to add extra noise we do want to drown out the noise…

Editor’s pick How safe disposal led to our funeral rites 26 July, p 38 From Malcolm Moore, Rotorua, New Zealand When it comes to the rise of burial practices, the basic needs for species are survival and reproduction. That means food, shelter and security. Dead bodies attract scavengers. For a vulnerable hominin species like Homo naledi who, for a period at least, stayed in one place, decaying bodies could have attracted carnivores. Safe burial or the building of cairns, for example, requires suitable terrain and available resources, such as labour, efficient digging tools and time. Disposal in the far reaches of a cave system would be relatively quick and effective. Dehydration or breakdown by microbes and small animals would soon follow. So, the pragmatic issue of safe disposal comes first,…